Joan Baez Up in Tree Protesting Garden Sale

Joan Baez, who has been driving Americans up a tree for decades, is now returning the favor.

Veteran US protest singer Joan Baez moved into a tree in Los Angeles along with famed tree-sitter Julie “Butterfly” Hill to prevent a local garden from being sold and destroyed. Baez, 65, doyenne of the 1960s folk music and protest movement, joined other protesters in hopes of saving the 14 acre (5.7 hectare) piece of land which has been tended as a community garden by about 350 urban farmers since the early 1990s. She is being accompanied in the garden tree-sit by Hill, 32, who spent over two years from 1997 to 1999 in the branches of a 600 year old northern California redwood to prevent it from being cut down.

The garden, in the South Los Angeles neighborhood, is on land that the city leased until 2003 to the Los Angeles City Food Bank, which supports several such community projects. The city sold the land to a developer in 2003, however, and efforts by a public land trust to raise millions of dollars to buy it and keep it in public hands failed to meet a Monday deadline.

Anyone who would waste two years of their life in a tree to save said tree is certifiable. And, frankly, if a group of rich actors can’t raise the money to keep a plot of land as a garden, they can’t be all that concerned.

OTB

Popularity: 3% [?]

Joan Baez Up in Tree Protesting Garden Sale

ADVERTISERS

TOPICS

AFFILIATIONS