Arcata, Portland & Bellingham

The O2 Fire and Forests Road Show rolls on! Our schedule is intense, but the response we are receiving continues to propel us happily along! Humboldt County delighted us with our largest and most high-energy audience yet! A day of costumed stilting around Arcata initiated hundreds of great connections at Muddy Waters Coffee House and on campus at HSU. Over a hundred people filled a stadium-style room, exploding more than once into cheers for the Wild Siskiyou and leaving the evening with arms full of literature and words of "see you up north this summer!" We collected over a hundred hand-written letters to congress people in one day!

Our collective left jazzed with the knowledge that we infused Humboldt with the infectious buzz of a victory in the making this summer! It is heartening to know so many motivated and experienced forest defenders are fired up to keep the forests vertical in Southern Oregon. After the show, our outstanding hosts treated us to a late night music circle around a bonfire at their classic old farm house on the edge of town. We woke up to barn swallows swooping over the bus.

We spent our second day in Arcata teaching workshops at the Redwood Peace and Justice Center. The folks at the RPJC are helpful allies who operate an inspiring community resource center that supports all manner of social justice projects and eco-activist endeavors. After mailing off hundreds of letters at the post office, we turned our steel chariot north and slogged through the fog and splash of a spring downpour on the north coast. Belted kingfishers dotted our wet drive north. We stopped for a fresh salmon dinner at sunset at an ancient Yurok village site on the side of Hwy 101. Our resident Norwegian took the opportunity for a picturesque swim in the frigid, crashing surf!

We opted to negotiate a rainy late-night passage up Hwy 199, through the winding Smith River Gorge, to sleep a comical night at the Moon Mountain RV Resort in Grant's Pass! An early morning sent us traveling towards three back to back shows, two in Portland and one in Bellingham. We hopped a curb and removed some barriers to pull the big biofuel bus into the middle of campus at PSU. Students there got quite a kick out of us on our stilts, and arrived in good numbers for our show that night. Hundreds of enviro types were gathered nearby to comment on Senator Ron Wyden's imminent Wilderness bill, so we took the opportunity to outreach to allies by distributing handbills on stilts to the slightly bewildered crowds.

The PSU venue was cavernous and challenging, but the show went smoothly and the reception was awesome. The next day we drove our biodiesel bill board up another curb and around another set of barriers to park in the center of the historic campus of Reed College. Reed's student union is a laid back venue lined with wood and a cozy fireplace offering warmth on a cold, drizzly day. We packed our second Portland room in two days, for a show that felt polished and tight.

After-hours networking provided great conversations (and bad karaoke) with our allies from the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, OSPIRG, American Lands Alliance, Forest Ethics and the Oregon Natural Resources Council. The good folks at Portland Indymedia featured a raving story about our event, and attended both stumptown shows.

This communique comes from Interstate 5 as we turn our back on the Canadian border and head south to our show tonight in Olympia. Bellingham was fantastic! Our local organizers were as solid as they come and did a thorough job setting us up for a full two days of presentations and workshops. Well over a hundred people filled a large lecture hall with cacophonous applause and even a standing ovation at the end of the show! Dana Lyons opened with a song about trees, and our event was scheduled to dovetail with a concert by Joules Graves next door. It is hard to imagine a crowd being more receptive or enthusiastic than this one was. Multiple people were touched to tears and told members of our crew they were "deeply inspired" and had felt a "life changing experience"! We collected over 80 more letters and heard many rumblings of plans being made for travel to the Siskiyou this summer!

We were thrilled and mutually inspired by the uniquely holistic result of this truly collective creation. The whole is clearly greater than the sum of its parts with this road show, and each day is full of lessons for us all about how powerful we are together when we each do our small part well towards a common goal.

For our second day at Western Washington University we took over the Viking Union for a full day of well attended workshops. Topics ranged from feminism and ecodefense to fire ecology and forest policy to the strategic use of civil disobedience. One of the more exciting results of the day was a dedicated group of people energized to start a Bellingham Independent Media Center after a four-hour training with Kerul and Forrest! Everything about our Bellingham stop felt tightly planned and well orchestrated, and we even had time for late night dancing on the town Friday night!

Last night, a fun crew of locals joined us at an outrageously beautiful state park on the coast for a night of sunset birding, music, drumming and fire dancing with poi chains and staffs. It was a cheerful and animated evening in an other-worldly paradise. The islands of the Lummi Nation and the San Juans provided a mystical backdrop for Red Necked Grebes, Black Oystercatchers, Common Loons, Harlequin Ducks, and a young Bald Eagle.

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. . .

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.

And now, a report from the road...

The Oxygen Collective is on the road! The Forest and Fire Roadshow is now in full swing. We all miss the beauty and love of the Siskiyou mountains and valleys, but it has been an inspiring four days on the road for the forest.

We have already given three presentations in Oregon and California, performed hours and hours of outreach on stilts and travelled hundreds of miles on board the biodiesel bus. And we are just getting started.

Picture nine people living on a bus. Four cell phones, five wireless laptops, two video and four still cameras, four pairs of stilts and one fifteen foot metal tripod. It is a sunrise to midnight odyssey.

Our energy remains high and our trip bird list is already over 60 so we could hardly imagine a better project to be part of. Continue on here for updates from each stop and check back every couple days for more updates.

Taklima, OR: Our first performance was an offering to a Siskiyou community that has fought for their forests for decades. It was with a great deal of trepidation that we stood before the crowd of 85, but our worries were for naught. The folk of the Illinois Valley were amazingly generous with their applause and their donations. We were still figuring our way before a crowd and the IV input has been invaluable.

Chico, CA: We had two days in Chico and used every minute. Our push was for letters to Senators Boxer and Feinstein and we didn't leave town until we had 100 handwritten, many from our stiltwalking and tabling at Saturday Market. We also spent an afternoon in a downtown park giving four trainings to dozens of people. It was in the park that we refueled with 40 gallons of biodiesel made by local activists from reclaimed veggie oil. Our Chico stop also included four radio interviews, network television interviews and a newspaper story.

Mills College, Oakland: By our third presentation, we were finally tightening up. We also got a 100% response from our request to the audience to write letters. But our great success at this women's college has been a commitment from five women to come to the Siskiyou this Summer to work to defend the forest. Oh yeah, and we identified an Allen's Hummingbird. Cool.