Opinion

EDITOR’S NOTE: Today we are pleased to offer for your information a guest editorial, author unknown. It’s a cogent, well-written summary of why the City of Berkeley needs an adequate environmental impact report from the University of California before the university moves forward with its relentless desire to radically change the face of our city between now and 2020. Nothing’s changed—the points made in this piece, placed on the city’s website in February when the lawsuit was filed under the title “Fact Sheet,” are still valid. -more-

On the first of May we had the pleasure of dropping in at three homes on the Bringing Back the Natives garden tour which we learned about from Ron Sullivan’s article in these pages. This was not one of your elegant events featuring name architects and landscape designers which are staged, with pricey admission fees, for the benefit of good causes, though we’ve enjoyed some of those too. This one was more basic: just an outright public relations triumph designed to show anybody who’s interested what you can, yes, try at home. The three sites were in the Northeast Richmond flats, numbered streets not far from Barrett and San Pablo. The houses there are modest in scale, and the small gardens on flat city plots were designed and executed by the homeowners themselves. Showcasing native plants in luxuriant display, they demonstrated gardening with minimal water to attract butterflies and other wildlife to the city. That area is a fertile alluvial plain, better for gardening than hilltop view lots. Look at the web page bringingbackthenatives.net to get a glimpse of what they’re up to. -more-