Occupy the Farm: A New Candidate for Goldman Environmental Award

I live in Albany—on the outskirts of Berkeley—but I've lived in Berkeley since 1969, so whenever I hear the early morning sound of helicopters, I assume there's either been a major traffic accident or a revolution. Wednesday morning, before 7 a.m., a huge chopper appeared a few hundred feet above my kitchen window and right away, I knew time was up for Occupy the Farm.

On April 22, a few hundred people took wirecutters to a section of land in Albany called the Gill Tract, owned by the University of California, and planted one acre of crops, brought in two crates of chickens, and constructed an ersatz barn complete with library and bookshelves (these are Berkeley student-farmers, after all). UC has not been happy with the occupation and issued a statement this week calling the occupiers' demands for the right to farm one acre of the 15-acre lot .

It was obvious that UC police and helicopters would not be far behind.

On my way to the "farm," I ran into my friend Francesco Papalia, who ran and lost for Albany City Council and who just wrote a post for Albany Patch rather than attending the tedious city planning meetings to which he has sacrificed a major part of his existence. Francesco had a serious camera slung around his neck and, garbed in shorts and t-shirt with baseball cap, he could have been mistaken for an occupier himself.

When we arrived at the entrance to the farm, the gates were opened just enough to allow one or two people access. Someone explained to us that the UC Berkeley police were allowing people to go into the farm and remove flats of plants and gardening tools. When we got to the farm, an earnest young woman with a bandana who gave off the distinctive rancid whiff of a farm occupier told Francesco their plans: a group of occupiers were going to refuse to move from the last row of plants and would be subject to arrest. "Are you arrestable?" she asked Francesco.

We walked onto the farm without answering her, but Francesco said to me, "Could you believe it? I could have been a UC plant, not a farm sympathizer, and here she is telling me their plans for resistance."

Francesco, who says he is a committed Democrat, told me that he had engaged in protests before. "I was beaten up so badly at UC Berkeley during an apartheid divestment protest, I still have scars," he said. He also went to the massive antiwar protest in D.C. in the sixties.

It's hard not to sympathize with the desire of these kids to farm and share the bounty, even if the land they work on belongs to the public. But that's the point: UC is a public institution, and , who was at the scene Wednesday morning supporting the students, some of whom had studied with him, the occupiers' use of this land to grow and share food is part of the university's mission.

It's now 8:30 a.m. The helicopters are gone, and the land is laying fallow. Two hungry German shepherds are straining at the leash as they eye the foreclosed chickens cooped on the sidewalk on San Pablo Avenue, a major thoroughfare navigated by gold miners in the 1840's as they descended from the Sierra foothills, stripped of trees and soil by blasting equipment.  It seems strange that the great University of California, founded by the wealth of those very same mining and railroad barons who took out our forests and polluted our waterways, are now opposing the one acre dedicated to the renewal of life through public sustenance.

One footnote: Recently I attended the Goldman Environmental Awards, the world's largest monetary prize given to environmental activists on six populated continents. I would so much like to nominate as the recipients of next year's Goldman Environmental Award for taking the mission of the University of California seriously and acting courageously.

Correction: This story originally misidentified Papalia's political party affiliation. It has been updated with the appropriate information. Francesco says he is a committed Democrat.