Q: I can't live without my morning coffee, and though I want to do the right thing for the environment, the eco-friendly coffees cost significantly more than regular old Joe. Is there any real benefit to buying eco-friendly coffee? Which is the best: organic, shade grown, fair trade or bird friendly? And is there a budget-friendly source for eco-friendly coffee?
Asked by William Check, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. I hear you—I can’t live without my morning cup of coffee, either. And on those more lethargic days, an afternoon cup can be nice, too. While we’re on the subject, a pre-study-time evening cup sometimes gives me a helpful boost. You get the picture. The pursuit of coffee has become almost as central to the American lifestyle as the drive to get the most out of one’s dollar. But unfortunately, as Julie Craves of the website Coffee & Conservation says, “there’s no such thing as a ‘cheap’ cup of coffee.” Although it seems less expensive to the consumer, the production of “regular old Joe” carries serious costs to the environment, and to coffee farmers around the world. When I interviewed Craves, who is a bird ecologist at the University of Michigan, she explained, “For decades the price of coffee has been artificially low and, in the quest to keep coffee inexpensive, our environment has suffered in the form of deforestation [and in] farmers who cannot afford to send their children to school or raise their standard of living.” For coffee, it all comes down to overproduction. Farmers who cultivate bulk “commodity crops,” such as coffee, sugar and other products sold cheaply, make the most profit by producing as much of their crop as they can. Craves explained that this motivates clearing rainforest in order to plant more, as well as using pesticides, herbicides and chemical fertilizers to boost short-term production. The environment suffers in the long run—lost winter habitat in the tropics means fewer migratory songbirds in North America in the summer, for one thing—and the increased production pushes prices still lower. Over 25 million people directly depend on growing coffee for a living, and it provides additional support for another estimated 100 million people. Artificially low coffee prices, and the fact that coffee farmers only receive five to 10 percent of the retail price of a pound of coffee, makes this a very risky dependence for most of them. The environmental issues at hand are strongly linked with the social ones. Smaller-scale farmers tend to use more traditional agroforestry methods, growing coffee along with other crops in the shady forest understory. Agroforestry systems can act as refuges for plants, insects, and birds—and they are thought to prevent further deforestation. Coffee is grown in some of the world’s most biodiverse regions, making these benefits all the more important. But these more sustainable growing methods also produce a somewhat lower yield—and that makes competing with industrial-scale production very difficult indeed. Between 70 and 80 percent of coffee in the United States is sold by just four companies: Nestle, Kraft, Proctor and Gamble, and Sara Lee. These companies most often sell blends that contain a high proportion of robusta coffee, a hardier, but less flavorful bean than the traditional arabica coffee. Robusta coffee is better suited to plantation-style production, and thus often grown on deforested land and with pesticides and other harmful chemicals. Seeking out coffee made from arabica beans can be a first step toward making sure that it is less harmful to people and the planet—and more enjoyable to your palate. Seeking out coffee certified as eco-friendly or sustainable can help you be even more certain. Please see the Nitty-gritty for a breakdown of the different labels that can help guide your choice. But the short answer is, “bird-friendly” certification is your best bet for finding a truly sustainable cup of coffee. In the meantime, we are in what is often referred to as a “coffee crisis,” and it’s one that has nothing to do with dozing off in class. Right now, the simple pleasure—or for some of us, basic necessity—of a cup of coffee is causing serious harm to tropical environments and the people and wildlife that depend on them. Insisting on a more sustainable brew will cost you a little more—maybe a dollar or two for a pound of certified beans. But that extra money will do real good for birds, for people, and even for your palate. Originally published in Stanford Magazine's SAGE column: http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=44835 _ Q: I can't live without my morning coffee, and though I want to do the right thing for the environment, the eco-friendly coffees cost significantly more than regular old Joe. Is there any real benefit to buying eco-friendly coffee? Which is the best: organic, shade grown, fair trade or bird friendly? And is there a budget-friendly source for eco-friendly coffee?
Asked by William Check, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. Buying the right coffees can make a difference. But how to know what the right coffee is? As noted in the question, there’s certainly a plethora of labels out there, so it can be difficult to determine which one really is the best, or what to look for in a sustainable coffee. Here’s the breakdown of what those labels actually mean: Organic: The main criteria for organic certification are that farmers not use most synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers for at least three years. Potential benefits include less environmental contamination, and fewer farm accidents with toxic chemicals. Fair trade: The driving force behind fair trade certification is not environmental sustainability, but greater social equity. Producers are paid more for their product, in exchange for ensuring good working conditions and better living wages. The fair trade label is only available to cooperatives of small producers, not to individually owned farms. It has no explicit requirements for shade-grown or organic certifications; though such environmental benefits are often a side effect of smaller-scale production. Shade-grown: While coffee is traditionally grown in the shady forest understory, many coffee plantations now grow coffee under sunnier conditions in order to produce faster, higher yields. This leads to deforestation and a loss in biodiversity. The shade-grown label implies that the coffee was grown in the traditional way. However, there is no set definition of this—the coffee brands that market a shade-grown label have, for the most part, independently decided what that label actually means. Coffee is grown under the whole range of conditions, from traditional forest understory to full sun. The more closely the farm resembles a forest, the more sustainable it is. There are five typical shade categories that coffee is grown in: Rustic—traditional coffee agroforestry, where shade covers 70-100 percent of the land. Traditional polyculture—coffee is grown under both native and planted trees with 60-90 percent shade cover. Commercial polyculture—more trees are removed to make more room for coffee plants; shade is mostly provided by timber and fruit trees and covers 30-60 percent of the land. Shaded monoculture—coffee is grown under only a few, heavily pruned trees. Shade covers 10-30 percent of the ground. Full sun—complete lack of tree canopy and no shade cover. The five categories of shade in which coffee is grown. From “Biodiversity Conservation in Traditional Coffee Systems of Mexico.” 1999. Conservation Biology 13:11-21 Unfortunately, because there is no actual certification process for coffee that is marketed just as “shade-grown,” the brands that carry that label will require more investigation into what they individually mean by it. Bird-Friendly: This certification was developed by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC). The idea is that more sustainable agroforestry methods of coffee production provide a safe haven for threatened rainforest birds, include the many species that migrate to North America and Europe during the summer. It is the most stringent in its requirements. It is the only true “shade-grown” certification, requiring a minimum of 40 percent shade cover and eleven species of trees. Bird-friendly coffee must also be certified organic. As it has the strongest eco-standard, buying coffee with the “Bird-friendly” label is the simplest way to ensure that your money is going to the right places. Bird-friendly coffees are available at Whole Foods and some other specialty grocery stores, or you can order online from this list of distributors. Some of these distributors, such as Birds and Beans, actually sell beans that are cheaper than what you would pay for some of the packaged blends at specialty coffee chains such as Peet’s Coffee & Tea or Starbucks. Still, Bird-friendly coffee is not exactly widely available. When I checked at Whole Foods—apparently the only chain grocery store that sells coffee with the bird-friendly certification—only one of its 11 available brands carried the label. There were, however, plenty of other certified coffees on the shelf, with a lot of overlap in the certifications between them: seven of the brands they sold were labeled as organic, five as 100 percent arabica beans, and four as fair trade. Interestingly, none were explicitly marketed as shade grown. But keep in mind that the certification doesn’t always say it all. The certification process itself can be quite expensive, with producers typically paying the price. So some small-scale, sustainable farmers decide to bypass the process, even though they would qualify. According to Julie Craves, our sustainable coffee expert, “All of these certifications cost the farmers to obtain—not only in fees, but added labor and inputs.” That expense is only worth it if they can obtain a better price for their coffee. The certifications can seem pointless and are certainly confusing, but Craves says, “[The most important] thing people need to know is to not buy the big [cheaper] brands in the grocery stores.” Certifications can provide a useful shortcut to knowing that your coffee is more sustainable. But if certified coffee is not available to you, there are some other broad-brush indicators of more sustainable coffees: Country of Origin—Some countries still grow most of their coffee under shade and use few chemicals, while other countries have overall shifted to sun-tolerant coffee varieties. In general, the best coffee to support comes from Mexico, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Bolivia, Papua New Guinea, and Ethiopia. Source-countries to avoid include Costa Rica, Brazil, Colombia, and Vietnam. Type of Bean—As discussed in the essential answer, the least sustainable type of coffee production is typically of robusta beans (Coffea canephora), while traditional arabica beans (Coffea arabica) are generally more sustainable. Arabica coffee also tastes better, and is the bean of choice of many specialty roasters. Robusta coffee is a harsher, bitterer variety, with a higher caffeine content than arabica coffee. It is typically used in cheaper coffees or as a filler in blends. It grows better in the sun than arabica and thus tends to have higher yields. Blends typically don’t advertise that they contain robusta coffee, so look for coffees labeled 100% arabica—it’ll taste a lot better, too. Price—Unfortunately the final indicator of a sustainable coffee is indeed price. Cheap coffee, by and large, is detrimental to both the environment and to coffee farmers. But keep in mind, as Craves says, “even coffee grown to the highest certifications is only ‘expensive’ in relation to the unrealistically cheap coffee we are used to.” If you really want to save money on coffee, brew it at home instead of ordering it at a coffee shop. You can make about 20 awesome cups of coffee from a pound of sustainable beans. Even if it costs 12 dollars a pound, you’ll be paying maybe 60 cents a cup. You’ll never beat that at a café—and you’ll enjoy your savings all the more knowing that your coffee fix isn’t hurting people or the planet. Originally published in Stanford Magazine's SAGE column: http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=44838 _ _“This does not feel like Christmas,” I thought between forced gulps of hot chocolate. I looked over at my teammate Doug, hunkered next to me in our kitchenette dug out of the snow, nursing his frostbitten hands. My dad and the other climbers in our group, Wim and our guide Victor, huddled in our shelter trying to warm themselves. We were at the base of Mt. Vinson-Massif, at 16,050 feet the highest point in Antarctica. In December 2005, in the middle of my senior year of high school, between the anxieties of college applications and prom drama, my dad and I had somehow decided to journey down as far away from holiday cheer as we could possibly be to climb this peak.
I was a 17-year-old girl amongst middle-aged men, and while it wasn’t the first time I’d played that role—Mt. Vinson would become the sixth of the Seven Summits, the highest peak on each of the continents, that my dad and I would climb—I still felt an underlying compulsion to prove I was good enough to be there. The team had leisurely awoken that morning thinking we would follow a relatively easy plan. The goal was to tag High Camp and then come back down for the night, following the mountaineer’s maxim of acclimatization, “climb high, sleep low.” While normally it’s best get a pre-dawn start for a day of mountaineering, both in order to get the most out of daylight hours and to leave when it’s the coldest so that the ice is more solidly frozen in place, neither of those considerations mattered as much here: It never gets dark in December in Antarctica, and with the mercury hovering between 0 and –20 degrees Fahrenheit, we weren’t too worried about things thawing out. Still, when the sun was shining and the wind was calm it could feel deceptively warm. Even though it looked like we would have good weather for the day, I casually threw some extra mitts and my fluffiest down jacket into my pack, just in case, along with the bag of food I was carrying up to leave for when we returned for our summit bid. We rolled out of camp with the sun gleaming against the pristine snow that crunched underfoot as we made our way toward the base of the headwall. Once there, we made a stop to put on our crampons, spikes that attach to the bottom of mountaineering boots to help gain traction in the ice, and then began to ascend the face that would lead us to High Camp, situated in the col between Mt. Vinson and its neighbor, Mt. Shinn. Planting my ice axe into the incline ahead of me every couple of steps, I followed the slow but steady pace Victor set at the lead of the rope. I was giddy at the thought of being surrounded by the untouched peaks of this mystic land. Unconventional, perhaps, but not a bad way to spend Christmas day, I thought. Cold Hard Tracks Christmas back home was, of course, much different. The holiday season in Long Beach was announced by the appearance of colorful, tree-shaped light decorations floating out on the bay. Sometimes after the boat parade that went around Naples Island—for which we would deck out our kayaks, and ourselves, with festive strings of lights—I would paddle out to one of the platforms, just for the novelty of sitting on a floating Christmas decoration. My brother and I often spent Christmas in Brooklyn with my mom and grandma, where the holiday fixation was on appetizing fowl. Be it pheasant, quail or duck, my mom would spend the better part of a day strategizing the sequence of events that would yield the best feast. Though we always ended up with a delicious meal, things rarely went according to plan. Back on Vinson that dynamic was in full effect. After a couple of hours of climbing on Christmas morning, a smattering of clouds invaded the sky, blocking the warmth of the sun. We made a quick stop to adjust our layers to the lower temperature; while Victor and Wim each added a jacket, Doug and my dad said they thought they would be fine with what they had on. Feeling lazy about digging through my pack and readjusting, I convinced myself that my current garb would also suffice. Yet as we began to climb again, the wind picked up and I soon realized that the thin gloves I had on wouldn’t be enough after all. I tried to shake off the burning cold by whirling my arms around, hoping that increasing the blood flow would be sufficient. It wasn’t. Because we were traveling in standard glacial travel style, with a single rope connecting the team, if I stopped to get my thicker mitts out of my pack, everyone else would have to stop with me. I knew that in this sport, seemingly small errors like this could result in dire consequences. If I made everyone stop, they could grow cold themselves due to the lack of movement, starting a chain of events that could end with frostbite or a fall. As part of a small team whose members were out to push their limits, I agonized that there wasn’t room for my previous laziness. But my mind flashed on all of the things I wouldn’t be able to do, or at least not as well, if I lost my fingertips to frostbite. I may be a mountain climber here, I thought to myself, but back at home I needed those fingers if I wanted to keep playing the piano or the oboe or even be able to instant message with my friends. I convinced myself it was worth it to protect my hands. Completely embarrassed, I called out to Victor. “Why didn’t you change your gloves when I gave you the chance before?” he asked, clearly cross. But he stopped so I could throw off my pack and get out my mitts. However, my punishment wasn’t complete; they weren’t at the top of my pack as I’d been hoping. I grew increasingly frustrated as I rummaged for the elusive mitts while the rest of the team waited impatiently. Victor gruffly marched up to me to aid my search by holding the bag of food and the jacket that had been obstructing my path to the gloves. By the time I finally found them I was almost to the point of tears. I apologized but still felt I would have to do something to make up for my mistake. As we climbed on, the weather worsened. Once we got to High Camp we hastily made a cache for the gear we would leave up there and then started back down. Now in near-whiteout conditions, we were thoroughly miserable. A layer of the freshly blown snow accumulated in between some of our boots and crampons, reducing the purchase of our feet on the slope and causing us to stumble from time to time, pulling and catching each other by the rope that served as our lifeline. Peak Experience Mountaineering started for my dad, and thus for me, when he climbed Mt. Whitney with a friend from work. I can imagine my dad taking his last few steps to the summit: euphoric from the endorphins, adrenaline and altitude, hardly able to believe how far he had come since that morning as he looked down at the valleys below. Standing on top of a summit triggers just the right emotional cocktail to make it the most addictive experience I have known. After Whitney and some other California peaks, he felt ready to take on something bigger. He suggested climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro to his friends, but they couldn’t take the time off. So he brought it to the family dinner table one night. My older brother and my stepmom both reasonably declined. But, more than climbing a mountain, the thought of going to Africa seemed incredibly exotic and exciting to me. As an animal-lover, I reasoned that if I climbed Kilimanjaro with him, which I knew nothing about, I could probably convince him to take me on a short safari afterward. “Yeah, I’ll go!” It came out without much thought, unknowingly launching the biggest obsession of my teenage years. Eventually, that obsession would turn into a world record. After success on Vinson, my dad and I only had one peak left to complete our Seven Summits quest: Mt. Everest. I took a gap year before college to train and prepare, and we reached the summit of Everest that spring, making me, at the age of 18, the youngest person at that time to have climbed the Seven Summits, and the first to climb them all with her dad. I felt depleted when we got back to camp after our long Christmas day on Vinson; it took all of my willpower to help out with the chores of collecting snow to melt for water and cooking the dinner I was too tired to eat. As I laboriously cut up garlic with my pocketknife to throw in with the frozen salmon patties—our holiday dinner—Victor looked at me and said, “I bet you’ve never had a Christmas like that before, have you?” I wearily shook my head. Smirking, he added, “Somehow I don’t think it’ll be the last, either.” After dinner I used the satellite phone to call my mom and brother. I was so exhausted, and there was such a lag in the connection between us, that it was hard to communicate anything at all. Even if I didn’t really know what I was supposed to say, how I could possibly describe what it was like to be there right then, I liked the thought of them being able to hear me. I tried to imagine them sitting cozily around a tree, well fed and warm and protected from the chilly streets of New York, as I looked across the expanse of ice in front of me that led to the bottom of the earth. My dad and I then called my stepmom, younger brother and sister back in California. She asked how we liked our presents—we’d forgotten! Before she’d left us at the airport, she had handed my dad and me each a small package, which we’d stashed away in our sleeping bags. We hung up the phone, got into our tent and opened them. I uncovered a pair of earrings, two small silver hoops. They seemed so out of place here, but I looked forward to going back to my other life, where I could envision wearing them. Mountain High A day or two later we returned to High Camp, the point of departure for our summit bid. I had still not recovered from our hard Christmas day and was nauseated from the altitude. After we’d set up a tent, but before we’d finished all the chores of setting up camp—most importantly, cutting out blocks of ice to build into a wall for protection from the wind—Victor suggested I get inside my sleeping bag to boil some water for tea while the rest of the team continued working. A bit surprised at getting out of the dirty work but not about to complain, I obeyed. I had never loved my sleeping bag more than I did when I crawled into it then. “You were moving quite slowly—I think you were getting a bit hypothermic,” Victor said later, explaining why he had let me off easy. When we woke up the next morning, Victor suggested we start up toward the summit: The weather was good, for now, and we had increasingly little time before we had to be back at basecamp in order to get our ride back out. If we missed it, we would most likely have to stay an extra two weeks. He promised that if we felt we weren’t strong enough, we would turn around and rest and try again the next day. I thought maybe I would feel better once we’d gotten started, but pretty quickly I became sure that I wasn’t going to make it. I felt on the verge of vomiting with every step. But I kept marching along, distracting myself with an internal debate over whether I had yet reached the point at which I should just tell the team I needed to turn back around. I would pick out an objective just within sight—some distinctive rock or feature of ice—and tell myself that all I needed to do was make it there, that then I could decide whether or not I wanted to keep going. But upon reaching every target, I would just decide to postpone the decision again by picking out a new one. My whole existence was pared down to figuring out ways to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I wasn’t really sure right then why it was actually so important that I did, but I figured that if a previous self had been willing to go through all of the pain and effort this mountain had required so far, then it wasn’t something I should give up on easily. Far sooner than I expected, Victor told us that we were probably halfway there. We continued on. We did make it to the summit that day. I trudged up, planted my ice axe into the ground, and rested my forehead on it. My dad came over and let me lean on him to rest instead. "Good job, honey-bear," was all he could say as I quietly cried into his shoulder. Originally published in the Santa Cruz Weekly and the North Bay Bohemian: http://www.santacruz.com/news/2011/12/20/holiday_on_ice http://www.bohemian.com/northbay/holiday-on-ice/Content?oid=2201682 After the eviction of Occupy Santa Cruz last week, some questions loom large: Is this the end of the protest? Without the encampment, will there be further action advancing the movement’s ideals? Have they even figured out, specifically, what those ideals are yet?
The protestors gathered on the courthouse steps after the General Assembly on Sunday expressed little doubt that, although it’s suffered a blow, Occupy Santa Cruz will continue on. “The camp was for the Occupy protestors to have a 24–hour protest,” Andre Llana says. Given that the purpose of activism was largely diluted toward the end of the camp’s existence, as it turned increasingly away from a platform for protest and into a residence for Santa Cruz’s transient and homeless community, the eviction of the camp may even have done the political focus some good. “All the blowout of the camp did was prove who’s really here for the protest and who’s not,” Llana says. “The camp has been cleared out, but we’re still having General Assemblies. We’re just regrouping,” says protestor Isaac Collins. Occupy Santa Cruz is now in the same position as most of the other Occupy protests around the country. Kalle Lasn, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Adbusters Magazine and a driving force behind the start of the national movement, told Santa Cruz Weekly that he thinks the protest, rather than fizzling out, is now in its second phase. “Phase one of this movement was very monolithic,” he says. “It was one wonderful occupation without demands, without leaders, and it had a certain magic to it that really worked. Now that’s over and no one really knows what will happen.” But, he continues, “I think it’ll fracture into a myriad of projects of different kinds. I don’t think there’s any clarity of what’s going to happen in the future, but I do think this movement will have long legs.” One question the movement now faces is to what degree it will focus on physical space. In Santa Cruz in the hours and days following the Dec. 8 sweep of San Lorenzo Park, some protesters turned their energy toward an effort to restore a small vacant lot at Spruce and Pacific into a community garden. Activist Andy Moscowitz, who’s served as the local protest’s spokesperson, says the biggest thing to come out of Occupy Santa Cruz is “a consciousness as to how we use our space.” But, he adds, “I think the concepts that have come out of the Occupy movement are spreading into people’s awareness and now people are running with them in a million different directions. It’s really diffuse through everything right now.” Last Friday over the hill, Stanford University took an intellectual approach to the diffuse ideas of the Occupy movement during the “Occupy the Future” event, organized by Stanford professors. Some speakers, like Michele Barry, dean of global health, were specific about directions the Occupy movement could take. “The widening gap between health and equity needs to be upfront and center,” Barry said. “We all need to send a message to Congress when the Affordable Care Act is quietly gutted, as it was a few weeks ago when the House of Representatives took out all of the preventative health care services in the act.” Others, like former Assemblymember Sally Lieber, more generally sought to keep the ethos of the movement alive in spite of the loss of the encampments. “It’s not just about occupying a physical space. It’s about occupying the intellectual space, occupying the spiritual space,” she says. “Occupy whatever you find is juicy to you.” As far as the issues that Occupy Santa Cruz finds juicy, given the action of taking over the vacant building on River Street and a recent letter from the General Assembly to the County Board of Supervisors, the group seems to be developing a focus on foreclosures and evictions. This is an emphasis that Occupy protestor Jay Cambell thinks is likely to continue. “The foreclosed homes aspect is very important,” he says. “This week we’re going to the supervisors and to city council and we’re going to bring some individuals who have some very rich stories. By showing the human side of the foreclosures, we hope to sway some hearts and minds and at least get the issue of improper foreclosures looked at.” Ultimately, while splinter groups may now decide to take on a variety of issues and approaches, Kalle thinks there is still a cohesive element to the national, if not international, protests that have been sparked by Occupy Wall Street. “All the young people know that their future doesn’t compute, that their lives are going to be full of political, economic and ecological crisis—that if they don’t stand up, they won’t have a future,” he says. “That’s what keeps the movement together. We don’t need a park to keep it focused. “I think the fact that you in Santa Cruz are part of millions of young people around the world fighting for a global future is a very powerful idea.” Originally published in the Santa Cruz Weekly: http://www.santacruz.com/news/2011/12/13/is_occupy_finished_ There’s a good reason so many chipper holidays fall in the height of winter: Spreading goodwill and cheer is the social antidote to the winter blues brought on by shorter days and colder temperatures. While we here in the Golden State come in for merciless ribbing from our fellow Americans if we’re caught complaining—after all, diehards still have the chance to surf in the morning or go hiking in the afternoon even at this time of the year—opportunities to soak up those mood-lifting rays of vitamin D these winter months pale in comparison to what we get in the summer.
Which is to say that if you’ve got a friend or loved one who’s hiding under the covers, or just stuck in a rut, sometimes a little push to get out there and test the limits of the old comfort zone can be the best thing for a person. Luckily, there are plenty of places locally that provide activities for the intrepid, from skydiving to ballroom dancing, so a gift certificate may be just the thing. Stand Up Paddle Boarding and Kayaking It’s dispiriting how quickly the novelty of living in a beach town can wear off; newcomers arrive imagining how good for the soul it’ll be to see the ocean each and every day, only to lose that initiative within the first month. Getting out on the water and touring the bay on a stand up paddle board or kayak with the Kayak Connection (413 Lake Ave., #3, Santa Cruz; 831.479.1121) may help reinvigorate that inspiring ocean connection. Covewater Paddle Surf (726 Water St., Santa Cruz; 831.600.7230), the local headquarters for all things stand-up paddle, has a two-hour introductory lesson special that includes photos of the proud paddler. Scuba Diving Go deep—up to 40 feet deeper—by giving a PADI open water scuba certification class at Adventure Sports Unlimited (303 Potrero St. #15, Santa Cruz; 831.458.3648). After drifting down into a whole new world, fledgling divers will resurface with a brightened appreciation for this landlocked one. Sky Diving Want to deliver an even bigger kick? Rather than floating down to great depths, give the gift of a fall from great heights with Skydive Surfcity (160 Aviation Way, Watsonville; 831.435.5169). Strapping onto the back of one of their frequent fliers in a tandem dive one way to change perspective while soaring over spectacular ocean views. Rock Climbing Sometimes the struggle up is actually more rewarding than the free fall down. Scaling walls with the gift of a membership at Pacific Edge Climbing Gym (104 Bronson St. #12, Santa Cruz; 831.454.9254) can be like a vertical dance that requires a fulfilling synthesis of balance, strength, flexibility and yogic mental control. Ballroom Dancing For those who may be into the dance but not the heights, let them trade in the belay partner for a tango partner with the gift of a class at Palomar Ballroom (1344 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz; 831.426.1221). Language Classes If this present is really just an excuse to play matchmaker with the recipient and that hot Argentinean, keep in mind that getting him or her to the next level may require more than just fancy footwork. A Spanish language class at Aux 3 Pommes (765 Cedar St., Suite 102, Santa Cruz; 831.421.0898) might prove to be more fruitful. Originally published in the Santa Cruz Weekly: http://www.santacruz.com/news/2011/12/14/throw_mama_from_a_plane_last_minute_gift_guide _ The Occupy encampment in San Lorenzo Park had obviously thinned out by 5pm on Wednesday, the stated deadline for the eviction notice that police issued on Monday. A couple dozen onlookers stood around the periphery of the camp, some linking arms in solidarity, some shaking their heads in dismay. A few policemen strolled around them—a stark contrast to the scene around 7am this morning, when about 90 police officers in riot gear cleared out the approximately 20 tents and people who had stayed the night. While action escalated this morning, the scene at the camp was generally calm yesterday evening. Most who remained in the center of camp sifted through their possessions with varying degrees of haste, or wandered through the remaining 30-some tents while listlessly picking up trash or just singing and talking.
When asked for comment, one of the more purposeful occupiers brusquely replied, clearly frustrated, “No, I’m busy. You can help pick up trash if you want, but I’m not going to talk. If you’re going to be down here, you have to help out.” Occupier “Tall Mark,” who said he had been at the camp as a homeless person with nowhere else to stay, stood and watched the scene going on around him. “The threat is to have everything taken away, all the tents and everything, and give tickets, I guess,” he said. He noted that most people had packed up earlier that morning, and that those who were still there were homeless, like him, with no clear place to move to. “Honey,” who is also homeless, said she joined the camp after she had been sleeping on the beach and had been told to move. “I’m not occupying anything by myself,” she said. “I didn’t even know Occupy was going on,” she heartily laughs, “until I asked what was going on for real.” A nearby man added, “As homeless, we’re powerless. We just try to stay out of the way, that’s all we try to do. I’ve got a backpack and a sleeping bag and I just go wherever, and lay wherever. We’re gonna keep moving.” He paused, adding “But it sucks, you always gotta keep moving, man. It’s nice to be able to relax.” Activist Andy Moskowitz stood and solemnly watched. “I camped out regularly, but I’m one of the people fortunate to have other places to sleep,” he said. “I wish I could say the same was true for other people. This has been a place of comfort for those who had not had comfort.” Morning Roust This morning drama on the scene heightened when the police arrived just after 7am. Dale Eugene Kenville, who was there to watch the scene unfold, said, “They came down in riot gear, closed off the bridge that came down to this area and announced, ‘You have one minute to comply, to get your gear and walk away, or you’re going to jail.’” The Sentinel reports that officers proceeded to clear out the camp at 7:45am by dismantling tents—including the iconic teepee—and carrying away whatever other sundry posessions were left. Although most of the people who stayed the night quickly left once police arrived to finalize the eviction, a few people pushed back, ending up in six arrests, according to the Sentinel. Those arrested included both Santa Cruz county residents and transients. At 10am several people were still gathered around the camp, watching the last of the police’s cleanup effort as they raked up the trash still left on the ground. While some of those gathered were campers trying to figure out their next move, others were there purely for the spectacle. “I’ve never seen my tax dollars spent in a better fashion,“ said onlooker Tim South sarcastically. “It was one thing when it started out as the Occupiers out on the courthouse, but when they started putting tents out down here, it was just an excuse for homeless people to have a free place to stay.” With a grimace he added, “I want to know what Occupier is going to refund me, who’s going to reimburse me for my tax dollars cleaning up their crap.” Originally published in the Santa Cruz Weekly: http://www.santacruz.com/news/2011/12/08/police_roust_occupy_santa_cruz_camp _ |
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