Earth to Berkeley Oak Grove Protesters: Get Out of the Trees! (Part 3 of 5)

In December 2006, protestors claiming to represent the interests of the environment established residence in a grove of mature oak trees adjacent to Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, California. Their objective: to prevent the University of California from removing the oak grove to construct an athletic training facility. Supporting them in their endeavor are such reputable organizations as the Sierra Club, the California Native Plant Society, and the California Oak Foundation. The tree-sitters even have a website for their cause: http://www.saveoaks.com.

On the surface, the action of the protestors could seem like a bold, principled action to protect an important terrestrial ecosystem. Indeed, the felling of a mature oak grove is not an act to be celebrated. However, due to unintended consequences of the protestors’ actions, they are greatly damaging the cause of environmental protection, and producing a net loss to the environment.

In my previous post, I examined the problem of promoting sparse development. Today, let’s examine the opportunity cost of tree sitting.

Reason 2: Opportunity Costs a Fortune

The study of economics includes a fundamental concept referred to as “opportunity cost”. Opportunity cost refers to the cost of opportunities foregone as a consequence of one’s choices. For example, if you spend your Saturday afternoon painting your house, then you forego the opportunity to work overtime, go shopping, or travel out of town. To understand how the concept of opportunity cost applies to the tree-sitters, we need only ask what they could have done with their time and resources other than camp in the oak grove. The answer? A surprising lot.

• Time Passes in the Trees, Too. As of this writing, the protesters have resided in the oak grove for longer than one year. According to their own website, arrests of 16 and 21 people have taken place on different days this fall. So let’s conservatively estimate their number at 20 protestors. 20 people times 365 days times 16 waking hours per day equals 116,800 person-hours that have been expended on this quest. By their own count, the protestors are tree-sitting in order to save 38 mature oaks. 116,800 divided by 38 equals 3,678 person-hours per tree!
  
  
• Time Is Money. To put that into monetary terms, let’s imagine that the tree-sitters had instead used their time to earn money, then donated the proceeds to an environmentalist organization, or used the funds for an environmentally beneficial use. At a wage of $15 per hour, which could be earned at a low to medium skill job in the Bay Area, the estimated opportunity cost expended thus far of protecting each tree is $55,196 (= 3,678 * $15), and the total cost of expended to protect the oak grove has been $2,097,431 (= 116,800 * $15). That’s right, $2.1 million dollars!
  
  
• Something Better to Do. Couldn’t the protestors have used their time for a more environmentally worthwhile endeavor? $2.1 million would allow them to purchase and protect a plot of tropical rainforest, with an entire intact ecosystem holding far more environmental worth than 38 trees on a semi-developed plot in urban Berkeley. How many solar panels could they have installed in those 116,800 person-hours? How much California farmland could they have recovered from unsustainable commercial agriculture and converted to permaculture? How many earth-saving clean technologies could they have developed and marketed? How many green policy directives could they have successfully lobbied? How many green-aspiring consumers could they have educated?
  
  
• Time is Running Out. Just as we implore companies and consumers to be efficient in their use of natural resources, we too must recognize that our time as friends of the environment is a scarce resource. We are playing a giant game of catch-up, trying to patch leaks in the hull of our global environmental ship before time runs out. We must focus the time and the resources we have to patch the biggest, most serious holes first. If we fail to do so, our ship will sink.
  
  
• Efficient Resource Use: Think Big! To solve our most serious environmental problems, we must think big. We need real solutions, sustainable frameworks that are more effective than the unsustainable frameworks currently in place, and we need people to implement them. People who care as much as the oak-dwellers need to use their brains to create big solutions to big problems – this is how we create a better world.

Protecting our natural environmental resources is a critically important objective – let’s accomplish the most we possibly can. Just as we advocate the efficient use of natural resources, we also must use our human and monetary resources most efficiently. We must think big!

In my next post, I will examine how the tree-sitters are hindering the advance of sustainability by alienating potential allies to our cause.