The People

Voices of Salmon Nation

Brenna Bell and John Brush

BRENNA BELL and JOHN BRUSH are members of Cedar Moon, an 18-person intentional community on Tryon Life Community Farm in Portland, Oregon. They spoke with us in the fall of 2007 in one of the community houses on the 7-acre education and demonstration center, surrounded on three sides by Tryon Creek State Park, a 650-acre day-use forest.

John Brush: Tryon Life Community Farm took ownership of this land in January 2005 – after raising $1.6 million through a whirlwind of community outreach that got support and assistance from Metro, City of Portland, Friends of Tryon Creek State Park, the Arnold Creek Neighborhood Association, Dignity Village, ShoreBank Pacific, City Repair Project, and Equity Trust, Inc, and so many other amazing organizations, people, communities.

A long time ago the land here was a lush forest – like much of the Northwest. Then about ninety years ago it was logged to feed an iron smelter in Lake Oswego. The mythology of the land is that after WWI it housed a bootleg still. In the 1930s it was seized and sold at auction, and for the next fifty years or so it was a a family farm with geese and hogs, then after that vegetables.

Brenna Bell: Talking to everyone actually created what the Farm is now. We offered a way for people to get involved, through donations and volunteering. People saw a bunch of scrappy kids saying, “We have a good idea, and we need your help.” And it had an amazing snowball effect. By the end, in that incredible final 10-day countdown when it seemed we were in the news every day and we still had to come with $100,000, we had people streaming down the driveway to give us checks. They all started feeling a part of something.

When we were served an eviction notice in 2004, there seemed to be two stark choices. A developer owned the rights to buy the land and planned to build 23 large cookie-cutter houses. Our alternative vision for a nonprofit sustainability education center was almost universally, positively accepted. Still, I can’t tell you how many times people said, “That sounds like a great idea, but I just don’t see how you’re going to make it happen.” Kind of like the situation we face in the world as a whole!

John Brush: Looking back now, it actually helped tremendously that the land had a history of being a rental property during the 1990s because it meant that hundreds of people had come in contact with the place and had a relationship to it. There was already a foundation for the network of support that we needed.

So we had this existing network, but we also provided lots of options for people to get involved and feel a sense of ownership of the vision and the process. Normally when you read something in the newspaper, your options semm to be: write a letter to Congress or feel sad and disempowered. We included people in a much more tangible way, and that principle of inclusion is one of our guiding values today.

Brenna Bell: I am a native Northwesterner whose grandparents came on the Oregon Trail. And for me, the fact of rootedness in a bioregion has been vitally important my whole life.

When I was in college, I spent a semester in Kenya, and when the indigenous people would ask me about the plants where I was from, all I could say was, “Well, they’re big and tall and green.” And I realized that I had been living in a place but not with the place. I came home and decided to try and learn everything I could about the plants and the ecosystem.

There is this immense transience in our culture that keeps people from really creating a relationship to place. And so if you mess up your room, you can just go find another one. As long as that is an option for us, I don’t see people really taking the care to learn to know, to love, and to protect the places where they live.

Sometimes I feel like we live in a culture with a tyranny of choice: You can be anyone you want, do anything you want, live anywhere you want, and there is nothing holding you to a path or a place. I think that’s really hard on people, and we're trying to create ways for people to connect to a place.

John Brush: We’ve done quite a bit of work around visioning for the future. We’re building a place for the movements that are trying to create a richer, more beautiful alternative to the status quo of our industrialized economy and society – movements that already exist in Portland and beyond - to embody collaborative visions in practical experience.

This place will be mixed use with residential, agricultural, commercial, educational and spiritual components all playing a role. We imagine building a couple of additional structures – mostly in between the existing houses, in a sort of infill – so that eventually we reach the same population density as would have occurred under the conventional development model. But we’ll do this by intentionally creating smaller private spaces and more public spaces so that there is a greater density of resources available, with much less total resource use.

The land will be a food-forest, with a combination of habitat corridors and agricultural production and “living rooms” that people can use. All aspects of this place will reinforce the fact that people aren't separate from the places they live.

We're already doing a lot of this, like teaching people to turn their lawn into garden without digging anything, or building structures from earth. We want people who come here to bring it home with them and feel like it’s possible in their own lives and places. Becoming involved with the farm is as easy as dropping in on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday, our drop-in days. We have a lot of opportunities for people to make things their own.

Brenna Bell: We really don't want to see this as a lush oasis in an urban wasteland. That is the antithesis of our vision. We want to help be a catalyst for the entire city to transform, to be a tangible example of what is possible.

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