The Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project provides in-depth analysis and information about the global ecological crisis and facilitates strategic planning for action among leading organizers from urban Bay Area organizations working for economic and racial justice in communities of color.

Workshops & Strategy Retreats

Facilitating workshops, strategy sessions, and retreats to develop a shared analysis of the ecological crisis and its impacts on urban communities of color.

Resilience-Based Organizing

Supporting grassroots and community-based organizations in implementing new strategies based on building community resilience.

Earth Skills

Interactive, land-based workshops designed to help us restore and manage our relationship to the resources that meet our basic needs.

Slides, Shocks and Shifts: Bay Area 2030

Developing tools and curriculum to support strategic movement building for ecological justice, based on the future Bay Area context.

Occupy the Farm – Take Back the Gill Tract Needs Your Support!

(photo credit: Subconscious Collective)

On Earth Day 2012, Occupy the Farm: Take Back the Tract launched with an ongoing mass act of moral obedience – farming. People from all walks of life, including families, elders, neighbors and students, occupied the last best agricultural soil in the urbanized East Bay, known as the Gill Tract. Trucks were waiting there with 10,000 seedlings, compost, hay, roto-tillers and tools.

WAYS YOU CAN SUPPORT OCCUPY THE FARM

• Sign the online petition:  Show the UC Berkeley administration that you support the vision of Occupy the Farm – and call on them to stop police action so that the farmers may continue to farm!  Click here for the petition.

• If you are an organization or group that wants to support: Endorse the collective letter of support, being signed by organizations, alliances and groups nation-wide. To sign on, please emailoccupythefarmletter@gmail.com.  

• Show up & work hard: Everyone who believes that the best use of farmland is farming – please join in! Our work is our resistance, and the fruit of our labor creates our collective resilience.
  The Farm is located in Albany, on the corner of San Pablo Ave and Marin Ave.

• Take more land, wherever you live: Wherever community needs are not being fulfilled and traditional avenues of change have failed, take space at the required scale to meet these needs. Occupy. Make Productive. Contest the Title.   

• Stay updated:
  –Twitter: @OccupyFarm
  –Facebook: Occupy the Farm –Sign up for text message alerts if you’re local: Text “gilltractfarm” to 41411.
  –Email list: send a message toGillTractFarm@riseup.net with “listserve” in the subject line to be added to the email list.

• Donate to the Farm: Click here to find a link to their online donations page, as well as a current list of needed materials.

• Learn more: www.OccupyTheFarm.org

[Climate Connections] A Breath of Fresh Air for the Occupy Movement: How Occupy the Farm Hopes to Reclaim the Commons

By Jeff Conant, Global Justice Ecology Project

Reposted from climate-connections.org – visit Climate Connections for great up-to-date articles and updates on the Gill Tract.

When hundreds of people took up the banner of “Occupy the Farm” on April 22nd and laid claim to a patch of urban farmland owned by UC Berkeley, it was not the first time this 5-acre parcel had become the flashpoint of a struggle between the University and local communities. But it was the first time anyone had done something as brash as simply taking the land without asking.

On that sunny Sunday two weeks ago, an ad-hoc band of UC alumni, urban farming proponents, families, and veteran Occupy activists ended an Earth Day parade by arriving at the site, cutting the lock and pitching in to till and plant 3/4 of an acre of guerilla farm. At least in the short term, the action worked fantastically well. Fears of a police raid the first night went unfulfilled. Rather than sending its well-appointed riot squads to dismantle the trespass, the UC took the tack of firing up its public relations machine (and cutting off water to the site). Media, from Alternet to ABC to Forbes, picked up the story. Occupiers took the high road by engaging in direct dialogue with faculty, students, and administrators. Two weeks later, the land continues to be occupied – and, more importantly, farmed.

Now, with several UC research teams needing to get their crops in the ground by mid-May, and the University unwilling to meet the demands of the Gill Tract Farmers Collective, as the group working the land calls itself, confrontation seems imminent. Whether or not the Farmers manage to stay, the experiment is a bold, largely unprecedented act of reclaiming the Commons in the most immediate sense – taking land out of private speculation and putting it into community use.

The organizers say the UC-owned Gill tract is significant not only because it is the last and best agricultural land in the East Bay, but because the struggle over this land is tied to the struggle to keep the public university serving the public interest. Over the last decade, through investments by Novartis, BP and other corporations, the University of California has become increasingly captured by private interests, which have come to control its research agenda and its land use policy. Now, Occupy the Farm says, the public is taking it back.

In the university’s first published response to the Occupiers, on April 27, Vice-Chancellor and Provost George Breslauer wrote, “We take issue with the protesters’ approach to property rights. By their logic they should be able to seize what they want if, in their minds, they have a better idea of how to use it.”

Blunt as the Vice-Chancellor’s thrust was, he hit on a key point: the occupiers do believe they have a better idea of how to use the land than the UC. And, once concerns about power, money, private property, and other systemic irritations are set aside, their case is perfectly rational. In a revolutionary sense, that is.

Without doubt there are very real issues to wrestle with about what the land is currently used for, whose interests are served by it, whose interests should beserved by it, and how such decisions are best arbited. In the best democratic spirit, the bold action of the Occupiers forces these questions to the foreground. In a system dominated by private property, where possession is nine-tenths of the law, these decisions are usually made simple, by Money and Power. But imagine a system where we relax the hold that the Rule of Law has over public property, we unclench the Invisible Hand of the Market that governs private property, and we revive a third option – one with a long and largely invisible tradition: the Collective Stewardship of the Commons.

Farmland is for Farming

The principle motto taken up by the Gill Tract Farmers Collective is “Farmland is for farming.” The slogan echoes the visionary cry for agrarian reform that kicked off the Mexican Revolution – the first agrarian revolution of the Twentieth Century – when Emiliano Zapata set forth the basic Commons principle, “La tierra para quien la trabaja” – the land is for the people who work it.

Read more »

Occupy the Farm Activists Reclaim Prime Urban Agricultural Land in SF Bay Area

(Photo credit: Dave Id/indybay.org — see more photos at Indybay here.)

[press release from takebackthetract.com]

(Albany, Calif.), April 22, 2012 – Occupy the Farm, a coalition of local residents, farmers, students, researchers, and activists are planting over 15,000 seedlings at the Gill Tract, the last remaining 10 acres of Class I agricultural soil in the urbanized East Bay area. The Gill Tract is public land administered by the University of California, which plans to sell it to private developers.

For decades the UC has thwarted attempts by community members to transform the site for urban sustainable agriculture and hands-on education. With deliberate disregard for public interest, the University administrators plan to pave over this prime agricultural soil for commercial retail space, a Whole Foods, and a parking lot.

“For ten years people in Albany have tried to turn the Gill Tract into an Urban Farm and a more open space for the community. The people in the Bay Area deserve to use this treasure of land for an urban farm to help secure the future of our children,” explains Jackie Hermes-Fletcher, an Albany resident and public school teacher for 38 years.

Occupy the Farm seeks to address structural problems with health and inequalities in the Bay Area that stem from communities’ lack of access to food and land. Today’s action reclaims the Gill Tract to demonstrate and exercise the peoples’ right to use public space for the public good. This farm will serve as a hub for urban agriculture, a healthy and affordable food source for Bay Area residents and an educational center.

“Every piece of uncontaminated urban land needs to be farmed if we are to reclaim control over how food is grown, where it comes from, and who it goes to,” says Anya Kamenskaya, UC Berkeley alum and educator of urban agriculture. “We can farm underutilized spaces such as these to create alternatives to the corporate control of our food system.”

UC Berkeley has decided to privatize this unique public asset for commercial retail space, and, ironically, a high-end grocery store. This is only the latest in a string of privatization schemes. Over the last several decades, the university has increasingly shifted use of the Gill Tract away from sustainable agriculture and towards biotechnology with funding from corporations such as Novartis and BP.

Frustrated that traditional dialogue has fallen on deaf ears, many of these same local residents, students, and professors have united as Occupy the Farm to Take Back the Gill Tract. This group is working to empower communities to control their own resilient food systems for a stable and just future – a concept and practice known as food sovereignty.

Occupy the Farm is in solidarity with Via Campesina and the Movimiento Sin Tierra (Landless Workers Movement).

MORE INFO: www.takebackthetract.com !

Gopal Dayaneni and Carla Perez of Movement Generation speaking at the action on Sunday. (photo credit: Dave Id/indybay.org)

Media Contacts:

Lesley – (707) 293-3253

Gopal – (510) 847-3592

Anya – (415) 892-4793

New Videos! Earth Skills Workshop: Restoring Health, Childbirth & Independence from Industrial Medicine

The videos are here!  MG (along with other incredible groups) hosted the first Earth Skills training of 2012 in March.  The topic was “Restoring Health, Childbirth & Independence from Industrial Medicine.”  The opening panel featured 4 amazing speakers, with an introduction by Carla Perez (MG).  Thank you again to ReCLAIM, our speakers, all of those who tabled at the resource fair, and everyone who attended the event.  Enjoy the videos of each powerful presentation here, and make sure to check out the resource/organizational links to learn more about each person’s work!

And check out the full Earth Skills 2012 calendar HERE.

Part 1: Carla Perez, Movement Generation
Introduction; independence from industrial medicine and the ecological crisis

Part 2: Shanelle Matthews, Forward Together & Black Women Birthing Justice Collective
The politicization of birth work and reproductive justice

Part 3: Atava Garcia Swiecicki,  Ancestral Apothecary Healing Services & ReCLAIM member
Practicing traditional, plant-based healing and challenging industrial medicine

Part 4: Sara Flores, Registered Nurse & Founder of ReCLAIM
ReCLAIM, midwifery, and dismantling the colonial legacy of biomedicine

Part 5: Deshaye Faughtner, Muse of Healing Acupuncture & Wellness Center & ReCLAIM member
Acupuncture, access to healthcare services, reconnecting with our bodies

Berkeley SynBio Forum Gets Major News Coverage

This week key scientists and strategists are converging at the SynBio forum, titled “The Bay Area Bio Lab and Synthetic Biology: False solutions and new risks to health, justice and communities.”  This forum, co-sponsored by MG and many others, is holding a critical discussion on the synthetic biology industry and a near-future synbio lab being built in the Bay Area.   Today that forum received major Bay Area news coverage, landing front page stories in both the SF Chronicle and the Contra Costa Times!  Read the short articles below, and look out for the compelling quotes from MG’s Gopal Dayaneni.

From the SF Chronicle:

Plans to merge labs for biofuel research criticized

“A plan by Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory to merge its energy labs into a major new research facility in Richmond where scientists would work to develop biofuels through genetic engineering came under fire Wednesday by activists who fear that dangerous new microbes would be created there.

And even if the venture succeeds in transforming plants into biofuels by altering the genes of microbes, the activists argued, the Richmond lab could become an unregulated front for corporate interests and turn millions of acres of croplands used to grow food in underdeveloped countries into huge plantations for energy production.”

Read the whole article HERE.

From the Contra Costa Times:

Critics raise safety concerns with biotech labs at Berkeley forum

“No one disputes that the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory campus that’s coming to Richmond will generate jobs and tax revenues.

But concerns persist about the work that will be done there, especially in synthetic biology, and the risks posed to the surrounding community.

That was among the topics at a news conference and public forum in Berkeley on Wednesday, touted as the first gathering in the area of local, national and international speakers to address concerns about synthetic biology, an emerging science that implants genetic material into cells to produce fuels and other industrial products.

Titled “Bay Area Biotech Labs Bring Unforeseen Risks,” the panel presentation at the Center for Genetics and Society featured five prominent critics of synthetic biology.”

Read the whole article HERE.