San Francisco and Stanford

This update comes as Priscilla, the biodiesel bus, winds her way up the Redwood Highway in the darkness. Shadows of giant trees fly by, shrouded in thick fog. The O2 hit the Bay Area with a whirlwind of back-to-back shows, media interviews and flash outreach in San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Stanford University and Oakland. We distributed over 15,000 e-mail announcements, plastered the city with posters and called in our urban allies to take note of the need for action to defend the Wild Siskiyou.

So far, we have collected hundreds of hand written letters to Senators Feinstein and Boxer, which are two for one because they will be forwarded to Senator Wyden in Oregon. We have also taken hundreds of images of people declaring their support for the Wild Siskiyou with speech bubbles that we will send as digital photo-postcards to decision makers.

Collective members gave a tight, half-hour interview about the "Biscuit Fire Recovery" Plan on KPFA, the Bay Area's most highly regarded and widely heard progressive radio station. We also appeared live on the independent station KPOO, as well as Enemy Combatant Radio, a streaming web station housed with SF Bay Independent Media Center.

Our San Francisco show rocked the Cell Space with a high-energy and inspirational show that integrated art and theatre deeper into our performance than we ever have before. Cell Space is a volunteer-run collective warehouse space that houses an art gallery, a metal and wood shop, and a great multi-purpose event space that serves as an activist venue and visionary cultural center for the Bay Area.

The show included new live music by Becky White and spoken word performance by Nathan Pundt, along with our regular presentations highlighting the science, politics, ecology and economics surrounding post-fire salvage logging. We opened with stilt walkers lighting candles for a central altar as Peg Millett called in the four directions with her medicine wheel song. All of this was capped with a rousing call to action to the Siskiyou this summer, accentuating the role of direct action as an effective tactic when all other avenues have failed to enforce the will of public opinion.

One of the most exciting parts of the night was the fantastic feedback we received from our most diverse audience yet. Seasoned urban organizers and experienced forest defenders were joined by an assemblage of performance artists, patry-throwers, friends, family and interested folks who were drawn in one way or another with little previous exposure to the issues at all.

We partied the night away in San Francisco and many of us watched the sun rise over the strangely beautiful, industrial landscape of the city's warehouse district. Saturday morning half the crew drove to Palo Alto for O2 flash promotion and street stilting, while the bus traveled to the East Bay to fill our tank once more with biodiesel. The bus could not fit into the bay at Oasis Biofuels, the only people currently selling B100 in the Bay Area, so we jumped into action and transferred 125 gallons into the bus with a hand pump- five gallons at a time!

Our travel to Stanford offered a sobering reminder of the perils of operating a 36,000 pound, 40-foot, triple axle vehicle when we veered an inch too far right entering the San Mateo Bridge, shattering the glass of a toll booth with the steel red heart of our trusty tripod mounted on the side of the bus. Whoops.

We exited that ordeal just in time to arrive on campus at Stanford University to set up for our Saturday night show. White throated swifts darted above the imperial pillars and an unusual jet-black tree squirrel ran across our path. The impressive architecture and ivy-league, academic environment at Stanford provided yet another stark contrast to our lively journey. The attentive crowd was receptive and enthusiastic and we helped re-birth an inactive campus environmental club with a spontaneous meeting at the end of our presentation! One of our best successes is that there are consistently multiple people at each stop who excitedly say they will see us in the Siskiyou this summer!

We drove north late into the night through the city and across the Golden Gate to camp in Tennessee Valley, a lush coastal canyon just north of the Bay. Easter Sunday was a day to sleep in and catch up- and our walks through the willows and along the steep cliffs offered a long look at a bobcat and pushed our trip bird list over 80 species strong!

As a final note, we just heard that the Bush appointed timber lobbyist in charge of the Forest Service, Mark Rey, timber industry scientist-for-hire John Sessions and former OSU school of forestry dean Hal Salwasser are coming to Ashland, OR for the Society of American Foresters conference at SOU May 5th through 7th. These men are largely responsible for orchestrating the looming plan for the largest logging project in the history of the US, and their visit provides an unparalleled opportunity for anyone who may be interested in letting their feelings on this plan be known. . .

Posted by Forrest at April 12, 2004 09:29 AM | Category(s): Fire & Forests Roadshow