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Photography by Reed Hutchinson
UCLA Photographic Services
Peter Smith hopes to raise enough money to move the beloved
bush behind him out of a construction zone. |
Early Taste of Eco-Activism
Youngsters rally 'round their favorite climbing tree
BY CYnthia Lee
UCLA Today Staff
The 20 student protesters defiantly marched out of their classroom,
exited the building and hoisted hand-lettered signs. “Save
the monkey tree,” they chanted repeatedly as they formed a
human shield around the object of their demonstration. Others climbed
onto its limbs.
Were these tree sitters protesting logging as an ecological travesty
in an old-growth forest? Not quite. Their “tree” happens
to be a 6-foot-tall mock orange bush near the entrance to the Krieger
Center run by UCLA Early Care and Education.
But to protesting preschoolers, it’s their climbing tree,
the one their parents and nannies have to coax them out of when
it’s time to go home.
To the dismay of protest leader Peter Smith, 4, the bush is set
to be uprooted to make way for the long-awaited construction of
five classrooms that would create room for up to 100 additional
children.
One morning last week, children arrived to find red ribbons tied
around some of the trees. “Peter asked me what the ribbons
meant,” said Sue Ballentine, the center’s program director.
When the youngster heard the bad news — red-ribboned trees
were to be transplanted while the unmarked ones, including Smith’s
climbing tree, had to go — Ballentine tried to comfort him
by pointing to the many big trees that would be saved. “But
I’m too small to climb in those trees,” Peter protested.
“My heart melted right there on the spot,” Ballentine
recalled. “That bush is probably just debris to a contractor,
but it’s sacred to these kids.”
Peter, who can’t stop talking about the ill-fated bush, is
now hopeful that his classmates, his mom Liz Smith, Ballentine and
other sympathetic parents and teachers can raise the money —
estimated at up to $2,000 — to transplant the bush elsewhere
accessible to the children. They may sell T-shirts and run a booth
at the center’s annual silent auction, said Smith. “It’s
taken on a life of its own,” she said of her son’s “obsession.”
The children are learning a valuable lesson, said Patricia McDonough,
professor of education, as she tried to get her pre-schooler out
of the doomed tree. “There’s environmental awareness
going on here. ... This is giving children the sense that this is
a world they can influence."
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