Have You Hugged Your Tree Today?
Neumayr, George
E nvironmental activist John Quigley spent November and December perched in an oak tree near Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles. Taking tree hugging to a new level, Quigley commandeered the old oak...
...Quigley enjoyed an entourage of hippie handlers, standing at the ready to hoist him brownies and other goodies left by visitors...
...Instead, he was humored by pots and businessmen worried about bad PR and unruly environmentalists...
...Ed Begley, Jr., who once participated in a Whole Earth Festival with Quigley, not only visited the tree, but scaled it as well...
...By the way, in 2001, Quigley, then executive director of Earth Day, criticized ABC's John Stossel for asking "leading questions" to children who had listened to one of Quigley's propagandistic talks on solar energy...
...So I put that aside and just climbed on up...
...Childish conduct did make Quigley popular with local school children—they were eager to find out where and how he went to the bathroom...
...He seemed more a media-conscious opportunist than a modern-day Muir...
...And "Old Glory...
...He said that he was studying the lives and works of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau...
...a bare-chested man in overalls wandered near a makeshift "tree museum?' The site resembled less a nature preserve than a festival of left-wing politics...
...News and World Report story, also provides boot camp for tree huggers, teaching "PR for trees...
...Turning public policy over to professional pantheists is undoubtedly endangering California...
...If nothing else, Quigley has succeeded inpopularizing tree sitting in Southern California...
...Photographers also watched attentively as Quigley received an arboreal visit from his girlfriend...
...Santa Clarita residents might agree.Along with Quigley's tree sitting came overnight camping, trash, and noise...
...Santa Clarita Tree Sitter Breaks Molar," reported the United Kingdom's Guardian...
...But Gandhi never had a cell phone or the services of a tree-climbing dentist who visited in December, after Quigley busted a molar on an energy bar...
...Excessive environmentalism caused the state's electricity crisis by making Sacramento politicians skittish about building power plants...
...he wanted to know if Quigley was "communicating" with the tree...
...I'm not good with heights," he said, "but it was very important...
...Meanwhile, Valley Crest Tree, a tree relocation company, has become the target of environmentalist threats...
...But for the professionalized environmental movement—more Club Sierra than Sierra Club, as one wag said to the Sacramento Bee—every tree and animal is endangered, save the human one...
...But this authentic local volunteer doesn't even live in the area, and almost surely hadn't laid eyes on "Old Glory" until friends alerted him to its pending removal...
...Quigley's ground crew handed out a form letter, suggesting that people write Los Angeles County supervisor Michael Antonovich and say, "You're fighting Gandhi, man...
...Instead of a house call, this is a tree call," Dr...
...Wanting to return to her and Pacific Palisades, Quigley announced in January that he was coming down...
...California is not exactly short of old oak trees...
...In 1998, he helped produce "Awakening" at the 1998 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Buenos Aires, featuring the "vertical dance troupe" Project Bandaloop rappelling down the National Law University Library building...
...A pensive Rene Russo visited "Old Glory" with her daughter...
...Within days, the New York Times and other prominent media outlets had dispatched reporters to Santa Clarita to cover the fate of "Old Glory," a sympathy-inducing name enviros quickly concocted for a tree few had ever visited before the controversy began...
...Galvanized by Quigley's "Oak Tree activism?' environmentalists are now opposing the Newhall Land'& Farming Co.'s plans for a 21,600-home subdivision a few miles from "Old Glory...
...The survival of the old oak is apparently a vital issue to the Salvadoran community...
...Now it's contributing to California's tight and outrageously expensive housing, as well as its crummy roads and highways...
...He has also been a respected figure in the Berkeley-based Ruckus Society...
...Peace signs had been put up, along with a flag of El Salvador...
...She had a little more room to move around, but the concept of being up in a tree for two years is just beyond [comprehension]," Quigley said...
...Quigley didn't prove to have the staying power of Julia "Butterfly" Hill, who resided in a Northern California redwood for two years...
...A few days after climbing up the tree, for example, he climbed down to vote in the November elections...
...CNN deemed the occasion worthy of a report...
...Taking tree hugging to a new level, Quigley commandeered the old oak as a protest against John Laing Homes, a developer with plans to cut down the tree as part of county-ordered road widening for a new housing development...
...On my visit, even passing policemen were encouraging Quigley's protest...
...Indulging such left-wing pranks is the media's forte...
...Quigley interrupted in mid-questioning to inquire "what publication" the person—me—standing behind him represented...
...This tree was here before the Pilgrims came...
...He warily sized up visiting journalists as he spoke to them via walkie-talkie...
...News of Quigley's energy-bar mishap even reached England...
...He hoped to pass the baton to another tree sitter, but on January 10 the developer used a judge's court order to evict him from the tree...
...We want people to wonder, 'Why are those people risking their lives to do this?'" The Ruckus Society, according to a 1997 U.S...
...Quigley is a "special event producer" and "environmental educator" from posh Pacific Palisades...
...Of course no environmentalist protest is complete without the requisite visit of Hollywood actors...
...Quigley's tree sitting had been intermittent anyway...
...Quigley certainly succeeded in putting John Laing Homes, well, up a tree...
...The press reported that he "overcame his fear of heights" to make a statement...
...He read mythology as he hung out in the branches...
...Carefully crafting his image as a simple student of nature—rather than a ringer for the environmentalist movement—Quigley spoke of residing in "Old Glory" with pens, paper, and books...
...There's a certain consciousness to it, a certain wisdom?' Quigley is something of an environmentalist performance artist...
...Should their agitprop succeed, cowed Californians may wake up and find the only housing available to them is in those trees...
...While I was there, Starbucks cups littered the grounds...
...The Times discerned in Quigley's tree sitting an important statement about "suburban sprawl?' Quigley, forty-two, presented his protest to credulous reporters as a purely local event...
...Before me in the walkie-talkie press line was a young documentary producer working with Quigley...
...It has saved other oak trees it could have removed, created an oak tree park, and dedicated eighty-one acres of woodlands to the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy...
...We're taking protests to the very edge," he told a reporter as he helped teach Ruckus Society demonstrators how to unveil a banner from a six-story scaffold...
...The dignified Muir thought that those who degrade human nature through libertinism would degrade Mother Nature as well...
...California's weakness for public nuisances like Quigley blinds it to these legitimate problems...
...Naturally, Quigley's ludicrous stunt proved effective...
...He denies that he is a hired tree sitter, but acknowledges that the Santa Clarita Organization for Planning the Environment (SCOPE) turned to him because of "his skills?' Quigley's tree-sitting resume includes several weeks in a western hemlock in Canada, which he described to a reporter in 1997 as the "most perfect relationship of my life...
...Howard "Twilly" Cannon, one of its founders, was admirably frank in describing its modus operandi: "You create symbols, then manipulate them so the public sees things the way we want them to...
...Pitted as big bad developer against idealistic protester, the company has received much grief, despite offering to relocate the tree at substantial expense...
...She was keeping me alive," he said...
...In addition to his expertise in environmentalist performance art, Quigley brings along his good contacts in the celebrity community...
...But when I visited "Old Glory" in early December, Quigley was busy fielding calls on his cell phone...
...Were John Muir alive today, he wouldn't have joined this environmentalist gang...
...Governor Gray Davis, under the influence of environmentalists, vowed not to build any new highways, then reversed himself after aides pointed out the inherent lunacy of such a moratorium for a traffic-clogged state...
...I was keeping her alive...
...Quigley should have been arrested on day one of his protest...
...The Los Angeles NBC affiliate reported in early January that local environmentalists were thinking about lashing themselves to small street trees slated for removal in El Segundo, forty miles away...
...And Club Sierra won't stop there...
...Human habitation is of no consequence to people who communicate with trees...
...15...
...He told them he had rigged up a pulley system to lower down containers of his excrement and urine...
...Ana Michel told CNN...
Vol. 36 • January 2003 • No. 1
