Berkeley Oak Grove Controversy
The University of California, Berkeley oak grove controversy arose over the planned removal of a grove of oak trees in preparation for the construction of a new student athletic training center for the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley municipal law prohibits removing any coast live oak with a trunk larger than six inches within city boundaries, but city boundaries do not include the university and the university further claimed an exemption to the city law as a state agency. The university's actions sparked three lawsuits, as well as a tree sit-in that ran from December 2006 to September 2008, when the trees in question were finally cut down.
Read more about Berkeley Oak Grove Controversy: The Grove, Training Facility, Tree-sit, Court Cases, Reactions
Famous quotes containing the words berkeley, oak, grove and/or controversy:
“It would much conduce to the public benefit, if, instead of discouraging free-thinking, there was erected in the midst of this free country a dianoetic academy, or seminary for free-thinkers, provided with retired chambers, and galleries, and shady walks and groves, where, after seven years spent in silence and meditation, a man might commence a genuine free-thinker, and from that time forward, have license to think what he pleased, and a badge to distinguish him from counterfeits.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Worry and brown desk
Stain it by infusion. There aren’t enough tags at the end,
And the grove is blind, blossoming, but we are too porous to hear it.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
—Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)