A Radical Thread
Environments & Ecologies
•
1h 10m
Directed by Jeanne C. Finley • Documentary • 2025 • 70 minutes
Seeking an alternative to America’s consumer culture, hundreds of back-to-the-land families coalesced around Poet Laureate Gary Snyder and settled on California's San Juan Ridge in the late 1960s. Repeatedly threatened by corporate Goliaths intent on clear-cutting the Sierra forests, damming the Yuba River, and polluting the Ridge with open-pit gold mining, the community organized to defend their homesteads. Their success in overcoming these seemingly impossible obstacles has created national models of sustainability. Now, they are facing their greatest threat of all: climate-driven wildfires.
A RADICAL THREAD is set against the dramatic scars of 19th century hydraulic gold mining and told through the story of the the San Juan Ridge Tapestry Project, a 17-year collaborative project stitching an 83-foot tapestry that visualizes the Ridge’s story in twelve narrative embroidered panels.
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