Mar/Apr 2014
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Not a Drop
Voices of Drought. “Personally,” says Erin Axelrod, “I am peeing outside every chance I get. I’m not flushing my toilet. Anytime I take a bath, I keep the water in the bath and use a bucket to pull water out to flush.” She continues her list. “I keep a pot in my kitchen sink, I…
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Sharp Edged
A new group of butchers open shop just as the County closes down. Lying on a marble table at the front of the room, a body is draped with a clean white cloth, a slim hacksaw placed nearby. An aproned man with a thick metal chain around his waist approaches the body and removes the…
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Speaking for the Soil
Naomi Starkman communicates for legislative change. Pepsi One won’t kill you, as long as you don’t drink an entire can. “Natural flavors” are genetically engineered. Some 5.1 billion pounds of pesticides are applied to U.S. crops each year, a direct health threat to the estimated 2.4 million farmworkers who tend them. These and other stats…
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Word, Words, Words
Your words can change the world. You know you’ve arrived at the rural Petaluma ranch Douglas Gayeton shares with his wife, Laura Howard-Gayeton, because you can literally see the writing on the walls. The ranch walls. Gayeton, 53, is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose unique “information art” includes a heavy dose of his own…
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Fire + Water
Wine and beer make room for a new boom in spirit distillation. You could be smelling one of any number of things,” Adam Spiegel says matter-of-factly as we quite literally sniff about the 750 square feet that currently comprises the heart of his 1512 Spirits distillery in Rohnert Park. Rye grain, steam, malt—who knows what’s…
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Letters of Intent
Sonoma County aims to be the first 100 percent sustainable wine region in the U.S. OK, here’s a word that sounds good: Sustainability. But what does it mean? Even the dictionary is of little use: “The property of being sustainable.” All right, let’s go to the root. Sustainable: “Able to be maintained at a certain…
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This Is Life
Meet farmer Oscar Orozco Garcia, radical spiritual libertarian. To prepare to have his photo taken after an interview, farmer Oscar Orozco Garcia runs through the rain to his truck and grabs a serape, a corked drinking gourd, and a homemade axe with a handle he carved from an oak branch. A tall, handsome man, he…
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Growing Farmers
Nearly 150 years old, the Grange movement is just getting started. The Sebastopol Grange sits on a neglected section of Highway 12 surrounded by not a whole lot. The Laguna de Santa Rosa, of course. An auction house. A consignment Western shop. A gas station. It’s just a building by the side of the road…
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Grow Your Own Money
How price vs. value creates different economic realities. For those uneducated in the arcane world of economics, understanding how our purchasing behavior impacts the local economy can be like visiting well, an arcane world. Prices, we know. We live and breathe them. But value is not so straightforward. If we only make purchasing decisions based…
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Defining Moments
A Letter from the Editor. One of the many delights of pulling together a bimonthly publication is watching certain threads emerge. For this March/April edition, the thread that became most dominant as we reported it is the difficulty of defining words and terms that we use every day. It began with a visit to filmmaker…