Mother Earth News Fair Comes to Puyallup

In Katharine Rode's Sumner home, elegant bamboo floors add a warm touch to her kitchen and living room. “Bamboo is such a renewable resource, it can be cut heavily and grows right back” she says. “I first read about it in Mother Earth News.”

Since its first edition in 1970, the magazine Mother Earth News has been a voice for the counter-cultural, back-to-the-land movement. Forty-one years later, it's still going strong, and next weekend a fair in it's name comes to the Puyallup Fairgrounds. Locals like Rode will volunteer on the Green Team, attend numerous workshops and showcase hot sustainability topics pertinent to this area.

“I've been reading Mother Earth News off and on for 25 years,” said Rode. “It has great articles on things I want to learn about.”

The weekend event will have numerous workshops (gardening, green building, renewable energy), live music, organic and local food tasting, kids's activities, ecobuilding demonstration, a huge eco-friendly marketplace, many influential speakers, educational exhibiters (including local farms and our local South Sound Healer's Network).

“Mother Earth News has always introduced me to new topics,” Rode continued. “This upcoming fair will be like walking through the magazine and being able to interact with all the crafts and knowledge that inspire me.”

Local sustainability groups are taking the opportunity to reach out to like-minded people who will be attending.

“We'll have a booth inside the fair near the ecobuilding demonstration. Then on Sunday morning (June 5), we'll be doing a bike tour of sustainable features in downtown Puyallup,” said Andrew Jacobs, member of the group Sustainable Puyallup. “The staff at Mother Earth News have been really supportive, and want their presence at the fairgrounds to help catalyze our projects throughout town.”

The topics taught inside the fair will be echoed by the bike tour. Jacobs adds, “We'll ride by gardens, homes, and buildings where people can see healthy, sustainable food being grown, as well as green features like passive solar windows and rain gardens.”

Sustainable Puyallup is also opening their booth space to other area groups. This includes Sustainable Tacoma-Pierce and Self-Reliant Community Graham, who promote food-growing, renewable energies, and sustainability advocacy in their areas.

Sumner will be represented through an educational display of updates and vision for the Fleishchman and Corliss properties. Rode, a member of Sumner Neighborhood Association, remarked, “Having Mother Earth News come to town will not only be fun for all of us, but give us an opportunity to broaden our conversations with the wider public. My family and I are really looking forward to it.”

Mother Earth News has grown since it's founding. At first, topics dealing with rural property acquisition, new gardens, living without running water or electricity and cheap building ideas sprinkled its pages. Seminars, books, and radio shows sprang up to cover these topics in multiple formats.

Through the years, as more people in small towns and cities turned to homesteading-type lifestyles, the topics have stayed with the original self-reliant values but added urban techniques. Now you'll also find articles on biking, small-space gardening, neighborhood energy projects, etc. This will be the Mother Earth News Fair's first event in Puyallup.

Fair information: Saturday June 4, 9am-7pm, Sunday June 5, 9am-6pm, Cost: $15 for one day, $25 for the weekend. Volunteer for a 2-hour shift and get weekend admittance for free.

Sustainability Bike Tour Information: Group will be leaving the Gold Gate entrance at 10 a.m. on June 5. Dress up crazy!

Tour sites: City Hall, Puyallup Community Garden, Raingarden installations (that same day!), fruit orchards and gardens, passive solar house, Wolf Campus, etc.

Definitions

Appropriate Technology: technologies like solar ovens, photovoltaic panels, wind generators, etc which have an appropriate scale and output for the end user.

Back-to-the-land: the movement of urban dwellers moving back to rural locations and learning the skills to thrive, mostly in reference to the last big wave occuring in the 1960s and 70s.

Homesteading: having a lifestyle that is land-based and promotes self-reliance. (Admittedly this is a colonialist definition, as indigenous peoples do the same things without using the word to describe it)

Homesteading skills: traditional skills such as food preservation, spinning, weaving, blacksmithing, building, that are use in a land-based lifestyle.

Self-Reliance: lifestyle choices that allow an individual, family, or group to rely on themselves for their necessities of food, water, energy and housing.

Sustainability: promotion of techniques and lifestyles that will enable the human race to live on a healthy planet for many many generations to come.