The Land: its people
Just north of the sprawling metropolis formerly known as Yerba Buena, there lies a small plot of land where men and women still cultivate good herbs (but mostly vegetables) of all sorts with practiced hands. The plot lies not far outside of the city-scape, near a small town nestled against a lagoon. The town is isolated—its inhabitants keep to themselves. The local estuary, where saline ocean meets fresh mountain runoff, has long been a site of abundance. Flooding deposits nutrients in the surrounding soils often enough that the local humans liken their underfoot humus to chocolate cake. The land is rich and tectonically separated from the rest of North America. It has always nurtured the people who inhabit it, and in return, the humans protect the land.
Today, this plot is known as Star Route Farms. I came into contact with the farm in one of my previous undergraduate classes while it was under its previous ownership. Now it belongs to the University of San Francisco from which I am about to graduate. My fellow environmental studies seniors and I are tasked with telling the story of the farm. During our journey, a more cohesive underlying picture has formed about the town of Bolinas and the potential for people like us—students from the big city—to have a positive impact here.
A three pronged fork has woven the picture together. The influential parties are as follows: The educators in the town; the town’s agricultural community; and ourselves—students, who play the role of foreign visitors. The picture is one of an evolving community, a progressive educational mindset, and the potential for the integration of these realms to take place on a storied farm. An array of community members whom we have enjoyed meeting and interviewing generously welcomed us into the fold and shared their stories openly. Most of them support the possibility of future USF students learning and bettering themselves in their town and, ideally, intermixing with citizens in a mutually beneficial way. We have been asked whether USF students on the Bolinas campus will merely add to the weekend tourist traffic that this idyllic town receives ever increasingly, or whether we will do something? I hope to prove the latter.
It has been brought to our attention by coastal Miwok descendent Skyroad Webb, that the indigenous inhabitants of this estuary historically only granted passage to travelers from other parts of the coast if a relative of the local tribe were among the traveling party. Colonization and development by European descended settlers has left the eco- socio-landscape of the area forever altered. That being the case, one thing has stayed the same: despite the overall hospitality we have received, it still holds true that the people who consider themselves local to this estuary, this lagoon, and this land, harbor a healthy skepticism towards outsiders. This attitude stems back to a moratorium on new water shares implemented by local government last century. That legislation has been effective in keeping the town exclusive, but that exclusivity has resulted in an increasingly wealthy demographic.
The Education: integration with the alluvial
This aforementioned shift in demographic was described to me by a council of educators tasked with creating an outdoor education program for the K-through-12 Bolinas-Stinson school district. They are witnessing families with children being pushed out of town, or even worse, deterred from moving here in the first place due to increases in property taxes and costs of living. As the area gets richer, its population gets older. Given the encroachment of cellphones, video games, and other immersive technologies into the lives of the children the town retains, the council perceives an increasing need for Bolinas’ young community to interact with and connect to the land in new ways. Interplay between kids and the outdoors has the potential to be beneficial to the land and the children symbiotically. The council’s mission statement outlines their goals for their student body, and from our outside perspective, it also reveals what we believe are the ideological pillars of the town itself. It reads as follows:
The Bolinas-Stinson School Young Land Stewards program aims to create individual empowerment through self aware engagement and collaboration to create positive impact on the land and the community. Our students will learn the values of:
Respect for Diversity
Responsibility
Cooperation
Compassionate Community Care Being in the Wild Outdoors
The Bolinas primary school within which these values are being enacted is physically surrounded by Star Route Farms’ pastures on all sides. Back on the other side of the Golden Gate in San Francisco, USF’s own Melinda Stone (who is a Bolinas resident), recently wrote these words within the original proposal that suggested USF purchase the farm, “USF West Marin Campus will be an agriculture-nature-community hub that cultivates, supports, and sustains transformative learning and research, educating leaders with a deep understanding of social justice and regenerative living systems.”
These two statements bring together the educational side of this town’s mind in a simple and leading way. The best community is not one constituted merely of people, but one of cooperative peoples to which the land is as much an object of compassion as their fellow neighbor.
To understand what fostered such a pervasive ideology, the history of the town must be examined. That history is a twisting tale with a consistent center-point: Agriculture.
The Agri-History: how plots shape plots of land
The imprint of past indigenous inhabitants is still evident in Bolinas’s estuary today— artifacts recovered near the lagoon are in the local museum on full display. Our tale begins there:
Coastal Miwok and other indigenous peoples live in harmony with the estuary and maintain its abundance for centuries, if not millennia, subsisting off the flora and fauna within.
The first people to ‘own’ the land, in the western sense, are the Garcia family of Spanish military notoriety. Rafael Garcia receives a Spanish land grant including what is now Star Route. After his daughter, Ramona Garcia, marries Gregorio Briones in 1822, the land is given to Gregorio in 1837 as the Garcias migrate north to Olema. The Garcia family’s dealing of the land prevents its return to indigenous ownership.
The Garcia’s establish a ranch. They host community events, dinners, and even rodeos on the farm. (A hotel built during that era still serves as housing for Star Route Farm employees today.)
In the years following, ranches crop up in every tributary, every flume. A thriving maritime community develops, with seaman sailing schooners out of the shallow lagoon to bring crops, livestock and foods to the burgeoning city to the south. The hunger of urban growth provides needs that the people of Bolinas can fill. A rich agricultural tradition is established around the lagoon.
Fast forward to the 20th century. Anti-Vietnam war sentiment and disillusionment with the status quo spark a “back to the land movement.” This quiet town, with its unique demographic, isolated vibes, and history of food production, becomes a hub for innovation and beatnik poetry. Marion Weber and her husband Warren purchase a farm with organic ideals in mind. Warren writes, as a young man, that,
“...Agribusiness oligarchies increasingly control the land, the production, and the marketing of the US’s food supply. The soil is depleted by chemicals and monoculture. Pesticides are threatening numerous species of wildlife. Mining and clearcutting are raping the land of natural contours and erosion protection. Leapfrog development blights our open spaces. The story goes on without sufficient counterplot.”
— The Town that Fought to Save Itself (1976)
And so, as Rachel Carson brings this destruction into focus on the national stage, a counterplot forms in Bolinas. Citizens of the lagoon position themselves at the center of a reinvigoration of the farming tradition which has long been the lifeblood of this small community.
In addition to Warren and Marion, this reinvigoration involves a man by the name of Bill Niman. He reshapes what it means to humanely raise beef by way of “thoughtful slaughter.” His farm, originally purchased in 1969, helps him spread worldwide influence —singlehandedly improving the global beef industry.
The reinvigoration is a movement.
It sees an English woman by the name of Aggie Murch move to America. She becomes a farmer because she is, in her words, “too tall to become a debutante.” Yet if a debutante is a member of a fashionable society, she achieves that in her own way as she continues to paint the culture of her new town with compassionately raised plants and animals. Her farm is still painstakingly fashionable in its wholistic design and productivity. She raises horses destined for the silver screen alongside apples destined to become hard cider, among many other crops. To this day, she reminds the youth of the difference between what they want and what they need.
In recent years it motivates a son known to the locals as Mickey, to innovate by flipping the concept of ‘point-of-sale’ into a pillar of community trust and reciprocity, all in the name of better accessibility to delicious veggies, grown locally. His honor-system farm stand is an institution on the road entering the town.
It attracts a pragmatic female farmer named Annabelle Lenderink who travels the world to find exotic plants which will thrive in this unique California chaparral climate. She simply states that her multicultural crops are, “more fun.” She manages Star Route today.
It sees a local man named Peter Martinelli start his career laying irrigation pipe for Warren while attending school at U.C. Berkeley. Peter gets into organics because he believes in it. He knows that it is a better way to treat the land and acquire food for a local community. In the late 80’s he becomes a delivery driver, then a sales manager, and eventually starts his own farm on his grandfather’s land, just down the road. When organic farming becomes big business in the early 2000’s, he sticks true to his motivations. He continues to carry on the legacy of local organic farming in Bolinas today. His Fresh Run Farms has recently become part of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust, indefinitely securing its future as agricultural land and wild habitat.
All of these people have some amount of experience working on or with the small plot of land within arms reach of a school yard named Star Route Farms.
The Future Students: what can become?
Peter Martinelli believes that the university’s acquisition of the farm is an opportunity for Bolinas’s regional knowledge base to move forward. He sees his way of life and that of his neighbors threatened by industry and development. His goal is to see West Marin’s green belt permanently protected. Students spending time learning the ways of the land on the same farm where he began his career, to his mind, is a step in the right direction.
That said, we, as a group of students hailing from all parts of the world, very much fall under the aforementioned category of ‘outsider.’ With this investigation of the farm’s story and its situated-ness in the lives of Bolinas locals and future USF students alike, we hope to show we intend to understand this place before we enter it and start digging around. Permaculturists, like those who work at the RDI institute near Bolinas, will be the first to tell you that any place should be observed for a long time—in order for it to be properly understood—before work begins.
We understand we must tread lightly, yet purposefully. It will be a privilege for our successors to continue to work as engaged activists studying environmentalism surrounded by such a rich tradition of land stewardship. In the words of Bolinas locals, “any perceived opposition between the ideologies of farmers and environmentalists is rooted in fallacy.” A farmer who respects his land and cares for it in a holistic way is an environmentalist at the most fundamental level. The ideology in this town and the hardworking people who continue to stoke the fire of resistance against human-land dissonance, have created a solid foundation. Where do we build from here?
In the words of renowned Bolinas poet Joanne Kyger:
And with March a Decade in Bolinas
Just sitting around smoking, drinking and telling stories,
the news, making plans, analyzing, approaching the cessation
of personality, the single personality understands its demise. Experience of the simultaneity of all human beings on this planet, alive when you are alive. This seemingly inexhaustible sophistication of awareness becomes relentless and horrible, trapped. How am I ever going to learn enough to get out.
The beautiful soft and lingering props of the Pacific here. The back door bangs
So we’ve made a place to live here in the greened out 70’s
Trying to talk in the tremulous morality of the present Great Breath, I give you, Great Breath!
— Going On (1984)
With that, I turn to a simple, yet emphatic phrase I overheard from people just sitting around smoking, drinking and telling stories in Bolinas’ Smiley’s tavern on a rainy Saturday in April. “When the youth stand up, you know an issue is of importance.”
Maybe not only the youth of the town of Bolinas, but the the youth of world at large, need a greater sense of interconnectedness between individuals, community and the land. Maybe here on a lagoon fed by the Pacific, on a farm shaped in the greened out 70’s, a new generation of young leaders can learn to experience the simultaneity of all beings on this planet. Students that dedicate themselves to the study of planetary stewardship are standing up and asserting themselves through their education, and those are the young people who can benefit community-making from all sides the most. As graduating seniors, we are on our way out the back door, but we hope to leave it open, so the town of Bolinas and the greater USF community can find the morality of their present, and share in continuing Great Breath.
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