Pasadena Protesters Sit in Marked Trees to Stop Removal
Cheered on by storied tree sitter Julia Butterfly Hill, citizen activists hope to preserve beloved trees the school district plans to take down.
Even among the many dramatic protests, struggles, and courtroom battles of the Redwood Wars, this particular facedown stands out: a young, tree-loving Earth First! activist camping in a redwood for over two years in the late 1990s to stop the greed of a financial manipulator turned lumber baron. The manipulator was Charles Hurwitz, a Houston-based investor who had taken over Pacific Lumber Company by burdening it with debt. The takeover put him in control of the largest commercial reserve of high-priced, old-growth redwood trees left on the planet, and he had his logging crews cutting as fast as possible. The tree sitter, only 23 years old and a newcomer to protest politics, was Julia Hill, who adopted the moniker Butterfly. Overcoming the crude calculations of raw power that should have crushed her resistance, Hill saved Luna, the tree she sat in for 738 days, from Hurwitz’s clear-cut greed.
So it was no small deal when Julia Butterfly Hill came to Pasadena Presbyterian Church on July 8. She was there to headline a rally entitled An Evening for Trees organized by local students campaigning to save trees on their campuses marked for destruction by Pasadena Unified School District. Like Hill, students and activists were gumming up the timber works by sitting in the trees’ crowns or tying themselves to the trunks. Hill was joined by John Quigley, who saved a historic coast live oak in Santa Clarita by sitting in it for more than 70 days in 2002–3.
The afternoon before the rally, Hill and Quigley visited the main office of PUSD and John Muir High School, both protest sites.
“One of the things I’m deeply passionate about is supporting young people, because the choices that are being made today are affecting the world that they’re inheriting,” Hill told a reporter for Los Angeles Daily News. “People aren’t taking responsibility for that long-term impact. They’re thinking short-sighted.”
The protests ignited after 17-year-old Pasadena student Paloma Muñiz Ochoa spent eight and a half hours in a mature coast live oak at PUSD’s main office in mid-June. She gave the tree the name Mary in honor of the late poet Mary Oliver, whose verse transforms nature nearby into miraculous revelation.
“I saw a couple videos of Paloma and was so inspired by the purity of her voice and it brought me back to my early days as a forest activist,” Quigley told the same reporter. “I’m just honored to be here and it’s so cool to see this generation rising up and this is just a classic situation of myopic bureaucrats who are making a decision that they think is an easy one, a safe one, but it’s not the best one for the health of the community.”
The morning after the rally, Hill and Quigley visited John Muir High School. Since early last month about 30 people have been protesting the removal of trees on the campus. While the pair watched, four protestors climbed into a Canary Island pine marked for destruction and settled in.
The Pasadena protests are the latest chapter in a preservationist story that began in India in the 1970s, when village women in the Himalayan foothills wanting to protect the local forest from loggers’ chainsaws wrapped their arms around trees slated to be cut and refused to let go or move on. Called chipko, the Hindi word for “hug,” the technique worked so well that a decade later the Indian government banned felling live trees in the Himalaya.
About the same time, Earth First! activists picked up the chipko technique as a tactic to stop industrial logging of old-growth Douglas firs and coast redwoods on California’s North Coast. In time the protestors moved up from hugging trees to climbing them and camping in the crowns, where they were much harder to remove. Julia Butterfly Hill’s quintessential sit to save Luna stands as the longest chipko protest to date.
In each of these cases – village women and Himalayan forest, Hill and Luna, and Friends of PUSD Trees and PUSD – a handful of motivated individuals have confronted much larger and more powerful organizations – Indian timber companies, Hurwitz and Pacific Lumber, and PUSD. Profit drove the Indian loggers and Hurwitz; bureaucratic logic, the PUSD.
The Pasadena conflict is rooted in the devastating January 2025 Eaton Fire, which burned parts of Pasadena as well as most of neighboring Altadena. Besides hauling off the charred remains of destroyed homes and buildings, clean-up crews have contended with soils contaminated, according to California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control, with toxics: lead, arsenic, chromium, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and dioxins and furans. When soil analyses revealed these contaminants in soils on PUSD campuses, DTSC mandated that the district clean them up. PUSD developed a plan to do just that. It entailed felling 193 trees on 11 campuses to get at the soils under them – up to a depth of four feet, according to one PUSD official. In total the district plans to remove 13,000 tons of contaminated soils.
The trees marked for felling are mature and magnificent. PUSD maintains that each tree will be replanted after the soil is replaced or cleaned.
“They say they’re going to replace the trees one to one, but one-to-one replacement is a myth,” Jessica Richards, an organizer with Pasadena Tree Preservation, told the Washington Post. “You cannot replace a tree that has been growing for decades with a tree that has a one-inch or two-inch diameter.” Rather than countenance such loss, tree lovers have chosen to hug the condemned trees and sit in them.
The protests have scored some victories. Pasadena has long been known for its leafy urban canopy, unusual in the sun-soaked near-desert of Southern California, and the city council passed the 2002 City Trees and Tree Protection Ordinance to safeguard it. Citing the law, the city issued a stop-work order to PUSD on July 1, which countered by saying that the city had no jurisdiction and continuing to cut. When city inspectors obtained a court order and returned to John Muir High School, PUSD had to let them have a look and suspended the project for the time being. In the meantime, PUSD announced that it would exempt 57 condemned trees, although it hasn’t revealed which trees it has in mind, and that it would research methods of cleaning some of the soils rather than removing them and the trees they support.
As I report this, the conflict is still playing out. It isn’t about money, as in the Himalayan forests or Hurwitz’s old-growth redwood groves. Rather, this struggle is driven by a community anticipating the grief of losing trees they know and love – trees that speak to the human spirit. Surely they are worth preserving.
Keep up the good fight! Bears Ears is about to be heavily damaged by the present would be dictator ....