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Karl Linn was a landscape architect, educator, and psychologist. Although he was trained in and had careers in these fields, it was what he did with his knowledge and talents that was truly remarkable. Karl was a man who lived his vision. Before he came to Berkeley he had made dramatic things happen in communities throughout the United States. He was known for creating community where there was little evidence of it, in places where there was little cause for hope. Knowing the allure of making gardens come alive, Karl organized people to transform their neighborhoods, many in desperate need of reclamation. In the process they created friendship and beauty in their community. That work was much of his life before he came to Berkeley.
Karl made many things happen. He was a founder of the organization Architects, Designers, and Planners for Social Responsibility (ADPSR). As a result of his vision, a large number of young professionals have organized within ADPSR, many of whom live in Berkeley, to promote and realize seminal environmental ventures, including green building practices and the use of alternative materials in construction. Karl’s vision was responsible for what is now a growing core of people who started a Green Resource Center in Berkeley, built the straw bale addition to the City’s Nature Center at the Marina, and created a “Green Map” guide to the large number of environmental businesses in the City.
As part of Earth Island Institute Karl created, along with David Brower and Carl Anthony who is now at the Ford Foundation, the Urban Habitat Project intended to reach inner city communities with the Institute’s environmental mission.
Over ten years ago Karl began to set his sights on new community gardens at Peralta and Northside Avenues. Two pieces of acreage, full of weeds and surrounded by chain link fencing, sat idle near the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) train tracks. By sheer dint of Karl’s considerable will, and using as many collaborations as he could possibly harness, Karl persuaded BART to agree to allow the community to use its land for gardens. That was just the beginning. Karl’s dream was that the residents who lived nearby, many of whom were apartment dwellers, could be embraced into the new gardens—and, indeed they were. Karl began organizing neighbors, person by person, extending his considerable warmth to person after person, inviting them to meetings, sculpting the imagination and talents of the landscape architects, artists, and builders who would realize and shape the destiny of the land they’d acquired. Many found themselves, shovel in hand, digging the outlines of garden plots, planning murals and stone art, building ponds, erecting fetishes, claiming and shaping what have become cherished gardens full of surprises and treasures.
The Peralta/Northside gardens are renown for their beauty, tranquility, landscaping, and most important of all, organic food production. Sculptures, murals, artistic gateways, a plenitude of flowers and vegetables. Karl arranged for businesses to donate materials, newspapers featured events, groups of neighbors spent many a weekend up to their knees in mud to create a whimsical Cobb structure complete with a wildflower roof. The gardens represent, today, a work of love always in progress. Weddings happen there, peace gatherings, solstice celebrations. Karl’s drive, his tenacity, and his vision to merge culture and nature inside of urban spaces made these gardens happen. Karl Linn was widely admired. On the occasion of his 80th birthday in March 2003, he was celebrated by hundreds of friends, admirers, gardeners and neighbors who gathered out of appreciation and love of Karl and his work.
Karl’s vision didn’t stop at creating gardens. He was seminal in creating Berkeley EcoHouse, a nonprofit environmental organization dedicated to hands-on learning and promotion and practice of healthful and ecological living. Karl’s leadership helped raise funds from the community to purchase the house, install green materials and solar energy, and begin solar and energy conservation programs in Berkeley schools. Under Karl’s leadership the house was completely solar powered and has developed its organic and permaculture gardens. One would think that the gardens and the EcoHouse were enough, but Karl’s dreams were unbounded. Karl was an historian and had a keen respect for knowing one’s place. As a result, the Ohlone Greenway interpretive exhibit seemed to sprout under our very eyes, a project of a dedicated group of local historians. The corridor of the Ohlone Greenway where BART comes out of the tunnel toward points north has become an interpretive historic walk of Westbrae’s history. Sculpture, murals, art exhibits, and plantings celebrate the historic legacy of that neighborhood from the Ohlone Indians to the early settlers to modern times. Karl organized gardeners, artists, and native peoples, and acquired BART’s active support. By this time, BART officials had become Karl Linn champions because of what he had helped create out of not much more than parcels of weeds.
Karl Linn realized yet another of his dreams on the Ohlone Greenway, dreams that have become legacies, gifts really, to the community.
Aside from the gardens, the interpretive greenway, ADPSR, and EcoHouse, Karl was a seminal leader in the Palestinian/Israeli Dialog group. These discussions were designed to model the kind of dialog that the participants hoped could be achieved between the two peoples who were experiencing so much violent and tragic conflict. Karl was raised in Germany amidst beautiful and abundant orchards his family kept. That life was soon to be wiped out by the Nazi advance. Karl fled Germany as a child and the family resettled in Palestine. His early experiences of life on the land and the injustices he suffered and witnessed both in Germany and in Palestine shaped his commitment to the land and to social justice. Karl was dedicated and fearless in his support of social justice and for a peaceful resolution to the deepening conflict in the Middle East.
Karl Linn was a man of action and a teacher. He had an unsurpassed commitment to building environmentally healthy and beautiful communities, to realizing human potential in all of its facets, and to achieving a just society. For these goals he remained extraordinarily steadfast and purposeful. He will be remembered as a man who left a deep and lasting mark both on the land and its people.
