Public Comment

Regarding the draft environmental impact report for UC Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and its Long-Range Development Plan: The plans are not right or honest in presenting the whole of your intentions and impacts. 

Here is a short list of suggestions re obvious problems with the plans:  

• We must not venture into new planet-endangering projects like this “Bio-energy Research.” Especially not one like this biofuels project which is gigantic and rushing in disastrous directions for profit, politics, and growth, and which uses concepts that have already brought us to the edge of extinction. We must all begin to do everything we can to ameliorate damage to our planet and to heal and protect our natural environment to stop destroying our earth. We must clean up our act. 

• The original charter for the UC Labs was for research in electricity and energy efficiency. This relatively benign research has been wonderful and seemed safe enough to conduct near the university and our dense population. But radiation, nanotech, synthetic biology research and so forth, should not occur near the university or in populated areas. On an earthquake fault zone is unbelievable. 

• It is time for “Less is More!” Time to downsize. We can’t be planning to grow corporations, universities, or populations. That is madness, selfishness, and greed. But we can clean up our act and there is huge profit in it! And brilliance, benevolence, survival, and Nobel Prizes too! 

• The Helios Computer should stay in Oakland where it is wanted and needed. Moving it to Strawberry Canyon will pollute the air with diesel and other toxic particulates while moving, demolishing, and redeveloping. Moving it to Berkeley would pollute the university’s own nest. The move would pave the earth in a delicate environmentally sensitive zone, and deforest in a wooded canyon at a time when our earth needs the cooling effects of every tree. 

• The UC Lawrence Berkeley Labs should not do this BP/ DOE, Synthetic Biology / commercial venture in Strawberry Canyon or any populated or large-scale area. Yet the planning is already underway for huge wet labs, dry labs, and offices all over Berkeley, and beyond! It is wrong to completely overwhelm a small city like this, and unbelievably wrong for powerful people with shortsighted plans to be fiddling with nature when they know our planet is beginning to burn.  

Merrilie Mitchell is a community watchdog and former candidate for City Council.