Visits to Santa Rosa & Davis

Our dynamic adventure continues to unfold and uplift! Serendipity and support are regular features of our days, and the collective is functioning as a true collaboration, even with the little sleep and the thousand little stresses.

After leaving our sheltered oasis with Redwood Mary at Mills College in Oakland, the bus and our merry crew crossed the North Bay to rally our allies in Sonoma County. A Golden Eagle graced our pilot car along the way. We started with some flash outreach on stilts in Sebastopol, and then pulled up to the New College Campus in Santa Rosa.

Our show there was smooth and sweetly received, and the old brick building made for a great venue. Biodiesel Betty was our gracious host for the night and we learned about many inspiring permaculture projects, biodiesel collectives and community activist adventures happening in Sonoma County. The O2 hosted a rousing after party with the locals on our bus as it was parked in an old rail yard among the train carcasses.

After a day of errands, publicity and outreach for our upcoming stops, we set out late for the domes at UC Davis. We arrived in the middle of the night to a beautifully surreal pocket of progressive consciousness and alternative living plopped square in the middle of the corporate campus of UC Davis. The 14 domes are an 'innovative housing' project encompassed by a common area of green grass, shade trees, organic gardens and chickens free ranging all around. Yellow Billed Magpies call from the trees all day, Swainson's Hawks are often overhead and a Nuttall's Woodpecker is a resident of their community garden.

Our stellar host went over the top organizing our stay at Davis, creating a silk screen poster for chalk board art advertising our events, and setting us up with a permit to park our bus and table right in the middle of the campus quad for a blitz of outreach, stilting and letter gathering.

Two O2 members inaugurated a well-attended lecture series on sustainability, while others gave presentations to classes on environmental ethics and environmental law. Our main presentation was a great success, with over 75 folks attending, and we followed up the next day with some informal workshops back at the domes.

We were all saddened to send Stu home, but glad to welcome Becky and Nathan on board as they returned from Indonesia.

This update is being written from the Greenpeace warehouse in San Francisco as two of our members give a live radio interview on KPFA and the rest of us prepare to go stilt around the city promoting our show at Cellspace tonight.

Posted by Forrest at April 9, 2004 09:32 AM | Category(s): Fire & Forests Roadshow