Extra

On Monday, Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I opened my email to see this note from James McFadden:

"This 'Berkeley Together' effort seems more like an attempt to divide Berkeley -- perhaps they should be renamed 'Berkeley Divided.' The most privileged are organizing to get an exemption from development -- assuming loss of local zoning control is ok as long as it doesn't impact them. It looks like the hill people are throwing the flats under the development bus rather than forming a united front to fight this developer grab of power and neoliberal deregulation/disempowerment of cities."

There was a time when I might have felt the same knee jerk reaction, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how climate change and climate catastrophes are going to change where and how we live. This morning my first podcast of the day was “The Daily” from the New York Times “Which towns are worth saving” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/11/podcasts/the-daily/climate-crisis-resilience.html We might extend that to which parts of towns should be abandoned and when is retreat the best choice?

My niece and I talked not so long ago about how we are going to see climate refugees from within our own country as parts of the US become uninhabitable. How many times should an area be rebuilt? Or, should there even be expansion in cities like Phoenix with a future like 118° on June 17^th? Homeowners in the hills are finding it ever more difficult to secure fire insurance. When the hills burn again as they likely will despite our efforts to prevent such an event, should they be rebuilt? At the very least should we be putting more people in an area where they may be trapped, unable to evacuate as in the Berkeley Oakland Hills fire in 1991 where 25 people died? The opposite side of the city will be impacted by sea level rise, with a best case scenario now 10 feet, not 6 feet.

We may find that as our electeds recoil from having to say the dreaded word “retreat” it will be the insurance companies that assess the risk and drive the response. 

Tuesday started with a demonstration of the online mapping tool for redistricting. There were only four of us attending so we got a very special demonstration with all of our questions answered by Mark Numainville, City Clerk. The results of the 2020 census show shifts in population sufficient to require redrawing the city council districts. It is unlikely that the district borders will change very much, but I am set on submitting at least one if not more versions before the deadline on November 15th. 

There will be another demonstration on Thursday, October 21 at 5 pm. Check the Activist’s Calendar for the links. 

I missed the agenda committee and went to the minutes and audio-recording. The City Manager was given 60 days to write a companion report on the Adopt-a-Spot budget referral, which means it won’t be considered until next June instead of November. Scott Ferris will be the actual author of the companion report per his own statements, so soon we will see what he really thinks of the work of the Parks and Waterfront Commission. 

Councilmember Taplin pulled his proposed ordinance for punitive damages for unauthorized removal of coastal oaks and tree replacement requirements. 

I’ve been writing for weeks on ecosystems, biodiversity and the importance of oaks as keystone plants in supporting hundreds of species of insects. We should be choosing which plants go in the ground by how many species they support, not just drought tolerance. Although I have no inside information on what happened, my suspicion is that development pressure and objections from the city foresters are at the bottom of this, pushing Taplin’s withdrawal of an ordinance with real teeth. This brings us to 1915 Berryman, where the new owner plans to demolish the existing structure and construct an eleven-unit four-story building. Five coastal oaks are reported as having been removed without authorization and six remain. There is a petition to require protections of the remaining oaks during construction to be signed at 1231 Bonita (drop by to sign 10 – 5 pm Monday and 12 – 6 pm Tuesday). 

The evening city council meeting started 1 ½ hours late. The preceding closed session contained only two items, the hiring of the new fire chief which has already been announced and the evaluation of the City Manager. I certainly wish I knew what generated a discussion that pushed the council meeting to start at 7:30 pm. Objective building standards were put off until October 26^th along with several other items. 

It was Taplin and Kesarwani’s budget referral, item 20 on consent, for $500,000 for security cameras in the public right of way that was the subject of considerable public and council comment. We could hear the distress from the residents of District 2 who described hearing gunfire and supported the installation of cameras as the answer, convinced that if cameras are present, gunfire will cease. The opposition came from the public who were concerned about increasing surveillance, who and what entities will have access to recordings, how the recordings will be used and how long recordings will be retained. Harrison and Hahn tried to insert some controls regulating the surveillance, but Taplin and Kesarwani would not budge. 

Monitoring two city meetings running simultaneously doesn’t work very well, but I still tried on Wednesday to monitor the Homeless Commission and the Parks and Waterfront Commission. Peter Radu, the City Homeless Services Coordinator, was present for a Q&A with the commission on the enforcement of the sidewalk and RV ordinances. That took up nearly the entire meeting. The presentation with charts of the number of homeless participants in Roomkey (44), Horizon (33), Emergency Choice Vouchers (43) and Continuous Care Permanent Housing ( 381) was displayed at the meeting, but not posted for further review. There were more questions than answers. I left feeling that the homeless will soon be chased again from one place to another. 

At Parks, when item 14. Native Species Planting in Berkeley came up for discussion, Scott Ferris said there wasn’t a referral. Brennan Cox spoke, saying none of this was necessary as there are already laws requiring drought tolerant plants, native and “Native Adaptive.” https://www.cityofberkeley.info/Planning_and_Development/Energy_and_Sustainable_Development/Water_Efficient_Landscape.aspx If you have watched any of the Douglas Tallamy videos that I have posted week after week or read any of his books, then you would know that “Native Adaptive” means imported plants (often called exotics) from other parts of the world that can be drought tolerant, but do nothing to support native pollinators, native species. The answer is in Nature’s Best Hope A New Approach to Conservation that starts in your yard. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAzDP0wQI78 

Without milkweed for Monarch caterpillars to eat there are no Monarch butterflies. Without the pipevine plant there is no food for pipevine caterpillars and thus no native pipevine swallowtail butterflies. Monarchs may winter on the invasive eucalyptus, but when spring comes the Monarch lays its eggs on milkweed and the caterpillar will feed and grow and pupate and become a Monarch butterfly only if there is milkweed. This same relationship (insect and host plant) is repeated over and over in nature. Insects and plants have evolved together over thousands of years. Bringing in a drought tolerant plant from another part of the world doesn’t make it a host plant and calling the imported plant “Native Adaptive” doesn’t make it a host plant either. We need to fill our yards, gardens, open space with predominately native plants and no more than 30% as non-native that are native adaptive. 

There is nothing important to say about the Thursday Reimagining Public Safety meeting except watch next time. 

I happened to snag one of the last two copies at Pegasus of On Tyranny Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century Graphic Edition by Timothy Snyder illustrated by Nora Krug, 2021. The graphic edition is exceptional, giving us a condensed European history and pulling in Trump without ever printing his name. Being an artist in my limited free hours, I loved the illustrations. This is a book I will look at again and again. 

The other book I completed this week was Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee, 2019. After watching Frances Haugen on 60 Minutes, I was looking for more on Facebook. Too much of the book was McNamee writing about McNamee. Despite all that, it was a warning and in-depth probe into the very real damaging and dangerous impacts of Facebook into people’s lives, society, culture and governments. McNamee goes into detail about algorithms, Cambridge Analytica, and how personal data is used to hook users into staying on the platform and influencing behavior/outcomes. 

Once you start understanding the algorithms, how people are influenced, propagandized, frightened and angered, then it isn’t hard to follow the outcome of health officers, election officers and school board members being threatened. This is the poisonous side of a platform that allows families and friends to send pictures and greetings to each other. “Move Fast and Break Things” says it all. McNamee advises us to throw out Alexa and never use Facebook to sign on to anything. 

In closing, if you read the analysis of masks and respirators in Part 1 and Part 2 in CIDRAP then you will know why this is my go to source on COVID.h