Earth Abides: Canticle farm in the sierra foothills
History
Earth Abides is a 100-acre, off-grid land project located in Sheep Ranch, CA on Sierra Miwuk territory, 130 miles from Oakland. Earth Abides was founded in 1976 in the lineage of the Catholic Worker movement, by people seeking to create a Catholic Worker Farm – one of the pillars of Peter Maurin’s three step program of social reconstruction (round table discussions, houses of hospitality, and farm communes or agronomic universities). According to Maurin, Catholic Worker co-founder, “People will have to go back to the land. The machine has displaced labor, the cities are overcrowded. The land will have to take care of them.”
The land served many purposes and people in its 46 year chapter as a Catholic Worker Farm, continually as an organic farm and since the 1980s as a place of retreat and refuge for the San Francisco HIV/AIDS community. You can read more about Earth Abides on its old website here. In July 2019 this special place was gifted by the Earth Abides Land Trust Association to Canticle Farm. We are so honored and moved by this act of boundless generosity.
What’s happening now?
The first page of this next chapter is beginning to be written, with the extended Canticle Farm community in discernment as to how best to carry on the deep legacy of the farm and live out Canticle’s values of community, service, spirituality, nonviolence, regeneration, simplicity and healing of historical divides in this new sister location.
Currently living on the land are three community members. They are focused on stewardship of the lands through daily practices that facilitate a deeper kinship with the fire, water, soil and forest ecologies which have been shaped by cultural practices from the people currently known as the Central Sierra Miwuk, while also tending to the necessity of cleaning up the less than harmonious impacts of previous settler occupants that take the shape of dense forests littered with plastics and metals. Our prayer is to clean up the messes of colonization as best we can and effort for right relationship with the first people to create a beautiful sanctuary for lives beyond our own.
Much support is needed, in the form of labor, tools, materials and financial resources. We welcome your collaboration!
How can you help?
- Volunteer – we are grateful for any volunteers that want to visit for a few days, a week, or a month to help with farm projects, needed maintenance, cleaning and repair work. Email us to arrange this.
- Donate – we need to raise a minimum of $50,000 in 2022 to sustain the land – taxes, fuel, basic repairs, etc. We are also facing a $250k+ need in deferred maintenance and care for the structures and forest. Paypal here or address below.
- Bring your people – we can host donation-based gatherings/retreats for values-aligned groups in Catherine’s House, the retreat house, which sleeps 10, with a big kitchen and a gathering space that can seat 15 in circle. Lots of space for camping.
- Wish list:
- Tracked Skid-Steer with forestry and construction implements
- Mini Excavator
- 1 ton Truck
- 9” chipper
- Bulk fuel storage
Keep in Touch
We have an email list – Friends of Earth Abides – for folks interested in receiving updates, invitations to events, opportunities to volunteer etc. You can click that link to request to join the listserv.