Columns

It was exactly one year ago that I wrote in my Activist’s Diary about how rapidly the earth was warming, that the degree of global warming was 0.8°C in 2018 and edging to 1.2°C. On Monday, May 9, 2022 the World Meteorological Organization announced a new warning https://tinyurl.com/2ww4xw27. Steve Newman summarized it in Earthweek this way, “The U.N. weather agency warns that there is now a 50% chance the world will warm past the 1.5°C goal at least briefly by 2026.” This warning is for NOW, not decades in the future.

Remember when lowering CO2 to 350 ppm was a thing? Today atmospheric CO2 was 421.84 ppm. The climate emergency is here. And, yes, it is hard to grasp the seriousness of it with a beautiful weekend like the one we just completed in Berkeley. Catastrophic climate-accelerated weather events leave recent memory when the sky is blue and the air is fresh. How easy it is to push the fires, drought and heat waves out of our thinking when they happen somewhere else and everything looks so normal when we open the door, but we are in a climate crisis. We are starting the summer dry season with snowpack at 35% of normal. Last week I wrote about the California Coastal Commission instructing Cambria and Los Oso to halt all new water-using development.

The lone agenda item at Monday’s Health, Life Enrichment, Equity and Community Committee was the proposed Fair Work Week Ordinance. It covers requiring things like advance posting of work schedules, overtime when there is less than 11 hours between work shifts, pay for cancellation and more, the kinds of conditions and protections workers at the lower rungs of the pay scale need. Businesses were well represented among the fifteen speakers. As one might expect they were less than enthused. No action was taken and it was continued to the next meeting. 

Tuesday evening at City Council after several speakers opposed reducing the Health Commission to nine positions, Councilmember Hahn withdrew her support and abstained while the mayor and remaining councilmembers voted their approval. The City Manager withdrew using $121,133 of Measure GG Fire Prevention Funds after a question from Councilmember Wengraf and this Activist asked how we could trust how the planned fall ballot measure funds will be used, when Measure GG funds for fire prevention are going to new carpeting. 

The big items of the evening were People’s Park and the configuration of bicycle lanes on Hopkins between Gilman and Sutter. 

The student housing projects at People’s Park were initially presented well over a year ago by UC Berkeley as including housing units for the homeless as a “benefit” of the project. Now it turns out that homeless housing isn’t a “benefit” after all. 

The City Manager will apply for $5,000,000 from the State’s competitive Local Housing Trust Fund (LHTF) program and the City of Berkeley has a one-to-one matching funds requirement. So not only is there significant public opposition to UC Berkeley’s filling People’s Park with student housing instead of building elsewhere, our tax dollars, through City of Berkeley, will be used for the homeless units part of the project. The item passed on consent. Things get messier all the time.  

Fifty-two people commented on the Hopkins Corridor Plan and Councilmember Hahn stated she received over 1600 letters. The best comments of the evening on the Hopkins corridor plan were, “People don’t know what it is like to be in a body that is not young” (I didn’t catch the name) and “Life is full of difficulties. It’s the solutions that are the problems” from Shirley Issl. 

There are long writeups elsewhere, but as I drove over to Monterey Market for my every-other -week food shopping, I wondered just exactly how well a double direction bike lane on the Monterey Market side of the street would work. It will mean crossing the bike lane to reach the parking lot and twenty-eight fewer spaces on the street. I walked the 1.2 miles once. It is possible, but walking means more trips, tripling the time for each trip when there never seem to be enough hours in the day and bicycling means dodging distracted drivers. And, given my out-of-practice bicycling skill, being in a narrow bike lane with bikers coming at me in their own narrow side seems hazardous at best. 

I am all for crosstown car free streets, but Hopkins is complicated, narrow, a bus route, with lots of schools nearby, the Monterey Market, shops and no reasonable parallel streets for alternate routes. Parking meters were part of the plan, but are now being referred back for more input and analysis along with residential preferred parking and a signal light at Monterey and Hopkins. 

This project in “process” was passed at 12:18 am making Zoom a much preferable choice over attending in-person. 

Wednesday evening, Kevin Burl from the Xerces Society (thank you Erin Diehm and Gordon Wozniak at the Parks Commission) earned the best meeting presentation of the week. Burl spoke to supporting butterflies and caterpillars and gave us the Xerces Society website www.xerces.org. There is a specific page for California https://www.xerces.org/pollinator-resource-center/california We could have used an entire evening on butterflies. I wish I had a link to give you for the presentation, but like most Berkeley commission meetings it wasn’t recorded. 

Points from Burl included, Monarchs hibernate on trees in the middle of groves where they are more protected from winter cold and temperature extremes. Thinning tree groves removes this protection. Butterflies need early spring nectar producing plants when they emerge from hibernation and host plants (milkweed for Monarchs) to lay their eggs. Urbanization, destruction of habitat, herbicides and pesticides like neonicotinoids sprayed on plants or seeds are responsible for the decline of Monarchs and other butterflies. We counter by choosing pesticide free plants wisely from https://www.xerces.org/pollinator-resource-center/california and https://calscape.org/ 

Before the presentation even began, David Fielder spoke to meetings not being recorded as unacceptable. Minutes are not comprehensive. Fielder chronicled the results of his communication with the City Clerk’s office. There is no prohibition of recording meetings as had been stated previously by City employees. My recall is that statement came from Scott Ferris but it could have come from the commission secretary or another City staff member. To Ferris’s advantage I can’t reference a recording and some of us feel that is why the community Berkeley Marina Area Specific Plan meetings were not recorded. 

Former Mayor Shirley Dean phoned in (there was a power failure in North Berkeley) her objection to monetizing the Marina. Former Councilmember Laurie Capitelli followed Dean’s comments with his own, saying, “It’s not often I am in agreement with Shirley Dean, but we are talking about monetizing our parks.”He emphasized that the purpose of the park system is to provide open space. We should not monetize our parks. He went on describing the view from the Marina as world class, and said that most of our parks should be off limits to revenue generation. 

The way the City of Berkeley has attacked the Marina is that the commercialization decision is made and then the public is presented with this: which arrangement of the commercial enterprises do you like best? Is site A or B better or maybe C? Not whether the Marina is even a location to be considered. That is the way it was last month with the Fitness CourtÒ. We have to give Nelson Lam and the Fitness CourtÒ sales rep credit for persisting when this was rejected over a year ago. At that time, it was suggested one of the BART housing projects was a more appropriate location. https://tinyurl.com/2p8b863b 

The Budget meeting on Thursday was short, with everything on the agenda moved to this coming week except the Auditor’s report on the financial condition of the City. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-audits/city-auditor-reports It is worth reading. 

The week ended with marches across the country for reproductive freedom and another mass shooting this time in Buffalo, New York. This was the same week that two Federal Judges appointed by Donald Trump ruled that the 2019 California law prohibiting the sale of long guns and semiautomatic centerfire rifles to anyone under 21 violates the Second Amendment. The lone dissenting vote came from Judge Sidney Stein , appointed by Bill Clinton. 

One thing that is different this time in the description of this mass shooting is the through line drawn to other mass shootings: White supremacy and White replacement theory. On April 30, 2022, the New York Times said “Night after night on Fox, Tucker Carlson weaponizes his viewers’ fears and grievances to create what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news. It is also, by some measures, the most successful.” 

The NYT analyzed more than 1100 episodes and reported finding Carlson mainstreaming “replacement” night after night. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/business/media/tucker-carlson-fox-news-takeaways.html 

It is unlikely Tucker Carlson will temper his racist rants. Fox pays Carlson $35 million annually for his popular nightly broadcasts and another $6 million for his podcasts. 

Carlson isn’t the first Fox show host whose venomous rants are associated with murder. Bill O’Reilly between 2005 to 2009 called the late term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, “Tiller the Baby Killer” repeating it until Dr. George Tiller was murdered during a Sunday morning service at his church, Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas on May 31, 2009. Afterwards came the denials that his rhetoric had anything to do with adding fuel to the fire. Nearly eight years and several sexual harassment lawsuits later Fox pushed O’Reilly out on April 19, 2017. 

Last week I wrote about The Story of Jane the Legendary Feminist Abortion Service in Chicago. You can hear the author talk about Jane in the Post Reports podcast https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/pregnant-dont-want-to-be-call-jane/ 

We shouldn’t be surprised that Roe v. Wade is about to fall. The fundamentalist evangelicals have been organizing the anti-abortion movement for decades and Republican politicians stepped in line to use them. In my August 22, 2021 Diary review of the book Jesus and John Wayne I wrote, “…[the] CWA (Concerned Women of America) the evangelical women’s organization with a mission to carry forward the pro-family, anti-feminist cause was far more organized than I realized. While Planned Parenthood has used each erosion of women’s reproductive rights as a fund raiser with never a call to action in the street, members of CWA were reported as 98% having voted, 93% had signed a petition, 77% had boycotted a product or company, 74% had contacted a public official and nearly half had written a letter to the editor.” 

This week following up on writings about fundamentalists, evangelicals and abortion, I picked up Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of IT Back by Frank Schaeffer, 2007. The book was fascinating. Frank Schaeffer’s father Francis Schaeffer and his mother Edith were big in the fundamentalist world. Frank describes talking his father into joining the anti-abortion movement and uniting with the Catholics. 

Frank eventually left the fundamentalists after seeing them as isolationist, anti-American and antithetical to valuing the arts and literature. It was “Focus on the Family” on TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Company) with Ed Dobson a onetime Moral Majority leader that drove the wedge. Dobson was preaching needing to save America from decadence, corruption and evil. The way to protect children, to keep them from questioning, meant banning books, homeschooling, private spaces where they could indoctrinate their children free from interference. 

It was exactly one year ago that I wrote in my Activist’s Diary about how rapidly the earth was warming, that the degree of global warming was 0.8°C in 2018 and edging to 1.2°C. On Monday, May 9, 2022 the World Meteorological Organization announced a new warning https://tinyurl.com/2ww4xw27. Steve Newman summarized it in Earthweek this way, “The U.N. weather agency warns that there is now a 50% chance the world will warm past the 1.5°C goal at least briefly by 2026.” This warning is for NOW, not decades in the future. 

Remember when lowering CO2 to 350 ppm was a thing? Today atmospheric CO2 was 421.84 ppm. The climate emergency is here. And, yes, it is hard to grasp the seriousness of it with a beautiful weekend like the one we just completed in Berkeley. Catastrophic climate-accelerated weather events leave recent memory when the sky is blue and the air is fresh. How easy it is to push the fires, drought and heat waves out of our thinking when they happen somewhere else and everything looks so normal when we open the door, but we are in a climate crisis. We are starting the summer dry season with snowpack at 35% of normal. Last week I wrote about the California Coastal Commission instructing Cambria and Los Oso to halt all new water-using development. 

The lone agenda item at Monday’s Health, Life Enrichment, Equity and Community Committee was the proposed Fair Work Week Ordinance. It covers requiring things like advance posting of work schedules, overtime when there is less than 11 hours between work shifts, pay for cancellation and more, the kinds of conditions and protections workers at the lower rungs of the pay scale need. Businesses were well represented among the fifteen speakers. As one might expect they were less than enthused. No action was taken and it was continued to the next meeting. 

Tuesday evening at City Council after several speakers opposed reducing the Health Commission to nine positions, Councilmember Hahn withdrew her support and abstained while the mayor and remaining councilmembers voted their approval. The City Manager withdrew using $121,133 of Measure GG Fire Prevention Funds after a question from Councilmember Wengraf and this Activist asked how we could trust how the planned fall ballot measure funds will be used, when Measure GG funds for fire prevention are going to new carpeting. 

The big items of the evening were People’s Park and the configuration of bicycle lanes on Hopkins between Gilman and Sutter. 

The student housing projects at People’s Park were initially presented well over a year ago by UC Berkeley as including housing units for the homeless as a “benefit” of the project. Now it turns out that homeless housing isn’t a “benefit” after all. 

The City Manager will apply for $5,000,000 from the State’s competitive Local Housing Trust Fund (LHTF) program and the City of Berkeley has a one-to-one matching funds requirement. So not only is there significant public opposition to UC Berkeley’s filling People’s Park with student housing instead of building elsewhere, our tax dollars, through City of Berkeley, will be used for the homeless units part of the project. The item passed on consent. Things get messier all the time.  

Fifty-two people commented on the Hopkins Corridor Plan and Councilmember Hahn stated she received over 1600 letters. The best comments of the evening on the Hopkins corridor plan were, “People don’t know what it is like to be in a body that is not young” (I didn’t catch the name) and “Life is full of difficulties. It’s the solutions that are the problems” from Shirley Issl. 

There are long writeups elsewhere, but as I drove over to Monterey Market for my every-other -week food shopping, I wondered just exactly how well a double direction bike lane on the Monterey Market side of the street would work. It will mean crossing the bike lane to reach the parking lot and twenty-eight fewer spaces on the street. I walked the 1.2 miles once. It is possible, but walking means more trips, tripling the time for each trip when there never seem to be enough hours in the day and bicycling means dodging distracted drivers. And, given my out-of-practice bicycling skill, being in a narrow bike lane with bikers coming at me in their own narrow side seems hazardous at best. 

I am all for crosstown car free streets, but Hopkins is complicated, narrow, a bus route, with lots of schools nearby, the Monterey Market, shops and no reasonable parallel streets for alternate routes. Parking meters were part of the plan, but are now being referred back for more input and analysis along with residential preferred parking and a signal light at Monterey and Hopkins. 

This project in “process” was passed at 12:18 am making Zoom a much preferable choice over attending in-person. 

Wednesday evening, Kevin Burl from the Xerces Society (thank you Erin Diehm and Gordon Wozniak at the Parks Commission) earned the best meeting presentation of the week. Burl spoke to supporting butterflies and caterpillars and gave us the Xerces Society website www.xerces.org. There is a specific page for California https://www.xerces.org/pollinator-resource-center/california We could have used an entire evening on butterflies. I wish I had a link to give you for the presentation, but like most Berkeley commission meetings it wasn’t recorded. 

Points from Burl included, Monarchs hibernate on trees in the middle of groves where they are more protected from winter cold and temperature extremes. Thinning tree groves removes this protection. Butterflies need early spring nectar producing plants when they emerge from hibernation and host plants (milkweed for Monarchs) to lay their eggs. Urbanization, destruction of habitat, herbicides and pesticides like neonicotinoids sprayed on plants or seeds are responsible for the decline of Monarchs and other butterflies. We counter by choosing pesticide free plants wisely from https://www.xerces.org/pollinator-resource-center/california and https://calscape.org/ 

Before the presentation even began, David Fielder spoke to meetings not being recorded as unacceptable. Minutes are not comprehensive. Fielder chronicled the results of his communication with the City Clerk’s office. There is no prohibition of recording meetings as had been stated previously by City employees. My recall is that statement came from Scott Ferris but it could have come from the commission secretary or another City staff member. To Ferris’s advantage I can’t reference a recording and some of us feel that is why the community Berkeley Marina Area Specific Plan meetings were not recorded. 

Former Mayor Shirley Dean phoned in (there was a power failure in North Berkeley) her objection to monetizing the Marina. Former Councilmember Laurie Capitelli followed Dean’s comments with his own, saying, “It’s not often I am in agreement with Shirley Dean, but we are talking about monetizing our parks.”He emphasized that the purpose of the park system is to provide open space. We should not monetize our parks. He went on describing the view from the Marina as world class, and said that most of our parks should be off limits to revenue generation. 

The way the City of Berkeley has attacked the Marina is that the commercialization decision is made and then the public is presented with this: which arrangement of the commercial enterprises do you like best? Is site A or B better or maybe C? Not whether the Marina is even a location to be considered. That is the way it was last month with the Fitness CourtÒ. We have to give Nelson Lam and the Fitness CourtÒ sales rep credit for persisting when this was rejected over a year ago. At that time, it was suggested one of the BART housing projects was a more appropriate location. https://tinyurl.com/2p8b863b 

The Budget meeting on Thursday was short, with everything on the agenda moved to this coming week except the Auditor’s report on the financial condition of the City. https://berkeleyca.gov/your-government/city-audits/city-auditor-reports It is worth reading. 

The week ended with marches across the country for reproductive freedom and another mass shooting this time in Buffalo, New York. This was the same week that two Federal Judges appointed by Donald Trump ruled that the 2019 California law prohibiting the sale of long guns and semiautomatic centerfire rifles to anyone under 21 violates the Second Amendment. The lone dissenting vote came from Judge Sidney Stein , appointed by Bill Clinton. 

One thing that is different this time in the description of this mass shooting is the through line drawn to other mass shootings: White supremacy and White replacement theory. On April 30, 2022, the New York Times said “Night after night on Fox, Tucker Carlson weaponizes his viewers’ fears and grievances to create what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news. It is also, by some measures, the most successful.” 

The NYT analyzed more than 1100 episodes and reported finding Carlson mainstreaming “replacement” night after night. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/30/business/media/tucker-carlson-fox-news-takeaways.html 

It is unlikely Tucker Carlson will temper his racist rants. Fox pays Carlson $35 million annually for his popular nightly broadcasts and another $6 million for his podcasts. 

Carlson isn’t the first Fox show host whose venomous rants are associated with murder. Bill O’Reilly between 2005 to 2009 called the late term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, “Tiller the Baby Killer” repeating it until Dr. George Tiller was murdered during a Sunday morning service at his church, Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas on May 31, 2009. Afterwards came the denials that his rhetoric had anything to do with adding fuel to the fire. Nearly eight years and several sexual harassment lawsuits later Fox pushed O’Reilly out on April 19, 2017. 

Last week I wrote about The Story of Jane the Legendary Feminist Abortion Service in Chicago. You can hear the author talk about Jane in the Post Reports podcast https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/post-reports/pregnant-dont-want-to-be-call-jane/ 

We shouldn’t be surprised that Roe v. Wade is about to fall. The fundamentalist evangelicals have been organizing the anti-abortion movement for decades and Republican politicians stepped in line to use them. In my August 22, 2021 Diary review of the book Jesus and John Wayne I wrote, “…[the] CWA (Concerned Women of America) the evangelical women’s organization with a mission to carry forward the pro-family, anti-feminist cause was far more organized than I realized. While Planned Parenthood has used each erosion of women’s reproductive rights as a fund raiser with never a call to action in the street, members of CWA were reported as 98% having voted, 93% had signed a petition, 77% had boycotted a product or company, 74% had contacted a public official and nearly half had written a letter to the editor.” 

This week following up on writings about fundamentalists, evangelicals and abortion, I picked up Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of IT Back by Frank Schaeffer, 2007. The book was fascinating. Frank Schaeffer’s father Francis Schaeffer and his mother Edith were big in the fundamentalist world. Frank describes talking his father into joining the anti-abortion movement and uniting with the Catholics. 

Frank eventually left the fundamentalists after seeing them as isolationist, anti-American and antithetical to valuing the arts and literature. It was “Focus on the Family” on TBN (Trinity Broadcasting Company) with Ed Dobson a onetime Moral Majority leader that drove the wedge. Dobson was preaching needing to save America from decadence, corruption and evil. The way to protect children, to keep them from questioning, meant banning books, homeschooling, private spaces where they could indoctrinate their children free from interference.