Extra

I was away for really only four and a half days, but I was so completely disconnected from Berkeley that when I returned it felt like a month. There is very little happening with city meetings with City Council and most of the commissions on August recess leaving only one city meeting on which to report, the Zoning Adjustment Board (ZAB).

The project at 1725 Berkeley Way was continued off calendar while the rent control history is being researched. The unattractive duplex project as planned would demolish eight trees at least that is my best count from the plans. The neighborhood attendees had researched the financers of the project and commented that this project looked too much like group living. It will come back again, but I have little hope that there will be any improvements. The other project of note is 2808 Ninth Street with its concrete patio, walkway, driveway and parking.

If you haven’t been paying attention to the impact of hardscape (all that concrete) and the environment you might think all this added concrete is fine. Certainly, after months of attempting to educate members of ZAB and staff, it didn’t catch their attention until I mentioned it in public comment. Of course, ZAB can’t require permeable paving which would improve the situation, they can only suggest, because Mayor Arreguin and the Council majority have failed to act.  

After all, what is a little more concrete with each new project? It adds up. With California SB 9 and 10 increasing density under the banner of more housing with no regard to the environment or even including affordable housing requirements, Berkeley is moving into a future covered with concrete. If we don’t change this direction, in a few years we’ll be able to feel the full effect of urban heat islands. 

We need trees, native trees and ground cover of native plants to support ecosystems. When we replace natural land cover with pavement, hardscape, buildings, we create urban heat islands. It is why cities are hotter than surrounding rural areas. Urban heat islands increase energy cost, add air pollution and heat related illness and mortality. As the earth continues to warm at an accelerating pace all this concrete is going to be more and more detrimental. Concrete/hardscape adds another problem. It makes our drought worse. If we ever get rain there will be no ground for it to soak in, it will just be runoff. 

The mayor and council majority are thus far an abysmal failure in responding to the climate and the environment. The one councilmember who has been consistent on climate and gave us the natural gas ban is hard pressed to change this tide. We desperately need eight more, even four more consistent votes would be a great help. The objective standards for density, design, and shadows in the proposed September 14 council agenda is a big nothing and it took three and a half years to produce this pablum. 

Before we move on, please pay attention to the condition of your trees. Oaks are extremely resilient to drought, but other species are looking desperate for water, dropping leaves as if it is late fall. 

The most positive turn for me over the endless months of the COVID pandemic is rediscovering my love of reading and the seeming infinite choices of ebooks and audiobooks (including just published) from our local libraries (my three favorite libraries – Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco). Here are two more books. 

I would probably have never found this book without the recommendation of my sister Diane late Friday evening. She read it with her Minnesota book club, Becoming Nicole by Amy Ellis Nutt, 2015. I told her Saturday morning if my iPad battery hadn’t been on 20% and we didn’t have a family wedding to attend, I would have stayed up all night and finished it. I have friends whose grandchild insisted he was a girl since the age of about 3, which is the same age as Wyatt Maines when he started insisting he was a girl. Becoming Nicole is about the transition from Wyatt to Nicole and the struggles of the family, going to school, community and going public to stop antitransgender legislation. 

If you have ever struggled with understanding someone being transgender, I would highly recommend reading Becoming Nicole. There is a clarifying quote from the first transgender patient of the endocrinologist Dr. Norman Spack who co-founded the Gender Management Service at Boston Children’s Hospital, “Lesson number one: sexual orientation is who you go to bed with, gender identity is who you go to bed as.” 

The book covers a lot including descriptions of Nicole’s childhood, preadolescence and the importance of postponing physical sexual development while the child is working through gender identity. The book also includes discussion of fetal development. Physical sexual characteristics occur separately on different timing from brain development of sexual orientation and gender identity, hence the potential for mismatch between the two. 

There are a number of articles in the Boston Globe about Nicole and her family. I recommend skipping those and going to the book. 

There is so much that happens in utero with the development of the fetus. Not being much of a conspiracy theorist, I have often wondered if the anti-vax movement isn’t in part a diversion and obstruction from researching the real causes of autism. 

Anti-vax is what brings me to the second book, The Devil’s Playbook: Big Tobacco, Juul and the Addiction of a New Generation by Lauren Etter, 2021. The first chapter solidified my interest with the description of the tobacco industry tactic to lift Marlboro from an underperforming cigarette for women into America’s number one brand worldwide and the tobacco industry response to the growing association between smoking and cancer. Leo Burnett was the advertising genius who created the Marlboro man, the square jawed cowboy and the icons of male autonomy. 

When the first scientific associations of cancer and smoking appeared in the 1950s, the tobacco industry used the hardball tactic to smear scientists and discredit their findings. Philip Morris built a network of scientists they called “white coats” to inject doubt into the smoking debate. 

The Devil’s Playbook reminded me of the film Merchants of Doubt based on the 2010 book by the same name by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway detailing how a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from smoking to global warming. Not only did the climate denial campaign use the same hardball tactic of smear scientists and create doubt, they used the same team. 

It didn’t stop with smearing scientists, Philip Morris characterized smoking opponents as creating a “nanny state.” That government was not only coming for the cigarettes, but would also regulate everything else smokers enjoyed like beer, cheese and red meat and declared smoking was a fundamental American right just like free speech and guns. 

I didn’t pay much attention to the Juul sponsored 2019 ballot Measure C to overturn San Francisco’s prohibition of the sale of e-cigarettes and vaping products. And I certainly didn’t know that Grover Norquist (for Measure C) and Mike Bloomberg (opposed Measure C) got into the fight. I also didn’t know that Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority opinion striking down the Massachusetts’ tobacco advertising ban back in 2001. 

I do remember the July 23, 2019 Berkeley council meeting discussion and vote to ban the sale of tobacco flavored products in Berkeley. The vote didn’t happen without a fight from sellers of flavored tobacco. Even Ben Bartlett commented that a ban would unfairly impact the Black community, but he came around to support the item on the consent calendar making the vote to ban flavored tobacco products unanimous. 

If the macho man, nanny state, anti-regulation, individual decisions over public health is sounding much too familiar than look no further than what is happening with refusing lifesaving vaccinations for COVID-19 and the hysteria over wearing masks and mandates. The anti-vaccine movement on the right even has their own “white coats” America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLD). One has to wonder what Fox gets out of pushing quack cures and why people listen, but that goes back to another film, The Brainwashing of my Dad by Jen Senko 

I doubt that the unvaccinated would see the irony in their purported independence, that they have instead been sucked or more aptly suckered into the jaws of slick advertising for bogus COVID prevention and cures. If only they suffered their foolishness without impacting the health of the rest of us. With so many yet unvaccinated, the pandemic continues and the variants evolve. We are not at the end of the pandemic, but I certainly hope we are at the end of catering to the unvaccinated. As for vaccine mandates, my stand is bring them on.