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Seeking an alternative to America’s consumer culture, hundreds of back-to-the-land families coalesced around Poet Laureate Gary Snyder and settled on the San Juan Ridge in the late ‘60s. Repeatedly threatened by corporate Goliaths intent on clear-cutting the Sierra forests, damming the Yuba River, arson, and polluting the Ridge with open-pit gold mining, the community organized to defend their homesteads. Their success overcoming these seemingly impossible obstacles has created national models of sustainability. Now they are facing their greatest threat of all: climate driven wildfires.
A Radical Thread is set against the dramatic scars of 19th century hydraulic gold mining and told through Marsha Stone’s 17-year collaborative project stitching an 83-foot tapestry visualizing the Ridge’s story in twelve narrative embroidered panels. Shelly Covert, the spokesperson for the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe credits the community’s activism for helping set the stage for cultural reparations. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder’s prescient archival footage about the environmental costs of fossil fuels are combined with his faith in the Ridge’s continued vitality. And Tapestry Illustrator Jennifer Rain Crosby demonstrates how its creation embodies the ethos of the community.
But the main character is the tapestry itself that depicts a community originating with much optimism and hope, runs into multiple challenges, grows and learns as it survives, faces the existential threat of climate change, and comes together to understand new ways of sustainability for future generations. The fact that many voices contribute to the community’s narrative, reflects the power of their collective nature as well the process of making the tapestry. A Radical Thread explores what can happen when a community truly dedicates itself to “living lightly on the land.” As second-generation Ridge member Caleb Dardick says, the Ridge endures because each member will step up and say, “I want to add my stitch.”
