Protester Goes Out on a Limb in Bid to Save Ancient Oak

To construction workers hammering away at new houses, John Quigley is just a “crazy dude.” But the quixotic tree sitter who has vowed to save an ancient oak from bulldozers has become a kind of Thoreau in suburbia.

Perched about 40 feet up a broad oak that’s about twice the age of the nation, Quigley has become an environmental phenomenon after two weeks of sylvan-squatting on the outskirts of Santa Clarita.

The county is forcing the developer to tear out the 400-year-old tree to accommodate widening of a canyon road for new subdivisions that have spread across the area.

News of his sojourn has traveled fast enough to reach “Remedy,” a 27-year-old EarthFirst! activist who has been sitting in a coastal redwood in Humboldt County for eight months.

“I think it’s great,” she said by cell phone. “Even if you’re in suburbia, you’re still on Earth.”

“You still have a responsibility to the water and to the air. So many of these actions have been in the backwoods. The issue doesn’t make it into the forefront of people’s minds. To have it happen in suburbia is just awesome.”

Quigley’s protest, however, didn’t just “happen.” It was planned by an otherwise staid environmental group of professionals and homemakers who grew to believe that pedestrian protests over runaway growth were falling on deaf ears.

What Santa Clarita activists decided they needed was a tree sitter, a professional willing to rough it for them. They turned to the Internet and turned up Quigley, a 42-year-old Pacific Palisades resident who in 1995 squatted in a tree in British Columbia.

“Hopefully what it does is inspire people around here to get involved earlier in the process so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again,” Quigley said from his perch beside Pico Canyon Road. “This is something we should be valuing and it is not being valued by the county or the developers. It’s just something in the way.”

The tree-sitting saga has touched a chord, drawing scores of residents to Tree 419, so designated by county bureaucrats involved in widening Pico Canyon Road.

“The tree may be more of a symbol that we’d like to resolve this issue [of sprawl] in a different way, instead of letting things get to this point,” said Laurene Weste, a member of the Santa Clarita City Council, which voted 3 to 2 last week to ask the county to find a way to save the tree.

Far from the stereotype of vegan tree cuddlers, Santa Clarita’s nascent environmental movement preferred to sue rather than squat -- until they opted to reach into the playbook of radical groups such as EarthFirst! and Greenpeace.

“We’ve made a fuss about frogs and toads disappearing, but this oak tree does really seem to get people’s attention,” said Larry Kanner, 61, a member of both of the river valley’s major environmental groups: Friends of the Santa Clara River and the Santa Clarita Organization for Planning and the Environment (SCOPE). “I think people are starting to feel closed in on from every direction around here.”

Lynne Plambeck, president of SCOPE, sent out an urgent e-mail seeking an experienced tree sitter when she found out the group’s attempts to save Tree 419 had failed.

Quigley got the e-mail from a friend in late October, and the environmental educator leapt at the chance. “I thought, ‘They’re never going to find someone who can put it together so fast out there,’ ” he said.

The protest was as obscure as EarthFirst! efforts to stop logging in the Pacific Northwest until the developer, John Laing Homes, entered the picture and moved the tree closer to a date with the bulldozer.

Mothers with babies, construction workers, hordes of media and curious suburbanites have since flocked to the site, where Quigley sat Friday atop a platform the size of a door, holding off sheriff’s deputies, firefighters and a crisis negotiator. A troupe of Native Americans even arrived Friday night to claim the site might be an ancient burial ground. They perfomed a ceremony and songs for any spirits in the area.

Quigley’s newfound friends bring him so many plates of hot food each night that he can’t eat them all. Some backers risked arrest and hopped the fence, camping out below him and hoisting supplies up by rope -- and his waste back down in jars and bags. One man even climbed the tree to join him for a time.

“I think it’s pretty cool and he should stay up there,” said Matthew Zubal, a 10-year-old who peered through a chain-link fence authorities put around the tree. “Me and my friends used to climb this tree. I think it’s cool that people want to move here, but 85% of the reason they want to move here is because of the views. There’s not going to be a view if they tear it all down.”

John Zirbel, 38, who has lived in Santa Clarita since 1969, called the issue a “no-brainer.”

“This is a 400-year-old tree and it’s been taken for granted,” Zirbel said. “They’re just so quick with the way they cut stuff down around here. There’s got to be a better way of doing this.”

But Javier Puentes, 38, who has lived in Stevenson Ranch for nine years, said new residents in the area are peeved at the congestion that is snarling the west side of the Santa Clarita Valley. “Everybody has a passion for something and it looks like this guy has a passion for a noble thing, but he’s holding up a lot of production,” Puentes said.

Construction worker Gabriel Rojas, 23, a Canoga Park resident who was working Friday at a nearby development, was more blunt. “The guy’s a crazy dude,” he said in Spanish, adding that the county should get him down and widen the road.

Quigley, meanwhile, huddled out of sight atop his plank in a sturdy crook of the tree, where he had a supply of peanut butter, avocadoes, cereal and granola, along with a sleeping bag and climbing ropes rigged to the branches. Ropes dangled down to the tree’s bottom, where supporters on lawn chairs kept an eye on sheriff’s deputies filming them from behind the fence.

Nearby, Lt. Tim Dolan of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department wondered how he would get Quigley down, but awaited word on whether the developer wanted to press trespassing charges.

“Whatever happens, I hope he gets down safe,” Dolan said. “I don’t want to see him fall out of the tree. I don’t want to see any deputies fall out of the tree. I’ve just finished my 30th year, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Quigley said he would offer no resistance, but he wasn’t going to make an arrest easy for officers.

“If they send deputies up, I’ll make sure I’m attached to the tree in such a way that they’ll have to take some serious efforts to get me out,” he vowed.

A native of Minnesota, Quigley studied drama at San Diego State University then moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. The change of scenery, he said, shocked him into environmental activism. He works for Earth Day Los Angeles and the Malibu Foundation, an environmental group working on water pollution issues.

Daryl Cherney, an EarthFirst! organizer who sat in trees in the early 1990s, said tree-sitting has slowly moved into the mainstream since it began in the early 1980s. “What we used to say is we’re fighting tree by tree, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s moving into more urban areas,” he said. “I think it’s a natural progression.”

Mary Lightheart, a 56-year-old grandmother who chained herself to a tree for three weeks in Fayetteville, Ark., two years ago, urged Quigley to stay put Friday. Her protest didn’t save the tree from a strip-mall developer, but she said it kindled an environmental movement that has since elected a more “green” mayor and City Council.

Whether a similar mind-set shift will occur in the suburban fringes of Los Angeles County remains to be seen. County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, whose district covers that area, has said he supports removing the tree. On Friday, he requested a crisis negotiator to try to talk Quigley down.

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Times staff writer Carol Chambers contributed to this report.