Leading Tree Hugger Branches Out
In Ojai, where people love oak trees enough to build shops around them and write poetic odes to their spirits, John Christianson might love them most of all.
He is the town’s best-known tree hugger, gaining notoriety last year by sitting in an aging oak for 15 hours, while television cameras rolled, to protest its date with a buzz saw.
Depending on who you are, he’s either the type of passionate and colorful character who defines Ojai or he’s a giant pain in the neck.
Christianson’s latest crusade has some protesting that he has gone too far.
It started at a shopping plaza where locals go to grab a sandwich and sip coffee. The plaza’s owners placed a small sign on an oak tree growing in the shopping square to let customers know they would have to chop down the tree. The problem, said plaza owner Polly Bee, is that the small oak they built around in 1962 “grew into a mighty oak--and it’s cracking the walls.”
Enter the 52-year-old Christianson, who climbed on the roof to inspect the tree, held a fund-raising vigil to pay for an appeal to stop the cutting, was threatened with arrest if he stepped on the property again, and had a flier passed out in his name that calls the pending chopping of the tree “murder.”
The substitute teacher and writer apologized for the latter in a published letter, adding that it wasn’t his doing.
“Please do not allow my mistakes to compromise this majestic tree’s right to due process,” Christianson wrote. “The tree is innocent; it only asks to live.”
Bee once thought of Christianson as just another part of the “color of Ojai.” Now she chooses her words carefully.
“I’ll try to keep calm,” she said. “[But] it’s gone far beyond common sense and good reason.”
The confrontation resulted in outraged letters to the local weekly, accusatory fliers and petitions to the City Council. Councilwoman Sue Horgan asked Christianson to resign from the city’s Oak Tree Task Force. She says his latest stand has done a lot of damage to the community.
“John is very passionate about trees, and I think people know that, and most people respect that about him,” she said. “But he went over the edge on this deal.”
For Christianson, it’s simple: The tree deserves to live.
“Tree hugging is an honored tradition in Ojai,” said Christianson, a gentle man with a tree-like build: tall, skinny and topped by a brush of hair. “We’re reviving the old tradition.”
He seems stunned by just how big the controversy has grown. He has an absent-minded professor’s air, a self-deprecating sense of humor and a fondness for Henry David Thoreau.
“This is a man who literally wouldn’t hurt a fly. I suspect he guides them outdoors,” said Jonathan Collins, an Ojai resident for 16 years and author of “Insights from the Coffee House,” a book of inspirational stories from Ojai locals.
Christianson moved to Ojai in 1968 from Santa Cruz as a follower of the choose-your-own-path philosopher Krishnamurti, whose school is based here. Married to Marilyn Foote, a community theater actress, he led nature tours, spoke at City Council meetings and conducted a one-man show in which he played Thoreau.
He was not known for environmental extremism in a city that draws artists, farmers, celebrities and New Agers to a world in the hills, away from freeways, high-rises and fast food.
That changed in March 2000 when two dying trees spurred him to action. He was upset by a City Council decision to chop down the trees in Libbey Park. The council was concerned that falling branches would injure children.
Planning his moves, Christianson got training from an employee of environmental clothier Patagonia on how to conduct a tree sit-in. He waited until sheriff’s deputies guarding a tree left for a few minutes, and scrambled up.
He sat in the tree, hugging a broad limb, for 15 hours, despite the cold, police and nature’s call.
“The tree was a defining moment for many of us,” he said. “It re-energized all of us, and refocused attention to the fact that we’re going to lose our trees.”
The trees were chopped down anyway, and Christianson was arrested on charges of trespassing and spent the night in jail. The charges were later dropped.
Since then, he has become an Ojai celebrity, either lionized or criticized for his activism.
And now the activist has set his sights on another cause: the preservation of a meadow at the city’s northwestern border. He saw a “for sale” sign there and envisioned the grassy expanse now ringed by mountains covered with buildings. So, every day at sundown, he pulls out a huge sign that says “Preserve Cuyama Meadow”--his name for it--and walks back and forth.
No matter what critics say, Christianson said he is committed to reminding people where they live.
“It’s incredible, the natural beauty, and so many people committed to preserve it,” he said.