Ever since college, when she took part in a single political rally, Gwen Minor had been content to stay on the sidelines when it came to protests. That is, until an 8.5-by-11 inch piece of paper pinned to a tall oak tree caught her attention.
Just days later in September, Minor climbed the tree — and refused to come down for the next eleven hours. City streets employees who showed up later that morning with orders to begin cutting down the tree left when they saw Minor, and her protest started a debate about the place of trees in today’s Redwood City.
The podcast below explores Minor’s ideas about how Americans’ attitudes toward trees might change in the future and how she’s planning to continue engaging local citizens.
Liam Kane-Grade is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he majored in journalism, English with a creative writing emphasis, and Classics. Throughout his undergraduate education, he worked as a reporter for the Sauk Prairie Star, covering the environment, technology and municipal governments. In 2012, Liam was an editorial intern with Wisconsin People & Ideas, the magazine of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters.
At the University of Wisconsin, Liam received the School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s Outstanding Senior Award, an honorable mention in the campus-wide senior thesis competition, and the creative writing program’s Charles M. Hart Writers of Promise Award. In addition, he co-taught a University of Wisconsin course for undergraduate transfer students and served on the university’s Letters & Science Faculty Honors Committee, which oversees honors program curricula and administers student and faculty grants and awards.
