PEACE, LOVE AND PUBLIC OWNERSHIP AT B.C. COMMUNE

LONE BUTTE -- We sweated. We grunted. Under a blue sky, we threw bales of
hay onto a dilapidated pickup truck.

There was Shawn Millar, a 40-year-old crack cocaine addict from Vancouver's
Downtown Eastside, who came here to try to kick his habit. Sharp as a
cowboy's whip, he chucked bales like a fiend.

There was Ernie Bob, a wiry 60-year-old, still prone to street bouts of
alcoholic mania. His nickname is "Sterno" because he used to drink it. Bob
spent his youth at the notorious Oblate-run St. Joseph's residential
school, where abuse abounded. Hard-working man of few words.

There was tiny Chiharu Yasuda, 23, a Japanese member of the international
network known as WWOOFERS (Willing Workers on Organic Farms), who have over
the years become integral cogs in this radical agricultural commune in the
Cariboo. Yasuda's been here a year.

Then there was community co-leader Rob Diether, wearing a Cuban T-shirt
reading "Hasta La Victoria Sempre," or "Until the Victory." Diether remains
inspired by Latin American rebel Che Guevera and laments how hard it is to
find an authentic Mao hat these days. He's also quick with a joke.

Finally, there was me -- middle-aged, middle-class, mainstream urban
journalist, whose normal idea of a workout is a 30-minute jog in the park
followed by a coffee and bagel at Cuppa Joe's on West Fourth.

You could not have found a more motley crew.

It was the most fun I'd had in a while.

Working for this egalitarian, back-to-the-land commune east of 100 Mile
House, we were able to collect and store 350 bales of hay from the rolling
farm field, which had been decimated by the provincewide summer drought.

I felt I was doing something of value: Making sure the dozens of beef
cattle owned by CEEDS (Community Enhancement and Economic Development
Society) would have something to eat when the snow inevitably falls.

Millar and Bob, like the dozens of street people and international
volunteers who come to the Cariboo every year to CEEDS, were toiling for
room and board and the chance to be part of this rag-tag family.

As we stacked hay, the cool waters of Horse Lake beckoned. Two sandhill
cranes flew overhead, looking downright prehistoric with their two-metre
wing spreads. When we were finished, the sun was low and the beer came out.
Grimy camaraderie abounded.

It was all in a day's work for CEEDS, a band of hippie revolutionaries,
most originating in North Vancouver in the 1970s, who were once notorious
in the Cariboo for their in-your-face radicalism. Now they're a largely
respected part of the Interior culture.

Most intentional communities are religious. But these hardy dozen core
members, plus their scores of supporters throughout the Cariboo, Vancouver
and the world, are inspired by the materialistic philosophy of Karl Marx
and Mao Tse-tung, who backed agrarian communes.

They've been struggling for 30 years to create something the Soviet Union
and China failed to accomplish: a just, non-hierarchical, sustainable,
small-c communist society, which helps members forge a deep relationship
with the Earth and its creatures.

How long can CEEDS keep running against the prevailing wind?

They act like they're in it for the long run. They remain committed to
their ideals, including that no one should own private land. Everything
they earn is shared among the group according to need.

Over the decades, CEEDS has also provided a home to hundreds of street
people and native Indians, supplying them with food, shelter, work and
connection with the land. While many communes have gardens, CEEDS is
probably the only one in the country that survives exclusively on agriculture.

They're also not what you'd call prudish about soft drugs. They've been
busted dozens of times for marijuana offences and running moonshine stills.
They once provided cheap vanilla extract to chronic drunks.

They squatted and farmed land for years. With their own resources, they set
up an unofficial hostel for homeless northern Shuswap Indians. They created
a huge garden on the Sugarcane Reserve and took on a morally suspect native
band council.

They once had a gun battle with a brutish rancher. They also once practised
free love, but it's been tempered in the name of cohesiveness.

They were growing organic before most people even knew what the word meant.
But they're wary of the "tofu agenda" and are proud meat eaters. They
lovingly raise free-range cows, sheep, pigs and chickens; then take
philosophical pride in slaughtering them for food, which they excel at
cooking and generously sharing.

The Williams Lake Tribune newspaper once called them and their
communist-anarchist beliefs more dangerous than knapweed, the farmers' scourge.

As long-time CEEDs director Karen Greenwood likes to say: "We're part of
what makes the West wild."

Marijuana (organically grown) and beer (home-made and green) is merrily
going the rounds as a dozen of us sit down for dinner at the oversized
kitchen table in one of CEEDS' well-worn farmhouses.

It's 10 p.m. - meal time: The pigs, sheep, ducks and chickens have been fed
and market vegetables and flowers picked. There's a hint of northern lights
in the starry sky. A coyote occasionally howls.

Most of the CEEDS clan has gathered, except for the driving force behind
its creation: Jerry Le Bourdais, 78. Much discussed, Le Bourdais is
battling severe Parkinson's disease in a nearby seniors home.

I try to get these all-for-one farmers to explain their philosophy. Oddly
enough, there is little of the shrillness often associated with political
radicals.

"We aren't religious, but some might see us as spiritual," says affable
Diether.

"We agree with Mao on materialism. The only world we have is the material,
natural environment. The real world doesn't come in the sky after you die.
This is the real world and you've got to look after it."

Head CEEDS rancher Greg Robinson, 52, who sports an abdominal six-pack that
would be the envy of any urban fitness guru, has turned Marxism into cowboy
aphorisms. "It's chip in and share the wealth. It's take what you need and
do what you can. It's turned out good."

Why oppose private property?

Soft-spoken, brainy Rod Hennecker, who acts, among other things, as the
commune's bookkeeper, answers:

"Like the Indians say, 'You can use the land but you can't own it.' The
land is the land. It should be shared by everyone, I suppose."

In addition to opposing private property, Hennecker is like a lot of B.C.
ranchers and farmers who think the government should offer some of the vast
expanses of marginal forest land it owns (92 per cent of the entire
province) to people committed to clearing and farming the soil.

"The B.C. government should be giving out land leases, or trusts, to people
and saying, 'This land can only be used for agriculture for the next 300
years.' They could cut some people off welfare and say, 'Here's 160 acres:
Go for it.'"

Interesting. But why do you embrace alcohol and especially marijuana?

It started out as a way for CEEDS to show solidarity with the Cariboo's
addicted Indians --- most of them survivors of St. Joseph's residential
school, led by disgraced bishop Hubert O'Connor -- who were being
mistreated while trying to survive on the streets of Williams Lake.

"We drank vanilla extract with the people who drank vanilla extract. It was
good. We also sold cheap vanilla extract, through Fed-Up Co-op," says
Greenwood, 44, who moved to the Cariboo just after graduating from Argyle
high school.

"It was for shock value. But it was also because everyone was getting
ripped off by grocery store owners. And it was better than people drinking
Lysol, Aqua Velva and sterno."

Although Greenwood takes pride in CEEDS' "rowdy" days of scandalizing the
establishment, she seems anything but harsh today as members have tried to
forge relationships with the Cariboo's folks. At the same time she dreams
of socialist, back-to-the-land revolutions, she speaks in a folksy Canadian
drawl and says things like, "Gee willickers."

Serving heaping piles of spaghetti with organic beef, taking another pull
on the joint making the rounds, Greenwood bears no resemblance to a
totalitarian Madame Mao, but seems more like the tender-but-resourceful
female cop played by Frances McDormand in the movie Fargo.

Over the years, Greenwood has acted like a den mother to scores of street
people, as well as to more than a hundred young Asian, Latin American and
European WOOFERS who've jetted across the planet to help CEEDS work its
more than 600 acres of rented farmland, organic gardens and hundreds of
livestock. Volunteers stay for decades, months or just a week. Any amount
of time is fine.

Even though CEEDS members openly celebrate marijuana for its relaxing
benefits, they refuse to be part of the province's $2-billion illegal
marijuana growing-operation business. "We'd be living a lot easier if we
could," says Hennecker. Instead, they pick up most of their belongings at
flea markets.

"There's not much money in farming. You've got to love it," he says.

Third political question: Why meat?

CEEDS members have revelled in jolting vegetarians by giving how-to
workshops on slaughtering chickens at countercultural gatherings.

It's not because they don't love their animals.

CEEDS is adamantly opposed to factory farming, which confines animals to
cramped cages. Their mammals and birds roam, play and mate naturally.

Every day CEEDS' workers enjoy feeding greens, outdated milk products and
organic slop to their eager pigs. They gather in their chickens' soft-hued
brown, green and blue eggs. They give their cows names.

"We believe raising farm animals is part of the back-to-the-land movement,"
says Lorraine Le Bourdais, daughter of hospital-bound Jerry, who was once a
famed union organizer at Greater Vancouver's Shellburn Oil refinery.

"We believe raising farm animals is a non-exploitative way to provide food.
You learn a lot about nature by having animals. And, if you're living off
the land in the Cariboo, with its marginal soil and short growing season,
you have to eat meat to survive."

Le Bourdais says she tells her two children, who sometimes fret about
bonding with farm animals they end up killing, they wouldn't have a
relationship with any pigs, chickens and sheep if they weren't raising them
for food.

However, there is one downside to being pro-meat. Le Bourdais admits one of
the reasons CEEDS members are having trouble drawing more young recruits
these days is they aren't vegetarian.

Le Bourdais, who displays some of the zeal of her dad, also make clear
survivalism was part of CEEDS' initial agrarian vision.

With global warming being cited as a possible cause of B.C.'s threatening
summer fires (which at one point had CEEDS' members packing their
belongings into their vans), with international tension surrounding the
continuing Iraq conflict, Le Bourdais believes North American cities could
soon be in for a cataclysm.

"We were brought to the Cariboo for that. If there is a crisis in the rest
of the world, CEEDS is going to be needed to help people set up and survive."

Before everyone turns in for the night, we watch a CBC news report on the
ramifications of eastern Canada's massive power blackout.

No one bothers to say, 'Told you so.'

When it comes to their own survival, CEEDS shows signs of adapting to the
times, without giving in to the status quo of capitalism and liberal
individualism.

The dozen core members who remain from a peak of 25 have become known and
admired in the Cariboo for winning farming competitions and coming up with
agricultural innovations.

Working four rented farm fields, CEEDS' workers have frequently won fall
fair competitions for their shimmering organic cabbages, tomatoes, peas,
radishes and bedding plants and flowers.

They've been applauded for reviving strains of vegetables and livestock
that were once decertified by governments, like Green Mountain potatoes,
wild turkeys and Leghorn chickens.

They began the first farmers' market in Williams Lake, which is now a key
part of the city's life. They continue to use low-cost, low-impact horses
to plow their fields.

And they home-deliver vegetables, flowers and organic meat throughout the
Cariboo and Greater Vancouver (see: www.jnweb.com/ceeds).

Hennecker, who walks with a limp from adult-onset muscular sclerosis, now
sits on the boards of many agricultural organizations, including those
dedicated to cattle raising and sheep herding. He also received a grant to
teach native Indians how to start market gardens on reserves.

CEEDS, in addition, maintains an official relationship with the Downtown
Eastside's city-run Carnegie Community Centre, which helped bring the
addicted Millar to the open skies of the Cariboo. "It saved my life,"
Millar says. The communitarians are also accelerating their reliance on
often-skilled WWOOFERS.

CEEDS, in addition, has received high praise from local ranchers and B.C.
government officials for pioneering, more than a decade ago, a movement in
which sheep are used to graze clearcut forests - to keep down weeds without
using pesticides, making it easier for seedlings to thrive.

But here's the kicker: CEEDS got out of clearcut sheep-grazing when
entrepreneurs they perceive as money-hungry began taking B.C. government
money to do it.

It's the same attitude CEEDS takes to the rising trendiness of organic
fruit, vegetables and meat. Hennecker says CEEDS won't follow the lead of
many opportunistic organic producers and jack up their prices.

"When poor people can't afford organic," he says, "they'll just go back to
Kraft Dinner."

There is an unmistakable streak of identify-with-the-people purity that
still runs through CEEDS, which will always make it hard for them to accept
middle-class comforts.

As Greenwood tends to say about her many decades with CEEDS: "It's been
good. Not easy."

As I'm about to leave after several days of enjoying the land and animals
with CEEDS' just-folks radicals, I'm still wondering about the commune's
uncertain prospects for the future.

Hennecker takes me in to visit founder Jerry Le Bourdais at the old folks'
home in 100 Mile House. A nurse has dressed Le Bourdais in one of his
T-shirts, which reads, "Legalize Pot."

But the once-fiery Communist/hippie/back-to-the-land activist is not in
good shape.

He's lying in bed and Parkinson's disease has turned his face into a mask.
He can't summon whatever it takes to answer my questions.

However, when I get up to leave, suddenly Le Bourdais seems aware. I try to
tell him he's accomplished something impressive by founding such a
long-lasting utopian community.

He fights to utter four words:

"We're not finished yet."