This website has been a part of Caspar Community's public facing presence since 1996, when the Internet first came to the Mendocino Coast via the National Science Foundation. Mendocino Unified Schools and its Mendocino Coast Network (MCN.org) generously offered a community website to our young organization. Michael, the website's founder and webster emeritus, thought the 'Net might be here to stay, and began using it to record the village's deliberations, share our plans, and appeal to 'outsiders' (whose coast this is, after all) to help us work toward our shared mission,
To preserve and protect
the quality of all life in Caspar |
So what's with the Commons part?
When we first began to get a grip on how the interwebs were going to evolve, our resident songwriter, Meridian Green, offered to buy us the domain name if we would accept her idea that our village's strength lay in our common appreciation for a bouquet of key qualities: inclusion, diversity, kindness, consensus.
At that time, Caspar had made itself famous for opposition, being the birthplace of Redwood Summer, the opposition to offshore oil and inland pesticides. We had learned the hard way that reaction is abrasive to the spirit, and immediately awoke to the fact that proaction is much more in tune with those treasured key qualities. Also at that time – the mid 1990s – villages about Caspar's size were acting out the brutal polarization that had begun to assail our country. Adopting the methodology of consensus, we recognized, preserved the natural peacefulness of this place, that had drawn us all to live here. |
Originally the brainchild of Jerry Juhl, Caspar Resident and purported father of Miss Piggy. For a too-brief time, Jerry favored us with his quirky humor and brilliant prose in support of Caspar's doings in the local press.