A ground support community provided food to the tree sitters, filed media reports, and made signs. Within one week, the tree-sit had gained people and public support.
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Also, there was not widespread agreement about which trees were the older, protected ones. The City of Berkeley had already made it illegal to cut down mature oak trees in the City, but the University claimed that their property was not under the jurisdiction of the City. At stake were 90 trees, including 8 redwoods and 65 oaks, of which 38 were protected coast live oaks. The Committee had promised to replace each of the 38 oaks with three newly planted ones. That panel was tasked with making a decision that took into account both sports center design, including that it was contractually promised to the football coach, and the environmental impact of the project. The tree-sit focused attention on the up-coming meeting of the UC Regents Building Committee the following Tuesday in San Francisco. The day was just prior to the last – and highly-contested - football game of the season, between Berkeley and Stanford. On 4 December at 4:00 am Zachary RunningWolf and Jess Walsh, the first two tree sitters,, climbed into the branches of the old oak trees to begin a tree-sit. On 14 November, the City of Berkeley passed a resolution supporting the protection of the grove calling it, “an impeccable resource that contributes to the well-being of all Berkeley citizens.” Berkeley students also started a petition and a Facebook group, which quickly swelled to 600 supporters. They called their coalition “Save the Oaks.” At rallies they renamed the lot “Memorial Oak Grove” and tied ribbons around particularly important trees, among them a 200-year-old tree named Sentinel Oak. In October and November local groups, among them the Sierra Club, California Native Plant Society and locally-known individuals Wavy Gravy, Country Joe McDonald and Julia Butterfly Hill began organizing actions to save the trees. All this would make up the new Student-Athlete High Performance Center It would also “retrofit” the seismically unsafe Memorial Stadium (built on a dangerous fault line). The new building would provide more sophisticated gym equipment for visiting athletes, more weight rooms, and 911 parking spaces. In the fall of 2006, the University of California Berkeley administration began implementing plans to build a new sports training facility that would be adjacent to the current stadium.