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A Berkeley Activist's Diary
Week ending September 19
Now that the recall is over and a sigh of relief in the outcome is in order, we can put our focus on the other ballot, KPFA. KPFA is having a station board election and the deadline will arrive on October 15, 2021. To vote in this election you must have donated to KPFA between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021. If you donated and cannot find your electronic ballot the website https://www.kpfaprotectors.org/ (the candidates I am supporting) has the information and links.
The Agenda committee on Monday was as usual poorly attended with the Mayor and Councilmembers Wengraf and Hahn sifting through the draft for the September 28th regular council meeting. Taplin’s proposed ordinance requiring plant materials to be native to Berkeley and Northern California and drought tolerant was referred to the FITES Committee (facilities, infrastructure, transportation, environment and sustainability).
I never really thought much about native plants (except what was the big deal) until a neighbor and I started a swimming routine and walked to and from our homes in the McGee Spaulding neighborhood to the Downtown Y. She would talk about pollinators and habitat and point out how the yards on the way were filled with flowers and devoid of bees and butterflies. I learned about host plants (i.e. monarch caterpillars only feed on milkweed), that with native plants little bites out of leaves was a good thing, that oaks are a keystone plant supporting 300 or more species and that Ginkos supported nothing, a dead zone for habitat. There was one house with a large California native pipevine. We would stop on the way home and watch the pipevine caterpillars chewing away on the plant. The pipevine never needed trimming to control its expansive growth as the lively caterpillars would keep it in check. That was until the owner decided on a new fence and had the pipevine cut down to a stump. The black and orange pipevine caterpillars and the iridescent blue and black butterflies are gone. All we have left is pictures. https://www.nps.gov/articles/california-pipevine-swallowtail.htm
My journey in appreciating native plants continued with picking up the writings of Douglas Tallamy and Edward O. Wilson. Most of all I’ve grown to understand just why these points by Edward O. Wilson are so critical to our future, “Insects are the little things that run the world.” “If insects were to vanish so would nearly all the flowering plants and the food webs they support. This loss in turn, would cause the extinction of reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals: in effect, nearly all terrestrial animal life.”
Many of us have been taught that bugs are bad, to be afraid and hate the little crawly things and that we must buy the pesticides on the garden store shelves to kill them. We’re taught native plants are weeds and to fill our yards with exotic plants from places other than here, exotic non-native plants that create a food desert to native pollinators. An analogy: offering non-native plants to pollinators is like serving a child kerosene instead of food. Even the subject of the book I summarize at the end of this Diary is about our species damaging local ecology and the destruction it wrought.
One plant, one yard doesn’t seem like much, but when we multiply that over and over across our neighborhoods, our cities, our state, our nation, our planet it is a cascade of destruction. We can look to this as contributing to the loss of 3 billion birds in North America over the last 50 years, the disappearance of insects, the decline of the monarchs and so many other species.
It doesn’t have to be this way. My neighbor, friend and swim partner has filled her yard with native plants. It is delightful as birds, butterflies, skippers, caterpillars and a wide variety of native bees discovered it. This is what Tallamy teaches us.
It was one of Tallamy’s graduate students that pulled together a study of nesting chickadees and tallied how many caterpillars were needed to feed the babies until they fledged the nest. The tally was 6000 to 9000 caterpillars. Think about that when about 96% of all baby birds need caterpillars as their diet.
If I were to guess from looking at this neighborhood, probably 90% of it supports not even one caterpillar. Crows will eat just about anything , which is a good reason why that population keeps expanding and song birds are in small numbers. The feeders with seeds in our yards will attract adult birds, but most baby birds can’t digest seeds.
You may wonder why I write week after week on the environment, habitat, ecosystems and climate. I am trying to bring you along, to pique your interest in creating an environment that supports our local ecosystems. I know it is a big stretch. And this grounding brings us to the rest of the city meetings.
At the Tuesday council meeting the Objective Standards and the Baseline Zoning Ordinance were rolled over to the September 28th. If you have rooftop solar and live in an area that may be the site of mixed use apartment buildings, which is pretty much everywhere with the signing of SB 9 and SB 10, then you should care about Objective Standards. In the standards up for a vote, a new tall apartment building next door can shadow up to 50% of your solar without any accommodation or design modification. In a city that claims to be concerned about resilience and climate this should be pretty appalling. It is item 33 in the agenda for the 28th. https://www.cityofberkeley.info/Clerk/City_Council/2021/09_Sep/City_Council__09-28-2021_-_Regular_Meeting_Agenda.aspx
You have another opportunity to dig into the Baseline Zoning Ordinance. The thickness of the document 532 pages is overwhelming. A suggestion is to use this link to the “readable” version (476 pages) review the table of contents and then go to the pages that affect your neighborhood and the things you care about.
Not one of these documents gives any attention to the environment, habitat or ecosystems.
The bills passed by our legislature completely ignore the environment other than promoting density as the beginning and end to solve greenhouse gas emissions. There is absolutely no consideration to creating corridors to connect to larger open spaces like parks where ecosystems can thrive. There is not one thought to preserving trees and a total absence of understanding the heat island effect when trees are removed and land is covered with buildings and hardscape.
That alone can increase local temperature by 10° to 20°. Buildings, sidewalks and patios add to water runoff if and when rain arrives, exacerbating the impact of drought rather than recharging the underlying land.
At the Transportation Commission on Thursday evening, Farid Javandel spoke about trees as though they are an inconvenience to be cutdown without a second thought.
The Human Welfare & Community Action Commission was canceled due to a lack of quorum and the Council Land Use Policy Committee meeting was cancelled without a listed reason although SB 9 and SB 10 might be somewhere in the background. I was planning to comment on the only listed item, Councilmember Taplin’s affordable housing overlay. In Taplin’s proposal, he does not define the percentage of housing affordable to each income level and especially moderate income (80% - 120% of AMI - area median income), the number of years the housing must be affordable 55 years, longer or in perpetuity, and there is nothing on green building, permeable paving or space/corridors between hardscape to support urban biodiversity/ecosystems. If this comes back again, I’ll need to update the chart posted in the Planet on March 14, 2020 adding the impact of SB 9 and SB 10 and including any modifications from Taplin. https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2021-03-14/article/49067?headline=Affordable-Housing-Overlays-Cambridge-vs.-Berkeley--Kelly-Hammargren
This week’s book was Four Winds by Kristin Hannah, 2021. Fiction is not my usual fare, although many of the political books released this year make me wish they were fiction. Four Winds has been on the lucky day shelf of ebooks at the Berkeley Library and came highly recommended by my sister. The novel is about the dust bowl, the migration to California, the wretched conditions of the migrant camps, the search for work and ends with union organizing by members of the American Communist Party. A close friend of my husband’s, Sylvia Thompson, who passed away in 2012. was a member of the American Communist Party and was a union organizer in North Carolina in the early 1940s. She had stories about the dangers of organizing and being chased out of towns.
In the author’s note, Hannah makes reference to the 2008 recession. I think more about the climate and environmental disasters that have been forcing migration within the U.S. and will continue doing so into the future. Climate migrants from outside the U.S. are already at our doorstep, and they were described in the same ways by the Trump administration as in the book on the dust bowl: lazy, dirty, infected criminals who burden the economy.
This novel has renewed my interest in finding the collection of essays by red diaper babies (it is somewhere on a shelf or in a stack of books) and finishing it. Berkeley has been a city with many red diaper babies, and that may be a significant contribution to the local progressive history.
