Starting in August, as many as 500,000 trees in the East Bay hills will be clearcut, and thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals made by Monsanto and Dow will be dumped on their stumps.
Please sign the petition to tell Oakland to halt this plan!
This plan will radically transform the character and appearance of the hills while causing great animal suffering, including the decimation of habitat vital to several endangered species. The environment in which they live will be eliminated, and these animals and multitudes of others will be displaced or forced to live in toxic waste dumps filled with chemicals that will poison them and their food and water supply. Human residents, visitors and their pets in the region will likewise be exposed to hazardous chemicals, while the idyllic setting upon which the property values of Oakland homeowners depend will be seriously degraded.
When Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf was running for office, she refused to meet with opponents of this plan.
The toxic herbicides are to be applied twice a year, every year, for a minimum of 10 years and possibly longer.
Some of these herbicides have been found to cause DNA and chromosomal damage in human cells and increase the risk of Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. They cause severe birth defects when tested on poor animals, including rats born with their brains outside their skulls, to harm birds and aquatic species and to damage the kidneys, liver and the blood of dogs, the latter being an issue of particular concern to the legions of dog walkers which regularly visit our public parks.
This will be the largest clear-cutting in the Bay Area in 100 years! Please sign the petition to tell Oakland to halt this plan!
It is irresponsible to spend
$4.6M in taxpayer money to destroy our cherished forests and poison residents, especially given the pressing needs facing Oakland which go unfunded.
Although fire abatement is the claimed rationale for this clear cutting plan, it will actually
increase the risk of fire. Healthy trees are to be reduced to highly-combustible mulch piles, and by converting forests to grassland and brush, it will replicate throughout the hills the precise environment in which previous fires have ignited.
The public is overwhelmingly opposed to this plan (90% of the 13,000 comments received by FEMA expressed opposition) .
Elected officials should consider the considerable public anger and backlash which will result when the plan commences, and hills residents and visitors witness firsthand the transformation of their beautiful, beloved forests to a sea of desiccated tree stumps, mulch and haphazardly scattered logs.
Please sign the petition to tell Oakland not to clear cut half a million trees!
