Protecting Women and the Land the Feminist Way: 50 Years of Radical Environmentalism in Rural Oregon
COMS Professor Dr. Elizabeth Burch has published the article “Fifty Years of Women’s Land at OWL Farm” in the March/April Issue of Lesbian Connection. Burch is newsletter editor and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Oregon Women’s Land Trust (OWLT). OWLT is a 501(c)3 nonprofit committed to ecologically sound preservation of land, and access to land and land wisdom for women.
The following are extracts from the full article:
On secluded property in Oregon, 147 acres of forest, meadow and wetland, hosts one of the most enduring experiments in feminist herstory. OWL Farm, stewarded by Oregon Women’s Land Trust, is a living legacy of resistance, care, and collective imagination. From her origins in the 1970s to the present day, the land offers a radical promise: that women can hold land together, without ownership, working by consensus, and in relationship with the earth.
Rooted below forested hills, OWL Farm’s watershed nourishes biodiverse meadows where owl, deer, mountain lion, bear, bobcat and an abundance of birds and pollinators thrive. These same landscapes have long hosted space for women seeking safety, healing and interconnection beyond patriarchal constraints. From its earliest days, the land was understood as a partner rather than a possession, an ethic that has shaped both governance and daily life at OWL Farm.
As industrial logging has intensified, clear-cuts have scarred the lands in the Pacific Northwest, underscoring the fragility of the ecosystems OWLT sought to protect, and making her an island refuge for trees and wildlife. With this, the Trust’s responsibility for preservation deepened. Stewardship was embraced not merely as environmentalism, but as sacred responsibility.
In 2006, a gas fracking company demanded permission to clearcut a 50-foot-wide swath through OWL Farm’s native forest, and blast a trench for an industrial size methane pipeline. The high-pressure pipeline routed to a Liquified Natural Gas export terminal on the Oregon coast was meant to be shipped across the Pacific. OWLT rejected monetary offers to sacrifice eight acres of forest in the habitat of the endangered Spotted Owl and a Great Gray Owl.
That 15-year struggle led OWLT to join a broad environmental coalition and became one of only 10 plaintiffs to challenge the US Government in Federal Court. We argued that the export of gas did not serve the “public interest.” In 2021, the US Court of Appeals ordered the approval be reconsidered. The fossil fuel company caved and abandoned the project. If you were a member then, you were a part of ending that threat to OWL Farm, the coast and the climate.
At a time when access to land is increasingly restricted and ecological crises intensify; women’s land projects are becoming both rare and urgently relevant. They remind us that land can be held in common, that care can replace extraction, and that alternate visions have long offered alternatives to dominant systems of power.
Fifty years on, OWL Farm remains what it has always been: a place where women, land, and wild resilience meet — still radical, still rooted, and still hooting at the moon.
See www.OregonWomensLandTrust.org on ways you can volunteer.