Extra

Please, if you haven’t turned in your RECALL ballot voting NO on the recall of Governor Newsom, stop, find it, check NO, complete it and head over to the ballot box at the Civic Center at 2180 Milvia. Elections have consequences and there are a long list of screwballs that could end up as governor if too many of us think our vote doesn’t matter. We need to crush this recall and we have only a few hours left to cast our vote. Polls close at 8 pm. Tuesday, September 14. 

Don’t forget the other ballot action, 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 (I couldn’t find mine), the website https://www.kpfaprotectors.org/ (the candidates I am supporting) has the information and links. 

My week started and ended around the Rights of Nature and native plants. I got a call at the beginning of the week from a member of the Peace and Justice Commission on the Rights of Nature. It was my article in the Planet on Cheryl Davilla’s Rights of Nature resolution that attracted the attention of the documentary filmmakers of the Invisible Hand and things rolled on from there. My analysis of the referral to the Peace and Justice Commission was covered in the April 3 Activist’s Diary. https://berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2021-04-03/article/49114?headline=A-Berkeley-Activist-s-Diary--Kelly-Hammargren 

The question to me was what I thought of a Guardianship for the Rights of Nature, a commission of sorts. My answer was long and not to the question. I was also asked what I thought about density versus development of open space. As to density, in a previous Diary, I quoted from a conversation I had years ago with H. Smith a Harvard educated city planner who said, “We can’t survive as a nation if we continue to cover our farmland with housing.” My thoughts on this now after reading Edward O. Wilson and Douglas Tallamy are, “We can’t survive as a species if we continue to cover open land. We can and must learn that our survival depends on learning to live with nature.” And, that doesn’t mean we move to the forests that are burning up. 

Douglas Tallamy in his continual delivery of the bad news of what will happen if we persist down the path of destruction of our ecosystems also gives us the steps to restoration and that is exactly what he did again on Thursday in his talk celebrating California’s Biodiversity Day. Tallamy is so positive and hopeful in addressing the decline of ecosystems. He tells us to shift our thinking and approach to life and each other. “I have a right” needs to be replaced with “I have a responsibility.” He emphasizes that we can absolutely live with nature, in fact, we need to develop a personal relationship with nature. Here are his four steps: 1) Shrink lawns by at least ½ and cover that land with native plants, 2) Choose keystone native plants, the plants that support the most species, 5% of plants support 75% of the caterpillars we can find them at https://calscape.org/, 3) control light pollution, turn lights off or use motion detectors and use yellow lights, yellow LEDs where light is necessary, and 4) landscape in a way that allows caterpillars complete development, use plants around trees not grass and do not mow around trees. 

There is the other piece to this and that is there are still members of commissions who believe the mayor and council are actually interested in their work. I find that to be magical thinking. The suggestion of a Guardianship after the council has just demolished almost half of the commissions falls into that same space, but I am always ready to be surprised.  

Surprised is exactly what I have been in what is coming from Councilmember Taplin. Taplin’s proposal for a native plant ordinance is in the agenda packet for September 28. He has also taken a strong hand in proposing amending BMC (Berkeley Municipal Code) to restrict trucks from detouring through residential neighborhoods to avoid traffic. Enforcement will be the next challenge if his proposed changes pass council. Thursday at the Land Use Policy Committee is his proposal for an affordable housing overlay. It hasn’t been updated since it was first submitted in February. I’ll report in my next Diary what happens to all of these. 

On to the city meetings. I only watched one hour of the Independent Redistricting Commission. These meetings always feel like a zoom of commissioners being fed mundane material that could have been handed out for reading without bothering with a meeting. The big decisions for as much as I listened are: the majority believes they should develop a slogan to capture our interest and the deadline for the 2020 realignment of districts needs to be completed by March 1, so it can be passed by council and submitted to the Registrar of Voters by April 17. I’m waiting for the discussion of shifts in population. If that has happened I missed it. 

I left the Redistricting meeting to attend the Parks and Waterfront Commission. The Echo Lake Camp survived the Caldor fire untouched, the Parks Commission will respond to the council’s consolidation of commissions and the resulting heavy workload for commissioners all of whom volunteer their time, Scott Ferris reported the commissions will resume meeting after the first of the year in the new consolidated configuration and the best was saved for last, the presentation on the progress of the pollinator gardens. Erin Diehm had a host of fabulous pictures of flowering native plants, native bees, butterflies and skippers. 

The Police Accountability Board and Homeless Commission were running simultaneously with the Parks and Waterfront Commission so I missed those. 

The Zoning Adjustment Board Meeting had an uneventful agenda so I opted for the Reimagining Public Safety Task Force. The Copwatch presentation videos of Berkeley Police were hard to watch, the overhead baton striking by police of a man at a traffic stop and a mentally ill man wanting medical care being, surrounded, handcuffed and put in a police car to be taken away to some unknown place of detention. We don’t like to think these kinds of things actually happen in our city, but they do. 

It seems like the consultants would rather continue forward on what feels like a predesigned plan rather than integrate the reports on the ground. The meetings up to this point have been orchestrated in a way that fills the evening with flowery sounding reports from the police department and stifled commission discussion. The Task Force is adding more meetings so not all hope is lost at this point. 

A podcast I find refreshingly informative is Criminal Injustice. This week in episode #142 http://www.criminalinjusticepodcast.com/blog/2021/09/07/142-public-safety-alternatives-cahoots the discussion was with journalist Rowan Moore Gerety on CAHOOTS a public safety program alternative to policing that has been in operation in Eugene, Oregon for thirty years. Gerety has an article on the same subject, “ An Alternative to Police that Police Can Get Behind” https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/12/cahoots-program-may-reduce-likelihood-of-police-violence/617477/ 

There are a couple of statistics in the article that are fascinating. Eugene, Oregon with a population of 175,000 has a police force of 126 community-safety positions 2/3 of which are police. That is a city with at least 55,000 more people than Berkeley and what sounds like a police force of sworn officers that is just a little more than 1/2 the size of BPD. 

This certainly needs a lot more investigation. And, it doesn’t sound like Eugene was even in the consultant’s list. There is a down side, downsizing. There were some pretty fat incomes that were noted in the Copwatch presentation and it is doubtful that BPD officers raking in around $500,000 with overtime are going to be willing to give up that kind of cash. 

Now for COVID. It is long past time to stop coddling the don’t want to be vaccinated population. Public health is just that, the health of the public. This pandemic would be over if every eligible person stepped up and got vaccinated. We should be vaccinating the world instead of concerning ourselves with the feelings of the vaccine hesitant. There is very little that anyone can do without having an impact on others and not being vaccinated has an enormous impact on everyone. We are interdependent. And, once a week testing is wholly inadequate as a substitute for being vaccinated. 

As usual, I like to finish with what I’m reading. When I started reading I Alone Can Fix it, I remembered why A very Stable Genius sits only a third completed in the stack. The two books are by the same two authors, Philip Rucker and Carol Leonning , Washington Post journalists and the text just doesn’t flow in a cohesive manner. I switched from a “book in hand” to an audiobook after clawing through the early chapters. I Alone Can Fix It is one of those books that really works better as an audiobook. 

The journalists filled in gaps left by other books. The beginning had a bit too much from players in the Trump administration trying to rescue their fraying reputations. Then it got better. The last chapters with the descriptions from General Mark A. Milley, Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff were eye opening. He frequently used the metaphor “we’re going to land this plane safely” for getting through the election to the transfer of power and the inauguration. There was also the inside scoop of bolstering Pence to accept the electoral college votes.