Tree Sitters Successfully Turn Away Workers Sent to Cut Trees at former Hayes Valley Farm

On the morn­ing of Fri­day, June 7th, the tree sit­ters and par­tic­i­pants in the Lib­er­ate the Land action at Gezi Gar­dens, the for­mer Hayes Val­ley Farm, suc­cess­ful­ly turned away the work­ers sent to cut the trees down.  The tree cut­ting com­pa­ny arrived at about 8:00 a.m.

On the morn­ing of Fri­day, June 7th, the tree sit­ters and par­tic­i­pants in the Lib­er­ate the Land action at Gezi Gar­dens, the for­mer Hayes Val­ley Farm, suc­cess­ful­ly turned away the work­ers sent to cut the trees down.  The tree cut­ting com­pa­ny arrived at about 8:00 a.m. and had the gates locked on them as climbers mount­ed har­ness­es to climb the trees inside the fence and pre­pare to climb those on the edge.

There are 6 plat­forms built in trees on the land between Oak and Fell Streets on Lagu­na in San Fran­cis­co.  Below, gar­den­ers water the greens,
edi­ble peren­ni­als, and oth­er plants as oth­ers pre­pare meals, orga­nize work­shops and activ­i­ties, and build a vil­lage to demon­strate eco­log­i­cal liv­ing in the city.

This Sat­ur­day, June 8th, Gezi Gar­dens is host­ing a bar­be­cue, live music, work­shops, and a neigh­bor­hood meet­ing.  Live music will start as ear­ly as 10:00 a.m. with a bar­be­cue get­ting under­way around noon.  The neigh­bor­hood and com­mu­ni­ty meet­ing will start at 3:00 pm to open a dia­logue about pre­serv­ing this open green space and poten­tial­ly turn­ing it into a com­mons for the peo­ple of San Fran­cis­co.  This will be fol­lowed by a teach in on the sit­u­a­tion in Turkey that start­ed when the peo­ple of Istan­bul attempt­ed to stop the destruc­tion of one of the last open green spaces in the city.

The day before the green space was planned to be devel­oped into a com­mer­cial shop­ping mall, peo­ple popped tents or slept under the stars with their kids or a book.  In the morn­ing, peo­ple stood in front of the exca­va­tion machines to stop the trees from being cut down.  Police respond­ed with tear gas and burned the tents of peo­ple in the park. The next day, 10,000 peo­ple showed up and sat shoul­der to shoul­der, stop­ping devel­op­ment of the green space until anoth­er vio­lent police response.

This sparked a social upris­ing through­out all of Turkey that goes far beyond envi­ron­men­tal­ism.  The peo­ple of Gezi Park say they are try­ing to stop pri­vate inter­ests from prof­it­ing off of their land.  The #Gezi­Park protests, some of which call­ing them­selves #Occu­pyGezi, has been joined by a gen­er­al strike through­out Turkey of city work­ers and pri­vate employ­ees, bring­ing the gears of indus­try to a halt.  When Lib­er­ate the Land marched to the land in San Fran­cis­co, they called atten­tion to the Free Farm and Esper­an­za Gar­dens’ dis­place­ment for hous­ing devel­op­ment while call­ing for sol­i­dar­i­ty with Turkey and lib­er­a­tion of land from pri­vate inter­ests around
the world.

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