21st Street Urban Homestead: Women's March, Corvallis

Homestead Library

Cookbooks:

Betty Crocker Cookbook, 1958 edition

The Enchanted Broccoli Forest

Diet for a Small Planet

Chez Panisse Fruits and Vegetables and The Greens Cookbook

Gardening:

Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades and Gardening When it Counts

American Gardens of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Ann Leighton

Permaculture Handbook by Bill Mollison and The Earthcare Manual by Patrick Whitehead

Design and Philosophy:

The Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Walden by Thoreau

One Man’s Meat by E.B. White

A Beekeeper’s Year by Sue Hubbell

Chicken Tractor

Worms Eat My Garbage

The Humanuare Handbook

Greywater Design

The Home Energy Handbook

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Women's March, Corvallis

The Women’s March came to Corvallis on Saturday; when it was clear that Portland was not going to be able to organize a march, Corvallis—and many other smaller cities—stepped up and organized their own, a classic example of Thinking Globally and Acting Locally.

Corvallis is not a loud marching city. We do not shout “This is what democracy looks like” along the entire marching route, even when the organizers set the stage. We are civil, introverted, earnest engineering types. Our premier celebration was, for years, a combination of art and engineering, of lectures and music, where men in shorts and sandals discussed the viscosity of mud while watching human powered vehicles work their way through said mud on a sunny Sunday morning. We tend to walk quietly, talking to our fellow marchers, admiring the clever signs. There are a lot of dogs along for the walk.

Corvallis, however, does know what democracy looks like. Some days, it is a wall of humanity, mostly in pink and red, densely packed on the sidewalks through the park, listening to speeches, avoiding the muddy grass. Other days, it is the Raging Grannies, in full regalia, singing “Which Side Are You On” to the city council before a vote on sanctuary cities. Or it’s a scientist handing out photographs of stream erosion and channeling to the planning commission while they debate an annexation further upstream. It’s a series of letters to the editor on a local ballot measure. It’s the longest running anti-war protest in front of the courthouse, every evening from five to six. It’s a group of people showing up to move the chairs around for an eco-film festival right after the space empties out from a modern dance lesson. It is the thousands of hours Corvallis residents spend, every year, working in small and large groups to make the city, the country, the world a better place. We don’t always agree on what that looks like, so it can be a messy, time consuming process but it is Democracy. And, on Saturday, it wore a hand-knit pink hat.