Tree houses

A group of Berkeley, Calif., environmentalists has taken tree hugging to the extreme.

Protesters have lived (using the verb loosely) atop redwoods on the University of California campus for 18 months now, determined to spare an 85-year-old grove from being chopped down to make way for a new athletic training complex.

During those 18 months, the university system has had to defend the campus modernization project on two fronts: in court, fending off lawsuits from the city of Berkeley, neighborhood groups and the California Oak Foundation, and on the ground against activists running supply lines.

Both theaters have yielded mixed results for the school. University administrators are oh-so-close to beginning construction, making a handful of concessions with the hope that the presiding judge might lift a temporary injunction on site work. They also won a court order allowing them to forcibly remove protesters from the trees.

The school was successful in cutting supply lines and yanking protesters from all but one tree, but the last extremists have resorted to hurling their own excrement at authorities to remain in their roost. Campus police offered food and water to the wackos if they would agree to lower their waste in a hygienic manner; the protesters refused, then got their food and water anyway.

That environmentalists would sue and squat to block development isn't surprising. But what's especially disturbing here is the greens' dogmatic devotion to natural resources as sentient beings, protecting trees as though they are people. That the university plans to plant at least three trees for every one they have to remove is irrelevant to the protesters -- they equate logging to murder.

The First Amendment protects environmentalists' right to practice their religion, but it doesn't guarantee them the right to block perfectly legal, normal construction projects by whatever means they deem appropriate. They can go without showers for years and defecate from treetops if they so choose. But it's past time for the courts to send a message that puts our quality of life ahead of the diminished standard of living that radical greens openly long for.