November 2004 | Dock of the Bay
Off the Wall
Sonoma County’s graffiti ban hasn’t stopped the young artists in the country’s ArtStart program. Benches and concrete walls are their canvases of choice. For five years, artists age 15 to 20 have joined this innovative summer job-training program. Their work has given the community 100 uniquely painted park benches and eight large murals.
Liz Uribe and Elaine Butchart, two Santa Rosa high school parents, launched ArtStart; they modeled it on Chicago’s Gallery 37, a project begun in 1991 by the city’s first lady Maggie Daley. (The Chicago program, which includes performing as well as visual arts, has been replicated in many U.S. cities and abroad). Creating public art under the tutelage of professional artists, teens learn valuable life lessons while earning a wage and honing creative skills.
Uribe and Butchart enlisted city councilman Steve Rabinowitsh to help realize their vision. The timing was right. Santa Rosa was breaking ground on the Prince Greenway project, a quarter-mile, downtown walkway lining a restored creek. Officials invited ArtStart to adorn six benches with their designs. Since then, projects have been completed for Coddingtown shopping center, the Sonoma County Museum and Paradise Ridge Winery. Plans are also underway for a ceramic map mural in downtown Sebastopol, along with decorative, memorial benches.
Muralist Mario Uribe designed and heads the program. Each spring, between 35 and 45 Sonoma County students are selected to work in the five-week summer program. Instead of hanging out at the mall, they “hang out at the wall” and gain paid experience in all phases of artistic production: research, design, marketing, scale renderings, and client presentations. Most importantly, these young apprentices learn about public art and experience the pride of contributing to their community.
Foundations as well as municipal and private sources currently fund ArtStart which holds its second annual art auction in Santa Rosa’s Finley Community Center on November 18. The auction features 40 painted or sculpted wooden chairs. For more info, contact Executive Director, Marlene Ballaine at (707) 546-2345.
— Suzanne Saucy
Newman’s Own Renewables
Paul Newman has found a way to turn pasta sauce into political juice. Newman’s private foundation — fueled by profits from the sale of Newman’s Own® line of snacks and condiments — is set to launch ReNewUSA, a renewable-energy road-trip designed to force Washington to accelerate the country’s long-overdue transformation to sustainable energy solutions. On January 20, 2005 ReNewUSA’s caravan of state-of-the-art “clean fuel” vehicles will rev up alongside the Presidential Inauguration in Washington DC before heading out on a four-month tour, bringing the renewable message to 35 states. The entire effort is designed to send a clear message to the President and his Cabinet: “You have four months to shape a bold new national initiative to make our country’s commitment to clean energy a top priority.”
ReNewUSA plans a series of high-profile events to beat the hustings and harvest hundreds of thousands of signatures by April 22, 2005. The goal is to deliver one simple Earth Day message to Washington: “New approaches to energy and the environment are needed — and the tools, products and solutions are already available! The only thing missing is leadership from the White House and Capitol Hill. It’s time for politicians to step up to the challenge.”
To enlist as a ReNewUSA volunteer, a local event coordinator, a sponsor, or a donor, contact the campaign at: info@ReNewUSA.org, www.ReNewUSA.org. For details about Newman’s Own® giving, visit: www.learningtogive.org/papers/people/newman_paul.html
— Gordon Feller
Arnold Axes The Forest Bill
Back in 2000, Mendocino County’s Jackson State Forest was called “the forest nobody knew.” Today, it’s the forest everybody loves. Well, almost everybody. If you were a marbled murelet, you might be forgiven for calling California’s Republican governor “The Exterminator.” On September 15, “the Austrian Oak” (as the former movie muscleman was known in body-building circles) took a lethal swing at SB 1648, a bill designed to protect the 50,000-acre Jackson State Forest from a future of two-by-fours and fence posts.
What’s been going on inside Jackson “is not recognizable as truly sustainable forestry,” says Paul Hughes, Executive Director of Forests Forever. “It’s the industrial extraction of timber for money.”
Vince Taylor, who started the Campaign to Restore Jackson State Redwood Forest in 2000, called the governor’s action a “slap in the face” to the 4,000 citizens who wrote the Governator to plead for the protection of Mendocino’s redwood treasure. The environmental community was outraged by the Governor’s unexpected veto.
SB 1648 was one of those rare compromises that had the backing of both tree-huggers and timber barons. Supporters ranged from the Sierra Club to Mike Jani, head of the Mendocino Redwoods Company, the county’s largest logging firm.
Back when Taylor started his crusade, he expected to spend five years and $500,000 to save the Jackson Forest “for all future generations for less than $10 an acre — what a bargain!” After a long struggle, Taylor thought he was about to see his dream come true. Instead, it was “Hasta la vista, conifers.”
So what happened to a bill that was supported by the public, every state environmental group and the region’s largest timber company? As Taylor explains, the bill’s backers “underestimated the entrenched timber bureaucracy’s contempt for the public and [its] power to prevent reform.”
Schwarzenneger admitted as much when he explained that he vetoed the bill because it would have interfered with the ability of the California Department of Forestry (CDF) to raise money by toppling trees.
Since 2000, Taylor has had the timber industry tied in legal knots. He will now be going back to court to protect Jackson from “the state’s single-minded pursuit of timber profits.” Taylor’s legal team has vowed to keep filing court challenges until “the state recognizes the legitimate rights of the public to influence management of its redwood forest.”
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment,” famed nature photographer Ansel Adams once remarked. Vince Taylor now has his own aphorism: “Government exists to protect the interests of the powerful from the will of the people.”
For more on the Jackson State Forests campaign, visit: www.jacksonforest.com
— Gar Smith
Brower Youth Awards
In a place where “river” means concrete channel and “park” means a place to play soccer, Lily Dong, now 16, has insured that all children who grow up in Pasadena, CA will have exposure to what the land used to be like. For four years, she has led the campaign to protect the last remaining undeveloped native habitat in the area, which is set to open this year as a public park and education center.
Dong is one of six winners of the fifth annual Brower Youth Awards, conceived by Earth Island Institute to recognize and celebrate a new generation of leaders who are following the example of David Brower, the legendary environmental activist who died in 2000 at age 88. In September, all six honorees met for the awards ceremony in Berkeley, which was hosted by renowned activist Julia Butterfly Hill and Van Jones, a civil rights attorney and founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.
Dong is joined by five other rabble-rousers: Hannah McHardy, 18, Billy Parish, 22, Shadia Wood, 17, Eugene Pearson, 21, and Christina Wong, also 21. Between them, they have saved thousands of acres of old-growth forest, kept bulldozers from turning a rare gem of southern California desert into another mall, registered large numbers of pro-environment voters in swing states, successfully lobbied to refinance a bankrupt Superfund, mobilized students at over 100 colleges and universities to take action for cleaner energy policies and stood up to politicians and officials to create green building standards. As Van Jones noted, “These are not just the leaders of tomorrow. They are leaders right now.”
In her acceptance remarks, Dong explained her philosophy: “You can’t be afraid to talk to adults,” she says, “especially not politicians.” Shadia Wood, from upstate New York, certainly agrees with that. While lobbying to refinance the state’s bankrupt Superfund (created to finance the cleanup of highly toxic sites), Wood delivered a “Toxic Waste Cake” to Governor George Pataki, complete with waste barrels, oil pipelines and dying wildlife.
“I don’t think security or the secretary were too happy to see us young people participating in the democratic process,” Wood remembers. It seems to have made an impression, though, as Governor Pataki signed the bill this year.
“I try not to make too much trouble,” says Wood.
We certainly hope she’ll reconsider.
To find out more about the Brower Youth Awards and this year’s winners, visit www.earthisland.org/bya
—Mona Ausubel
Name the Bridges!
Why are none of our five major spans named after an important Bay Area personage? New York has the George Washington Bridge. LaSalle, Illinois has the Abraham Lincoln Bridge. Louisville, Kentucky and Jeffersonville, Indiana share the John F. Kennedy Bridge. San Francisco only celebrity span is inland — Third Street’s Lefty O’Doul Bridge.
Happily, we do have one bridge that bears the name of a true Bay Area hero. The new bridge (replacing one built in 1927) over the Carquinez Strait was named after a 95-year-old steel worker, Al Zampa, who worked on the original.
In the spirit of honoring local legends, bridging the generations, and consecrating landmarks for remarkable landsmen, Common Ground is announcing the Bay Area’s first Invitational Bridge Naming Competition. Whose names would you want to see on the Bay Bridges?
Chronicle cartoonist Phil Frank has already launched a campaign to rename the Oakland-San Francisco Bridge after Emperor Norton, Fog City’s most colorful eccentric. But that would shortchange Oakland’s good citizens, who might wish to rechristen it the Jack London Bridge. One compromise might be to name the two spans that meet at Yerba Buena Island after the West Coast’s most famous labor leader. What could be more fitting than renaming the two sections of the Bay Bridge the Harry Bridges’ Bridges?
What are your thoughts? Should the Richmond-San Rafael be renamed the David Brower Bridge? And the Hayward-San Mateo crossing, the Barry Bonds Bridge? Should the Dumbarton Bridge be re-dubbed the Janis Joplin Southern Crossing?
And how about The Owen Spann Span? The Wavy Gravy Grade? Or The Micky Hart Bypass?
Send your nominations to “Name the Bridges,” c/o Common Ground, 305 San Anselmo, Suite 313, CA 94960
—GS
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