To construction workers hammering away at new houses, John Quigley is just “a crazy dude.” But the quixotic tree sitter who has vowed to save an ancient oak from bulldozers has become a kind of Thoreau in suburbia.
Perched about 40 feet up a broad oak that’s about twice the age of the nation, Quigley has become an environmental phenomenon after two weeks of sylvan-squatting on the outskirts of Santa Clarita, a Los Angeles suburb.
The county is forcing the developer to tear out the 400-year-old tree to accommodate widening of a canyon road for new subdivisions.
News of his sojourn has traveled fast enough to reach “Remedy,” a 27-year-old EarthFirst! activist who has been sitting in a coastal redwood in Northern California’s Humboldt County for eight months.
“I think it’s great!” she said by cell phone. “Even if you’re in suburbia, you’re still on Earth.
“You still have a responsibility to the water and to the air. So many of these actions have been in the back woods. The issue doesn’t make it into the forefront of people’s minds. To have it happen in suburbia is just awesome!”
Quigley’s protest, however, didn’t just “happen.” It was planned by an otherwise staid environmental group of soccer moms and engineers who grew to believe that more pedestrian protests over runaway growth were falling on deaf ears.
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What Santa Clarita activists decided they needed was a tree-sitter, a professional willing to rough it for them. They turned to the Internet, and turned up Quigley, 42, a Los Angeles resident who in 1995 squatted in a tree in British Columbia.
“Hopefully what it does is inspires people around here to get involved earlier in the process so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again,” Quigley said from his perch. “This is something we should be valuing, and it is not being valued by the county or the developers. It’s just something in the way.”
The saga has touched a chord, drawing scores of residents to “Tree 419,” so designated by county bureaucrats.
“The tree may be more of a symbol that we’d like to resolve this issue [of sprawl] in a different way, instead of letting things get to this point,” said Laurene Weste, a member of the Santa Clarita City Council, which voted 3-2 last week to ask the county for a way to save the tree.
Far from the stereotype of vegan tree cuddlers, Santa Clarita’s nascent environmental movement preferred to sue rather than squat–until they opted to reach into the play book of radical groups such as EarthFirst! and Greenpeace.
The protest was obscure until the developer, John Laing Homes, entered the picture and moved the tree closer to a date with the bulldozer.
Construction workers, hordes of media and curious suburbanites have since flocked to the site, where Quigley sat Friday atop a platform the size of a door, holding off sheriff’s deputies, firefighters and a crisis negotiator.
Quigley’s newfound friends bring him so many plates of hot food each night that he can’t eat them all. Several supporters risked arrest and hopped the fence, camping out below him and helping hoist up supplies by rope–and his waste back down in jars and bags.
Nearby, Lt. Tim Dolan of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department wondered how he would get Quigley down, but awaited word on whether the developer wanted to press trespassing charges.
“Whatever happens,” Dolan said, “I hope he gets down safe.”