The October issue of the Portland Monthly includes a story about Cedar Moon, the intentional community that shares space with TLC Farm.

While the pictures are beautiful, and the quotes are (almost) accurate, the article has several glaring factual errors that we need to publicly correct. Below is a letter Brenna Bell - Cedar Moon resident and President of the Tryon Life Community Farm board of directors, sent to the Editor - to clarify the article's confusion between Cedar Moon & TLC Farm, followed by a list of the factual inaccuracies of the story.

To the Editor,
I appreciated Bart Blasengame's reflection on the Cedar Moon community in the October issue of the Portland Monthly. However, he made some significant factual errors. First, he mischaracterized Tryon Life Community Farm (TLC Farm) as the “5-acre garden of Cedar Moon”. In fact, TLC Farm is a 501(c)(3) non-profit community sustainability center that manages the education & demonstration programs on the land. It was TLC Farm, not Cedar Moon, that successfully ran the campaign to protect the land from becoming a housing development. It is TLC Farm, not Cedar Moon, that gives educational tours & workshops, receives donations, and manages the outdoor kindergarten & summer camps.

Cedar Moon is the intentional community that shares the property with TLC Farm and is a separate legal & financial entity. To be very clear, Cedar Moon does not receive money from the activities and programs of TLC Farm – all residents currently work in town in a variety of professions. Personally, I am an environmental attorney. Other members of the community include several teachers, a community organizer, a midwife, a farmer's market manager, and a landscape designer.

Also, the article incorrectly stated that we give 15 hours a week to the garden and other Cedar Moon projects. Actually, Cedar Moon residents each commit to giving 5 hours a week to Cedar Moon and 10 to TLC Farm programs, though many give more. While Cedar Moon residents do make up the core of TLC Farm's volunteer base, hundreds of volunteers who don't live on the land have been crucial to TLC Farm's success as a public sustainability education center.

While this model of sharing land has proven hard for many to understand – Portland Monthly is far from the first media outlet to confuse the two entities – it is a model that allows for dense and complementary uses of the land. For more information about Tryon Life Community Farm as a prototype for sustainability, permaculture, and social ecology, I encourage readers to visit the website www.tryonfarm.org.

Sincerely,
Brenna Bell, Esq.

There many other errors in this article. The following is a list in order of appearance. However, the most fundamental failing of the piece relates to style and omission. Essentially, the article serves to reinforce stereotypical, stylized images of "hippies" and "communes" without describing either explicitly or indirectly the many ways in which we undermine the myth of lazy, irrelevant, self-indulgent, naive flower children.

In other words, the throwaway comments ("wild and woolly hippies", "lost colony", and "encampment") and the overall otherizing voice ignore the many serious and remarkable accomplishments we've achieved, and the complexity of our makeup and relationships with others, and the exceptional fact that actually we're a very effective groups of people and activists (both the Cedar Moon residents and the much larger TLC Farm).

Corrections:
* The teaser in the table of contents refers to the "stench" of the composting toilet; actually, a ventilation system and the speed of composting ensures that there is no bad smell at all inside the toilets.
* The story around Brenna's bike accident was quite incorrect: Brenna dislocated her right, not her left ankle, falling off her bike in the morning, not at night, and was leaving for work, not coming home.
* Brenna was by no means confined indoors for most of 90 days because of her ankle; she was bed-ridden for a week at most and was hopping around and milking the goats within 2.5 weeks. The day of the interview was her first time back in the State Park forest, not back out on the farm.
* Cedar Moon is not a commune, which is usually defined as a community which shares income; Cedar Moon members do not. We use the more widely used term, "intentional community;" no one here ever calls us a "commune". Brenna's actual quote referred to living in intentional community.
* Cedar Moon members are expected to contribute 5 hours a week to community work and to volunteer 10 hours a week for TLC Farm.
* TLC Farm is a great deal more than a "five acre garden"; the gardens are currently only about 1.5 acres, and TLC Farm is a non-profit community sustainability center primarily focused on education programs and demonstration projects that include buildings and social design.
* Cedar Moon is hardly an anachronism; it's part of a large and rapidly growing movement of people around the world and throughout Portland that are redesigning our lives to increase community and responsibility through a deeper connection with nature and other people.
* Robert Van Pelt is Native American -- Coast Siletz and Umatilla, in particular. The "quoted" construction is remarkably demeaning and racist, however. Moreover, the sweat lodge is not "remains": lodges are made of willow boughs, and are covered with blankets when in use, which happens regularly. Maybe Bart should have asked some more questions.
* The driveway is far from hidden: there's a sign right alongside the road.
* "Cedar Moon" was not used as a name for the intentional community until late in 2005. Prior to the formation of TLC Farm (in early 2004) the residents of the land occupied it simply as a rental, and included a wide variety of law students, doctors, musicians, activists, social workers, as well as farmers and others.
* We avoided "battle" with the landlord as much as we possibly could, bending over backwards to negotiate the best possible outcome for them while ensuring that donors and government contributors got a rigorously fair deal.
* TLC Farm facilitated thousands of Portlanders coming together to save this land: $350,000 (not $750,000) in donations, $400,000 in government acquisition of conservation easements, and $850,000 ($700,000 in mortgages) in loans.
* Cedar Moon is not the official caretaker of the land; TLC Farm and Cedar Moon co-manage the land, based on a contract that apportions responsibility for payment and ensures that the public's interest in the use of the land is maintained.
* The barn is actually in fairly good structural shape, as attested by architects that have inspected it. The roof doesn't leak at all. The walls are made of cedar slats that have several inches of separation, a common barn design that allows ventilation and natural light. (There are some areas that need superficial maintenance, which we are in the process of doing right now.)
* Not all of the structures in the Village Green are made of cob; only the sauna and benches and ovens.
* The small signs on the land are actually 8.5x11 sheets; the new larger sign kiosks are about 4'x7'. Hardly "postcards".
* The majority of visitors to the farm are not tourists who want to visit a hippie zoo, but youth and adults deeply interested in transforming their lives and learning from what we're doing, who visit the farm both through TLC Farm's education programs and come for self-guided tours.
* Cedar Moon is actually not oriented towards self-reliance, but on localization. That means decentralization and doing as much as possible oneself, but also means building strong economic relationships with other communities and collectives throughout the city and the region to address many more economic needs than can be met by 20-odd folk.
* There are no extension cords extending to the roadside power pole; we have a standard electrical connection and wiring like everyone else.
* Even though properly composted "humanure" has been shown to pose no risk at all, we do not use it on vegetables, only on trees and landscaping.
* We take traffic issues very seriously at TLC Farm. So, in the incident described, the moment Matt Gordon saw a vehicle that was improperly parked he addressed the issue, long before the bus arrived. There was no backup on Boones Ferry, no traffic impediment, no crisis. Matt does have Zen-like calm, though.
* Major correction: all donations, workshop income, etc. goes to TLC Farm, and we maintain absolutely rigorous separation between the groups' finances. These are how TLC Farm's $2000/mo mortgage (and other expenses) are raised. Most Cedar Moon residents work off the land in order to bring in their share of the $4000/mo (and other expenses) Cedar Moon has to raise. This in addition to volunteering to run the programs TLC Farm operates. It's a labor of love.
* Mother Earth Kindergarten is a project of Shining Star School, in partnership with TLC Farm.
* Brenna did not raise her eyebrow, suggestively or otherwise: she doesn't have eyebrows, being completely hair free due to an auto-immune condition.
* Bedrooms in the main house are not "communal"; the only common area is the middle floor kitchen, office, etc. Cedar Moon proactively engages the challenge of shifting "middle class" values around privacy in a sensitive way, working hard to make private space and time as available as possible.

What did you think about the article? Please send your letters to editor@portlandmonthlymag.com.