Author: UC Berkeley Library
The Power of Water: Friends of the River Foundation Records at The Bancroft Library
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
— John Muir (1838-1914) from My First Summer in the Sierra
On October 2, 1968, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was passed by Congress, creating a system of rivers throughout the country to be preserved for generations to come. For the environmental movement gaining momentum in the 1960s this was an important turning point for water protection – although the waterways deemed valuable enough to conserve did not include the Stanislaus River in Northern California, already slated for a large, new dam to be built by the Army Corp of Engineers. The impending filling of the reservoir would cause a 13 mile unimpeded stretch of the river to rise, bringing about the destruction and loss of numerous cultural resources and a highly accessible white water rafting area. Supporters of the dam argued that the New Melones Dam project would create construction jobs, increase the state’s water supply, help with flood control and generate hydroelectric power.
In 1973, a small group of individuals including Gerald “Jerry” H. Meral, Rob Caughlan, David Oke and David Kay decided to form a grassroots conservation organization called Friends of the River to gather signatures to put the Proposition 17 initiative on the ballot thereby adding the Stanislaus River to the list of protected rivers. Though the initiative was placed on the 1974 ballot in California and received significant support from river rafters, environmentalists and others who valued the river as it was, the initiative ended up failing in the election. This defeat didn’t suppress the spirit of the Friends of the River and the group was incorporated in 1975 as the Friends of the River Foundation, a non-profit membership based organization dedicated to river protection under the leadership of Mark Dubois and Jennifer Jennings.
By 1978, the New Melones Dam construction was completed and the spillway and powerhouse were in place in 1979. In May 1979, when the lake was about to be filled with water, Mark Dubois sent a four paragraph typed, signed letter to Colonel Donald M. O’Shei, the Army Corps of Engineers’ Sacramento District Engineer, warning of his impending action to attempt to halt the filling of the New Melones reservoir by hiding in the canyon and chaining himself to a rock in the river. This act of defiance by Dubois brought considerable attention to the already well publicized project and the filling of the lake was halted temporarily.
Though the New Melones reservoir was eventually filled in 1982, one of the campaign’s most influential achievements was to crack open the debate about the cost effectiveness and benefits to society of large dam projects around the globe. No other dams of this magnitude have been constructed in the United States since the completion of the New Melones Dam and the struggle to save the Stanislaus River from the construction of the New Melones Dam remains one of the greatest examples of citizen involvement in American history to stop a dam from being built. The Friends of the River Foundation continues to push for water protection legislation in California through grassroots organizing, public outreach and education.
The Friends of the River Foundation records are now open to researchers at The Bancroft Library. The processing of the Friends of the River Foundation records is part of a two-year grant project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to make available a range of archival collections relating to environmental movements in the West. A leading resource in the documentation of U.S. environmental movements, The Bancroft Library is home to the records of many significant environmental organizations and the papers of a range of environmental activists.
Additions to the Rainforest Action Network Records Now Open at The Bancroft Library
At first I thought I was fighting to save the rubber trees;
then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest.
Now I realize I am fighting for humanity.
– Chico Mendes (1944-1988)
The Bancroft Library is pleased to announce that a series of additions to the ongoing Rainforest Action Network records is now open and accessible to researchers. The processing of the Rainforest Action Network records is part of a two-year grant project funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to make available a range of archival collections relating to environmental movements in the West. A leading resource in the documentation of U.S. environmental movements, The Bancroft Library is home to the records of many significant environmental organizations and the papers of a range of environmental activists.
Rainforest Action Network was founded in 1985 by Randy “Hurricane” Hayes and Mike Roselle as a San Francisco based non-profit grassroots environmental group with a mission to protect and preserve the world’s forests and defend the human rights of indigenous people and others affected by unjust land grabs and the depletion of natural resources. Rainforest Action Network’s direct action, education and marketing campaigns apply pressure to governments and corporations to halt illegal logging, manufacturing, selling and use of old growth trees and tropical forests.
The global breadth of Rainforest Action Network’s activities range from Old Growth campaigns in Northern California, the Pacific Northwest and Canada to Tropical Timber campaigns to protect forests and indigenous rights in Central and South America, Africa, Tasmania and Southeast Asia. They also include the Global Finance campaign which organized and supported civil disobedience during the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, Washington in 1999.
The Bancroft Library has been collecting Rainforest Action Network records since 2006 and the newly opened additions document the group’s campaigns primarily in the 1990s-2000s. Future additions to the records are expected.
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Deadline for Library Prize for Undergraduate Research coming up soon!
We are accepting submissions for the Charlene Conrad Liebau Library Prize for Undergraduate Research now until April 18 at 5 p.m. Undergraduate students of all levels and disciplines may apply. We especially welcome submissions from lower division students, whose projects are judged separately from those of the upper division. More details are available on the website.
Works in progress are eligible. Submissions are open to research projects from a UC Berkeley course in one of the following terms:
- Lower division: Spring 2018, Summer 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019
- Upper division: Summer 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019
Update: Moffitt Library’s first floor reopened after flooding
Moffitt Library’s first floor has reopened after flooding forced it to close last week.
The library will be open for studying for RRR week and finals, although working electrical outlets will be in short supply.
The flooding, brought on by heavy rains, had forced an evacuation of Moffitt’s first floor last week and caused classes held on that floor to be relocated.
Stay tuned for updates.
Update: UC Berkeley Library adjusts hours for Thanksgiving week
The UC Berkeley Library is announcing adjusted hours for the week of Thanksgiving after continued air quality issues have led the university to cancel classes.
(Check the hours page for updates.)
The modified hours for Thanksgiving week are as follows:
Monday
Doe Library: 8 a.m.-5 p.m. (shortened hours)
Most other libraries, including the ones below, are open with normal hours:
Moffitt Library: Open 24 hours
Main Stacks: Closing at 2 a.m.
The Bancroft Library
The Bancroft Library
Bioscience, Natural Resources & Public Health Library
Optometry Library
Chemistry Library
Earth Sciences and Map Library
Music Library
Business Library
Environmental Design Library
Anthropology Library
Social Research Library
East Asian Library
Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF)
Northern Regional Library Facility (NRLF)
Others will be updated as final decisions are made.
Wednesday
Most libraries are open, but all are closing at 5 p.m. due to the holiday.
Thursday
Libraries closed for the holiday.
Friday
Libraries closed for the holiday.
Saturday
Libraries closed for the holiday.
Sunday
Most libraries open normal hours.
Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: This is Not a Fish Story , This is a Fish Story
What would it be like to fly halfway around the world on a non-stop flight from Newport, Oregon to Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland aboard a C-17 Air Force transport plane with a small crew of environmentalists, veterinarians, and an internationally famous 21-foot long, 10,000 lb. orca “killer whale”?
Detailed answers to that question and much, much more can be found in the Earth Island Institute records, a newly processed collection now open to researchers at The Bancroft Library.
Earth Island Institute is a Berkeley based non-profit conservation group founded in 1982 by David Brower that acts as an incubator to support a global network of ecological and social justice projects working to conserve, protect and restore the environment. Born in 1912, Brower entered the University of California at Berkeley at age 16 with a plan to study entomology, but due to financial pressures had to leave school by his sophomore year.
Located in the David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley, you may have walked by or visited the LEED Platinum rated building, read the Earth Island Journal publication, or be familiar with Earth Island’s work going back to the late 1980s on the dolphin-safe tuna campaigns. Those campaigns helped to heighten awareness of dolphin by-catch mortality levels during purse seine net and drift net fishing practices for tuna fish, reform marine mammal protection laws and establish the dolphin-safe tuna labels.
One of Earth Island’s other major projects began in 1994 after the film Free Willy was released by Warner Bros. and brought worldwide attention to the plight of captive marine mammals everywhere, although especially for the orca “killer whale” known as Keiko who starred as Willy. First captured off Iceland in 1979, Keiko was owned by Reino Adventura, a theme park in Mexico City, Mexico during the film’s production. After Earth Island Institute, numerous animal welfare groups, environmentalists and children from around the world rallied to free Keiko, Reino Adventura agreed to donate him to the newly formed “Free Willy Keiko Foundation” for a program of rehabilitation at the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport for eventual release back to the wild.
What happened to Keiko from then on is now in the historical record and up for research and debate. Although Keiko was released back into the wild, first into the Iceland sea pens in September 1998 and then into Iceland’s open waters, he died off the coast of Norway in December 2003 from pneumonia and possibly hunger, having lost the ability to fish for himself after being held captive so many decades. Since 1961, hundreds of killer whales, or orcas (actually a type of dolphin) have been captured and used in theme parks to entertain, and some would argue to educate, the public on the beauty and wonder of these magnificent beings.
As of 2018, there are approximately 60 captive orcas and countless dolphins and other marine mammals being held and used for entertainment at theme parks primarily in China, France, Japan, Russia, Spain and the United States. And yet, captive orcas are certainly not the only killer whales in harm’s way. As evidenced in a number of recent studies, films and news stories – orca populations in the wild are dwindling at rapid rates as declining fish stocks, marine pollution and other factors like increased shipping traffic have caused them to be at extreme risk for extinction. The time to learn about orcas, marine mammals, the greater ecosystem of our world environment and how we can improve life for all creatures of the land, air and sea is now!
The processing of the Earth Island Institute records is part of a two-year NHPRC-funded project to process a range of archival collections relating to environmental movements in the West. A leading repository in documenting U.S. environmental movements, The Bancroft Library is home to the records of many significant environmental organizations and the papers of a range of environmental activists.
Environmental Justice Grit in the Borderlands
Environmentalists make terrible neighbors, but great ancestors. – David Brower
It would be difficult not to notice a common thread of diligent, dogged persistence across the broad spectrum of environmental justice activism. This tenacity, coupled with a long view of the world and a whole lot of hard work, is what makes for some of the most successful environmental justice campaigns.
While success cannot be measured in one brief moment or win where environmental issues are concerned, each victory adds to the larger picture of global environmental awareness and health of the planet. Multiple stories of such environmental justice grit can be found in the collections at The Bancroft Library and one collection in particular is the newly opened records of Arizona Toxics Information.
Focused primarily on environmental concerns in the Arizona/Mexico border region during the 1970s through 1990s, Arizona Toxics Information was founded by conservationist Michael Gregory in 1990. The collection also includes materials collected by Gregory before Arizona Toxics Information was established when he worked with the Sierra Club Grand Canyon Chapter and grassroots environmental groups. Gregory had been employed by the United States Forest Service in the early 1970s and had witnessed the spraying of herbicide 2,4,5-T in national forests while he was stationed at fire outlook towers. 2,4,5-T is one of the main components of Agent Orange, which had already been banned for use in Vietnam due to its known harmful health effects and birth defects. From there, Gregory set about to research, collect information, write articles and lobby to end the practice of herbicide, pesticide and insecticide spraying in national forests and range lands.
In addition to the fight for pesticide use awareness and regulations, Arizona Toxics also ran several successful campaigns to shut down the Phelps-Dodge Corporation’s Douglas Reduction Works (copper smelter), the ENSCO hazardous waste management facility (PCB incinerator), and to improve the overall air and water quality of Arizona. As the Environmental Protection Agency’s Integrated Environmental Plan for the U.S.-Mexico Border Area and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) were being drafted in the early 1990s, Arizona Toxics Information lobbied and organized grassroots groups on both sides of the border to share information and rally for a multitude of environmental commitments in the agreements. These commitments included providing the public the “right-to-know” about pollutants being released from factories on both sides of the United States-Mexico border, regulating maquiladoras (factories in Mexico that are generally owned and operated by foreign companies which assemble products often to be exported back to the country of that company), and developing emergency disaster plans to respond to hazardous waste accidents.
The current status of NAFTA casts some doubt on the future of these agreements. The opening of the records of Arizona Toxics Information provides timely documentation of hard-won environmental justice victories on the US-Mexico border.
The processing of the Arizona Toxics Information records is part of a two-year NHPRC-funded project to process a range of archival collections relating to environmental movements in the West. A leading repository in documenting U.S. environmental movements, The Bancroft Library is home to the records of many significant environmental organizations and the papers of a range of environmental activists.
Research Software Survey Results Published
“Research software” presents a significant challenge for efforts aimed at ensuring reproducibility of scholarship. In a collaboration between the UC Berkeley Library and the California Digital Library, John Borghi and I (Yasmin AlNoamany) conducted a survey study examining practices and perceptions related to research software. Based on 215 participants, representing a variety of research disciplines, we presented the findings of asking researchers questions related to using, sharing, and valuing software. We addressed three main research questions: What are researchers doing with code? How do researchers share their code? What do researchers value about their code? The survey instrument consisted of 56 questions.
We are pleased to announce the publication of paper describing the results of our survey “Towards computational reproducibility: researcher perspectives on the use and sharing of software” in PeerJ Computer Science. Here are some interesting findings from our research:
- Results showed that software-related practices are often misaligned with those broadly related to reproducibility. In particular, while scholars often save their software for long periods of time, many do not actively preserve or maintain it. This perspective is perhaps best encapsulated by one of our participants who, when completing our open response question about the definition of sharing and preserving software, wrote ” ‘Sharing’ means making it publicly available on Github. ‘Preserving’ means leaving it on GitHub”.
- Only 50.51% of our participants were aware of software-related community standards in their field or discipline.
- Participants from computer scientists reported that they provide information about dependencies and comments in their source code more than those from other disciplines.
- Regarding to sharing software, we found that the majority of participants who do not share their code, they indicated that had privacy issues and time limitation to prepare code for sharing.
- Regarding to preservation, only a 20% of our participants reported that they save their software for eight years or more, 40% indicated that they do not prepare their software for long term preservation. The majority of participants (76.2%) indicated that they use Github for preserving software.
- The majority of our participants indicated that view code or software as “first class” research products that should be assessed, valued, and shared in the same way as a journal article. However, our results also indicate that there remains a significant gap between this perception and actual practice. As a result we encourage the community to work together for creating programs to train researchers early on how to maintain their code in the active phase of their research.
- Some of researchers’ perspectives on the usage of code/software:
“Software is the main driver of my research and development program. I use it for everything from exploratory data analysis, to writing papers…- “I use code to document in a reproducible manner all steps of data analysis, from collecting data from where they are stored to preparing the final reports (i.e. a set of scripts can fully reproduce a report or manuscript given the raw data, with little human intervention).”
- Some of researchers’ perspectives on sharing and preservation:
- “I think of sharing code as making it publicly accessible, but not necessarily advertising it. I think of preserving code as depositing it somewhere remotely, where I can’t accidentally delete it. I realize that GitHub should not be the end goal of code preservation, but as of yet I have not taken steps to preserve my code anywhere more permanently than GitHub.”
- “…’Sharing’, to me, means that somebody else can discover and obtain the code, probably (but not necessarily) along with sufficient documentation to use it themselves. ‘Preserve’ has stronger connotations. It implies a higher degree of documentation, both about the software itself, but also its history, requirements, dependencies, etc., and also feels more “official”- so my university’s data repository feels more ‘preserve’-ish than my group’s Github page.”
For more details and in-depth discussion on the initial research, the paper is available and open access here: https://peerj.com/articles/cs-163/. All the other related files to this project can be found here: https://yasmina85.github.io/swcuration/
—
Yasmin AlNoamany
Public Health Library Updates
Hopefully, all of you saw Michael Marks’ May 30th email. It has a number of important dates in it. Please return all books by Monday, June 11th. In preparation for the cessation of the Public Health Library contract, Document Delivery requests will not be accepted after Wednesday, June 27th. Web portal access will shut down Friday, July 6th so be sure to retrieve all your PDF articles by then. A number of print journals that CDPH will not have electronic access to have been moved to the CDPH Richmond Building C Library. All topical training webpages (e.g., Literature Searching, Health Statistics/Data Resources, etc.) will be given to OQPA for CDPH access after July 1st. Don’t forget to register as a CDPH Library Services User with OQPA.
The Public Health Library is now closed to the public in preparation for our merger with the Bioscience and Natural Resources library over the summer; however, contract services continue until June 30th. If you need to visit us or have any questions, please call us at 510-642-2510 or email me.
To express our appreciation and bid farewell, we are having a Contract Farewell Event on June 20, 2018 from 4-6:30 pm. We would love to you to attend if you are available. Retirees are invited as well. Please RSVP at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/62018Farewell
If you have any questions, please let me know.
Debbie Jan
Debbie.Jan@cdph.ca.gov