Activist’s Hopes Rooted in Change

A chain-link fence surrounds the 400-year-old oak tree near Santa Clarita in which John Quigley has been defiantly perched for more than a month. Each day, small children press against it, gazing wide-eyed through gnarled branches to see the man who doesn’t want the enormous tree cut down.

Attached to the fence are dozens of their notes, some from entire elementary school classes. They don’t always fully understand the problem: that a road is planned right where the old tree sits.

“Do not cut the tree....A man lives there,” reads the uneven scrawl of one young writer.

Children boil things down to the bare bones, and to many this has become a story of good versus bad. Quigley said he has tried to keep his message just that simple, to let people know that it’s possible for one person to make a difference.

“It’s like a children’s story: A man climbed up in a tree to keep it from being cut down,” he said. “Even if you’re not an environmentalist, you can understand that.”

But Quigley, 42, also acknowledged last week that he hopes his save-one-tree campaign sparks a larger debate about the more complex issue of growth in an increasingly crowded Southern California.

The tree, after all, is ancient against an ever-changing landscape of new homes, chain stores and shopping centers. Many of those who have come out to support Quigley live in the new houses. They’re part of the growth machine pushing relentlessly into the region’s remaining open spaces.

As he spoke, workmen were putting red tiles onto another new house in a new development whose homes look down on the tree from across a narrow, two-lane road. It’s this road that the county says must be widened to four lanes to accommodate traffic from another planned subdivision nearby.

So what is the answer? How do we balance growth with our need to protect the environment?

“If we were to take care of the areas that are already developed, if we were to invest in our cities so that people wouldn’t want to move farther and farther out, we wouldn’t have the kind of pressures that we’re having on the environment,” Quigley said. “I hope that the folks in this community will reflect on that, because there is an irony here. As a society, we have focused so much on convenience at all costs. Most of the planning that’s been done is just about how much money and how fast. We need a fundamental shift in our perspective.”

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Quigley said he grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., next to a forest. He took it for granted in a way. But when he came to Los Angeles after college, what he saw made him an activist.

“I had a big awakening when I moved to L.A. and saw all the density, the air pollution, the concrete,” he said, during a short break to stretch his legs on solid ground. “I thought, ‘Is this where it’s all headed? Does it have to be?’ ”

Some people resent that Quigley is an import and that he lives in Pacific Palisades, far from the tree, and that his protest has turned the area surrounding the tree into a kind of crunchy-granola festival, complete with aging hippies in overalls and posters decorated with peace signs.

Up close, Quigley looks like a man who’s been living out in the harsh wind and sun for weeks, his clothes smudged with bark dust, his face a deep, parched reddish-brown. He looks like a man sorely out of place in the tidy suburbs. But he said he understood the suburban dream, to live in nice homes with nice backyards in nice communities.

“To me, this tree represents the American dream as it should be. It’s about respecting our heritage,” he said. “In many ways, we don’t respect our elders, both our human elders and nature, what came before us. I think we need to undertake a fundamental shift in our values, to recognize that everything is a subset of the environment, and if we do not respect the environment, we’re contributing to our own demise.”

On the fence, one handmade poster quotes “The People, Yes,” a poem by Carl Sandburg:

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,

is a vast huddle with many units saying:

“I earn my living.

I make enough to get by

and it takes all my time.

If I had more time

I could do more for myself

And maybe for others.”

Up in the tree, Quigley has had a lot of time to think. It’s taken him out of the busy-ness of everyday life. Speaking of the support he’s received, in letters from all over the world, in visits from strangers, he said he was moved by people who told him that they, too, had paused to reflect.

He spoke of a letter one 16-year-old had sent to the local paper, describing how she’d spent an hour and a half at the old oak. In the letter, the girl said she’d driven home afterward looking at her surroundings with new eyes, Quigley said. She noticed the pencil-thin baby trees newly planted by developers and compared them to the old oak, he said.

“She looked around at this sort of prefabricated world and suddenly realized it could be different,” he said.

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When he first climbed up into the tree on Nov. 1, Quigley thought he’d be down in a week, he said.

“Each day I was thinking, well, at least, at least. At least, the tree’s going to live one more day. At least this is getting people to slow down and look at a tree,” he said.

That’s the first step, he said.

“It starts with awareness and then you have to make a commitment to take action. I think ultimately it’s about people who are sitting in their homes, doing their own thing, watching the news, having the courage to speak out and fight for things that matter. Maybe we need to start taking responsibility.”

To developers, the old oak tree was referred to in paperwork as oak #419. Now people call it “Old Glory” and think about its age and what it means, Quigley said. Some tell him stories about it. A woman told him that her husband proposed to her in the tree in 1942. Another woman told him she’s been walking by it every day for the past 55 years.

Quigley said people need to hear such stories from those who remember the history of places. They need to notice their surroundings and treasure them, he said.

“We’re all in the process of evolving. I would say the one thing that is unacceptable is apathy. If all a person does is commit to becoming more aware and to taking more action, then they’ve begun the process.”

Quigley is unsure when or how his crusade will end. The developer of the new road has said he plans to move the tree to a nearby park. But Quigley and his supporters believe the aged oak would not survive a transplant, and so the battle continues.

Meanwhile, Quigley’s supporters keep showing up to cheer him on.

Yvette Aslanian, who lives in a nearby development, said her kids think the oak tree is magical. They keep wanting to come see it, she said. “They think it’s out of a fairy tale, out of Harry Potter. They don’t understand how anyone could cut it,” she said. “They don’t see it’s because of all the houses that this is happening. But you know, once development arrives, it’s going to take root just like a tree and keep spreading.”

Aslanian, who moved to the area in 1990, said she knows some people might think she’s a hypocrite in her support for Quigley because she lives in a new development. But when she arrived, so much open space remained, and cows still grazed in the nearby hills, she said.

“Growth needs to be controlled at some point,” she said. “The community needs to come together and take control.”

She said she hopes that Quigley will help make that happen.

“They ask me if we can save this tree, and I say, ‘It’s possible. But all the powers that be, everyone, has to come together to make it happen. It’s kind of like magic.’ I take my kids here and I tell them: ‘This is what you have to do to make change.’ ”