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About Ruth

Ruth Malone is an Oakland resident since 1983, a founding member and co-chair of Friends of Knowland Park and a longtime Oakland neighborhood activist. Since 2007, she has been working to educate and organize environmentalists, park users, and community members to protect the park. In her day job, she is a professor of nursing and health policy at University of California, San Francisco, where she helps students study the links between health and political, social and natural environments, and conducts research on the tobacco industry and its efforts to thwart public health efforts worldwide. Ruth Malone’s Reflections Blog offers a combination of reflective essays and updates from the Protect Knowland Park Campaign, linking the fight to protect Knowland Park to broader environmental and ethical issues.

Author Archive | Ruth

Whose Offices Will be in the Planned Ridgetop Center?

By Ruth on April 27, 2012 in Oakland Politics

And Couldn’t They Be Someplace Else?

The Zoo's published depiction of the ridge-top building as seen from Golf Links Rd.

The Oakland Zoo’s development plans for Knowland Park include offices—yes, offices– in the 34,000 square foot, 3 story central gondola terminal building, which is planned to also include a restaurant and gift shop. The whole thing will be perched atop the most sensitive and pristine area of the park, a ridge where the threatened Alameda whipsnake was trapped in surveys, where a statewide rare plant community of chaparral provides cover and habitat for many kinds of animals, and where scat from large predators is regularly found. Why, you might ask yourself, would a “conservation”-minded organization decide to build a huge structure in that particular location, rather than looking for a site closer to the existing Zoo or on already-disturbed land?

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COURT ARGUMENTS HEARD

By Ruth on April 20, 2012 in Campaign Updates

Today (Thursday, April 19) the judge heard arguments in our legal case. Our attorneys argued forcefully that the massive changes to the Zoo’s plans meant that it should have been considered as a new project, rather than piggybacking on a lesser level environmental document for the old project, which lacked any information whatsoever about key project impacts and which misrepresented others. The City and Zoo attorneys, in turn, argued that we were trying to apply the wrong legal standard, that the previous Memorandum of Understanding with the community had no legal significance (see http://www.saveknowland.org/2012/04/04/bait-and-switch-how-the-zoo-and-the-city-of-oakland-used-a-1998-mou-to-mislead-the-community/ ) and should be ignored, and that the criteria for activating a key provision in the California Environmental Quality Act had not been met–namely, that there were NOT new circumstances or new impacts from the changed project. It’s hard to imagine how they can make such an argument with a straight face, but there it is.

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Bait and Switch: How the Zoo and the City of Oakland used a 1998 MOU to Mislead the Community

By Ruth on April 4, 2012 in Oakland Politics, Opinions & Editorials

The current legal case is a complicated one. Part of the difficulty arises because a very different version of the Zoo’s expansion plan was approved in 1998 than the one approved in 2011. When the Zoo presented its expansion plan in 1997, there had been considerable community outcry, because those plans were quite different from what had been originally described in the 1996 Zoo Master Plan. So, city-facilitated meetings between community representatives and the Zoo were held over a period of many months. These meetings, described as grueling by the volunteer community representatives, finally resulted in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by Dr. Joel Parrott, the executive director of the Zoo, and representatives of community groups, one of which was the direct predecessor of Friends of Knowland Park.

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21st Century Conservation

By Ruth on March 28, 2012 in Nature & Wildlife, Opinions & Editorials

Fledged swallow chicks in the nest waiting to be fed. Photo by Anna Hesser.

What does conservation mean in the 21^st century, and why is it so needed? The world faces an unprecedented loss of species as we enter the second decade of this century. As the renowned naturalist E.O. Wilson wrote, way back in 1980:

“The worst thing that can happen, will happen… Not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process going on in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us.”

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“Wisdom Sits in Places”: Knowland Park’s abiding meaning

By Ruth on March 22, 2012 in Nature & Wildlife, Opinions & Editorials

More than a decade ago, I read a book by the University of New Mexico anthropologist Keith Basso that made an enormous impression on me and forever changed the way I experience nature. Called Wisdom Sits in Places, it was a report of the authors’ several years spent studying the Apache culture of the southwestern U.S. One of its most profound contributions was to interpret the Apache relationship with place.

In many ways, it is impossible for those of us not raised within a culture to ever entirely understand it, so it is with caution that I approach trying to convey what was so immensely powerful about this little book. It’s also been many years now since it so impressed me, so it is possible that memory has embroidered my understanding. But the primary message I took from Basso’s reported conversations with tribal members and elders was that place matters –and it matters as more than mere location: Natural places reveal something to us about our relationships with the world and one another.

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