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Over two years have passed since I began writing articles for Mother Pelican . I embarked on this personal-political narrative of globalization and bioregionalism at EcoVillage Ithaca, New York, continued through Sage Co-Housing in Boulder, Colorado (both communities, predominately white and upper-middle class) to Pontiac, Michigan (a former General Motors factory town, now impoverished) where we converted a school bus to our eco-art installation tiny home. From there we traveled to Earthaven Ecovillage in North Carolina—where we made our home for two years. Following challenges with racial justice and eco-conscious living in our community, our travels in the LoveBus continued across the United States, through raging fires in Oregon[1] (visible from outer space) and California; and, raging economic disparity on Colorado’s Front Range. Finally, we landed on April 1st, 2021: the Garden of Eden, the orchard and animal husbandry breadbasket of the Western Slope Rocky Mountains.

 

The ancestral land of the Ute Nation,[2] Paonia, Colorado (originally peony , but intentionally misspelled by the settler colonialists in 1891) our home for the past t wo years, is the quintessential embodiment of synergistic opposites. Residing at the juncture of mountain and high desert, extreme political differences thrive side-by-side. Our North Fork Valley is known for its gun-toting big ranchers, coal miners (the neighboring West Elk Coal Mine is the third largest in Colorado), glyphosate/Roundup addicts,[3] anti-immigration zealots, and dangerously homophobic, fundamentalist body-phobic Christians. Yet, equally present are the Pagan off-grid[4] artist-activist, hippie-homesteading, garlic-braiding, beekeeping, cheesemaking, yak rearing, herbal medicine conjuring, gleaning, seed-swapping, wild-weed cultivating, beer-brewing, methamphetamine-making, decolonized/decentralized alternative banking, creative self-sustaining entrepreneurs, permaculturist, natural-building, tiny-home dwelling, body-worker fermentation fiends, farmers, and midwives—including a smattering of Jews, Buddhists, and Baha’i followers.

 

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