Put the Brussels back into Sprouts, not Sprouts into Albany.

Categories: Front Page, Open Mic

brussel-sprouts

Occupy The Farm and other folks supporting the Gill Tract as farmland staged a rally and blockade at Sprouts in Walnut Creek on Saturday, March 14th.

Sprouts in Walnut Creek? It seems that Sprouts, Inc has negotiated an agreement with the city of Albany and UC Berkeley to build a store on the Gill Tract (the only prime farmland left in the East Bay, at San Pablo & Marin, Albany, CA), and they will literally be paving over a last small bit of paradise to put in a parking lot. Just weeks ago a crew went to the site surreptiously and cut down a large number of older trees – the first step in clearing the space for development. The nearest Sprouts store in the Bay Area is in Walnut Creek… and so, the choice of protest site.

The Gill Tract was the site of a battle of wills between Occupy The Farm participants and UC Berkeley in the Spring of 2012, ending perhaps in a draw – the University agreed not to develop the northernmost part of the Gill Tract, at least for a while, and allowed a community farm to use part of the area in peaceful coexistence with crop researchers. But the southern portion remained ripe for development. Even a successful referendum (and here) against a particular development scheme only delayed the plans for pillage by a year or so.

Here are some tweet pics from the day’s protest. At least one person was arrested according to the twitter narrative, but there was no further reporting on that person’s fate as of publishing this.


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