For most of its history, Mendocino County has functioned both economically and culturally as a kind of colony, subordinate to centers of industrial capitalism like San Francisco. Consider, for example, the following extremely limited and decidedly non-Chamber of Commerce-friendly version of Anderson Valley history.
Pioneers flocked to the area to conquer the Pomo and steal their land. They cut down most of the trees and sent them to San Francisco, fueling the development of industry and real estate. A series of huge corporations beginning with Southern Pacific, culminating more recently with Louisiana Pacific, mopped up almost all that remained of the once mighty and majestic regional forests, in a pathologically selfish drive to turn a hefty profit no matter the cost to the real, physical world.
The hippies arrived and were soon compelled to set up pot farms in the overcut forestland to sustain themselves as part of a market economy. Gradually, bigger market forces entered the picture, and the weed industry was mostly taken over by wave after wave of greedy outsiders. Meanwhile, scores of yuppies from San Francisco and Mid-Peninsula, many of whom made had made it big in the Silicon Valley tech boom, converted hillside after hillside of oak savannah to corduroy-like rows of grapes, yuppifying and monopolizing local culture in the process.
(As an aside on Anderson Valley history: Until a few months ago, Schat’s Bakery in Ukiah featured a tourist-oriented placard about Boonville that led off with the following: “Boonville, which is in Anderson Valley, was originally inhabited by indigenous people. When the Gold Rush came in 1847, the indigenous people disappeared.” These sentences would be hilarious in their vapidness they weren't such a blatant case of sanitized and excerpted history that papers over genocide of an entire people and their culture.)
What does all of this history have to do with the main subject of this article: local efforts to create a different way of living in the here and now? Karl Marx put it best: “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the living.”
Since moving to this area three and-a-half years ago, I've been struck by how many people in Mendo are stricken with what anthropologists refer to as “colonial mentality”: a widespread sense of inferiority that stems from historical patterns of exploitation. In Mendo's case, there's a palpable sense – and I especially picked this up during my tenure as a county employee a few years back, surrounded as I was by the county's foremost bureaucrats — that our culture “up here” is backward and undeveloped, whereas that of the SF Bay Area (for example) is inherently superior.
There's also a material dimension to the weight of this “nightmare.” As it pertains to Mendo, our landbase has been horribly scarred and exploited by past generations. The economic system is a complete mess. Land is utterly unaffordable, so more than 99% of productive farmland is devoted to mind-altering cash crops: cannabis and grapes. Ecological crises and economic unraveling loom. All of these things — and many others — make it extremely daunting to even begin to consider how we might go about creating a different life both for ourselves and future generations.
The best antidote to this sense that I've experienced so far is the local “Not So Simple Living Fair” (probably an herbal antidote featuring local plants that have historically been used to alleviate depression and anxiety, like California Poppy and St. John's Wort), a workshop-driven showcase on practical rural living skills that has taken place in Boonville, at the Mendocino County Fairgrounds, for three consecutive years. Organized by the Anderson Valley Foodshed group, the most recent was this past weekend, July 27-29.
The Not So Simple Fair is a training ground for people who want to become more proficient at living off the land. Just as important, it's a celebration of local culture. It provides the best showcase currently in existence for what it is that makes Mendocino County an exciting place to live: the large numbers of people devoted to small eco-farming and “reskilling,” the idea of reskilling being to learn the basic methods for meeting one's material needs that people who lived close to the land, most often outside the market economy, have practiced in a given area. I've attended the Fair during the past two years. Each time, I've come away with a sense of pride about living in Mendo that I've gotten from no other forum.
The Fair centers around various renegade small farmers, cranks, misfits, craftspeople, indigenous people who are dedicated to maintaining cultural traditions, seed savers, hunters, builders, experts on local medicinal and edible plants. Refreshingly, the event is not celebrity-driven in the least. The featured presenters are people who have devoted more of their lives and thoughts to living long-term here in Mendo, in an ecologically balanced way, than anyone else.
Contrast this with the Solar Living Institute, which paid Robert F. Kennedy $25,000 to tout shallow lifestyle solutions to climate change in a 60-minute speech at the 2010 SolFest in Ukiah. On the other hand, the keynote speaker at this past weekend's Boonville event was Bob Cannard, a partner in a largely unknown but very successful small ecological farm in Petaluma.
Another contrast worth noting is this coming weekend's “Gaia Fest” in Laytonville, which almost exclusively centers around many proponents of the worst forms of New Age cult thinking, the cumulative effect of their overweening emphasis on “positive thinking” (e.g., You Create Your Reality With Your Thoughts) being to drive anyone who takes social change remotely seriously into deep depression. There are a few good workshops lined up, but one must excavate them on the schedule from beneath an avalanche of woo-woo.
The people who present at the Not So Simple Fair are serious, practical, and dedicated. There were five different workshop “tracks,” or themes this year, of which four related to food: Wild Foods, Energy/Shelter/Water, Food Cultivation, Farming & Gardening, and Animal Husbandry.
People from many areas of the state were drawn to the event. I met individuals and groups who traveled here from Oakland, Santa Cruz, Davis, and Fresno. A significant number of attendees live in Sonoma County. I'd guess that about two-thirds of the 300-500 people who came live in Mendo. The organizers seem to prefer a smaller but more dedicated group to a huge crowd. Thus, it's possible by the end of the weekend to recognize almost everyone who's consistently been part of the event and to develop a sense of community with them.
Another refreshing aspect of the Fair is that most of the attendees are relatively young (in a place like Mendo, that means younger than 40). Every spring and summer, a new wave of small farm interns and Worldwide Opportunities On Organic Farms (WOOF) volunteers flock to the various small farms in the area to gain new life experiences and learn about growing food. In recent years, many of them have figured out how to remain in the area because things like the Not So Simple Fair add greatly to the appeal of living here.
Of course, a primary aspect of why the event is significant is that our economy is unraveling, and severe ecological crises grow more urgent with each passing day. For obvious reasons, it's important in such a context to learn the kinds of skills the Not So Simple Living Fair offers.
I'm normally highly critical of “ethical lifestylism”: the practice of adapting one’s individual lifestyle habits (where you shop/eat/work) as a means of promoting or facilitating social change. Political change requires that we engage with politics; that is, the exercise of power at a social level.
The Not So Simple Fair certainly falls under the category of an ethical lifestyle event. That's most obvious when you consider what is absent from the event's discussion. For example, it focuses on cutting-edge methods of farming, but there are no discussions on how to combat farm labor exploitation or of the economic structures that make ethical farming so difficult on any kind of large scale.
At the same time, the event has a crucial political function. It is one modest example of how the unemployed and underemployed — rapidly growing in number — have started to organize a subsistence and trade economy outside of capitalism. Mutual aid and skill sharing are being promoted, which can certainly become dangerous to the powers-that-be if it increases in scale.
Ultimately, the development of the skills the Not So Simple fair helps to engender are hampered by a lack of access to land for a great many people. As interest in developing a subsistence basis for a fundamentally different economy and way of life continues to develop, we could do well to learn from groups like the Landless Workers Movement in Latin America. What sorts of intermediate political projects can we work on that would move us in that direction? Is it possible some day, preferably soon, to picture mass organization and occupation of lands to secure “victory garden”–style allotments, massive community gardens, and cooperative subsistence farms here in Mendo?
Perhaps. In the meantime, there's also abundant value to the sort of connection to the land the Not So Simple Fair helps to foster. One workshop I attended focused on foraging edible plants, led by Donna d'Terra of Motherland Botanical Herb School in Willits, which offers a popular program for local women who aspire to be healers and herbalists.
Toward the end of her workshop, d'Terra read a quote by Wendell Berry that captures the relationship to the natural world that so many Not So Simple attendees, me included, are cultivating. “When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be — I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought or grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."
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