Public Comment

Dear Senator Boxer, 

I am writing to you in your capacity as chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. I am a retired resident of Berkeley. I live at Strawberry Creek Lodge, named for the creek which flows through the University of California Berkeley campus and also through our back garden. 

Recently our local paper, the Daily Planet, has been reporting on a proposed deal between the university and BP, formerly known as British Petroleum. The oil company will give the university $500 million. The university is to build a laboratory (in Strawberry Creek Canyon) where university scientists and BP researchers will work on developing biofuels from biomass—probably using an Asian grass. The process will use genetically modified organisms, both to promote the growth of the biomass and to turn it into fuel. 

The concerns with this deal are threefold: 1) GMOs—genetically modified organisms—are a threat to the natural web of life that sustains us all. The fear is that by altering the DNA of plants and animals, we risk poisoning our food supply, inviting plagues of biological pests and upsetting natural balances we do not fully understand. 2) a more immediate threat is that by accepting the money, UCB will distort its own mission. Previous deals between research universities, including this one, and giant corporations have led to a curtailing of free inquiry and outright corruption. The terms of the BP deal would have BP scientists working side-by-side with university researchers, with only a shadowy line on an organization chart and a two-sided floor plan in the physical plant to protect the traditional community of scholars from becoming part of a corporation with a reputation for ruthless pursuit of profit. 3) Strawberry Canyon is a scenic area, with wildlife and air-cleansing forest. It is used by many for recreation. Strawberry Creek flows through it. Putting a large building, a parking lot and utilities into it will decrease its natural and recreational value, and will make run-off problems in the creek worse.  

On Thursday evening, March 21, the Sierra Club sponsored a forum on the BP-UCB deal. The speakers included Professor Ignacio Chapela, who became a hero to many on campus when he survived an attempt to deny him tenure because he exposed an earlier UCB deal with Monsanto that promoted research into GMOs for big agriculture at the expense of research into sustainable and organic farming. Chapela, in the brief time allowed him at the forum, demonstrated that the production of fuel from biomass is inherently inefficient, and also showed that the process would necessarily spell further disaster for rural people in Indonesia and the Amazon, where forests would be cut to grow the grass the project anticipates using. Already these people are being driven to suicide by the destruction of their farms and forests, as Chapela’s slides showed.  

This is an issue that may seem remote from our concerns at the Lodge. But we are downstream from the proposed project—literally in the case of Strawberry Creek. Our food supply is threatened by the spread of GMO technology. We are also endangered because the BP-UCB approach to the energy crisis and global warming pre-empts the sort of research and action that is needed. It is essentially a business-as-usual approach which tries to solve the problems of the oil companies while ignoring the imperative need to learn how to live in harmony with the earth, its natural processes, and the other people who live on it. We need more than a nice attitude toward nature, we need to change the way we live and the way decisions are made. If our hope is that the intellectual power of the university will be brought to bear on this problem, the Sierra Club forum raised a huge doubt that the current UCB administration can be trusted to do the right thing. 

I am writing to you in the hope that you will find a way to influence the university not to accept the BP deal. Understandably, the dean who represented the university at the forum described above was delighted with the money it promises, and was ready with organization charts that did little to allay fears that the university researchers will be, in effect, employees of BP. The influence of corporation money within the university is already a problem. We need the university to research real solutions to the problems of global warming and energy. The BP deal will create a focus exclusively on solutions that benefit BP, to the detriment of objective research. Also, the BP approach threatens the livelihood of farmers wherever it is used, making more enemies for the US worldwide. 

I realize that this is far afield from your main responsibilities, but I think it is of far reaching importance and I hope that you will be able to bring some pressure to bear on the university not to sell out the public interest in this critical area. 

Sincerely, 

Jane Eiseley