- Johnny, you made it!

(crowds cheering) (upbeat music) ♪ Let's do it, let's do it ♪ ♪ Yeah, let's do it ♪ ♪ Let's do it good ♪ ♪ Let's do it good ♪ ♪ Come on, do it, yeah ♪ ♪ Let's do it, yeah ♪ (singer indistinct chants) (audience applauds) (film clicks and whirs) - [Narrator] Since 1969, the Oregon Country Fair has been part of the region's cultural landscape.

It's the creation of counterculture communities that rejected consumerism and war and turned their focus to peace and love.

- Part of that whole ethos at that time was, the Back to the Land Movement, and as a result of that, they also stood up and said, "Well, we really ought to walk a good path."

(crowd cheering) - [Narrator] Those intentions may sound very fairy, but really, they're just Fair-y.

And every July, they're celebrated on this site in the Southern Willamette Valley.

(crowd cheering) - Land stewardship is absolutely a priority of the Fair.

The concept of leave-no-trace recycling and thinking about low impact on the land.

I think that that ethos has become more mainstream now, where it was more of kind of a newer concept in the '70s.

And over generations now, those practices have been passed down.

(film whirring) - [Narrator] The 500-acre site includes open fields, seasonal wetlands, and lots of trees.

- [Mark] The area that the Fair has put on is a woodlands with ash trees and maples and oaks surrounded by the Long Tom River.

(birds chirping) - [Narrator] The site changes with the seasons and the folks who run the Fair adjust right along with them.

- [Mark] The Long Tom will typically, a couple times a year, flood over the bank, and where the Fair happens will be underwater.

(water trickles) You can actually canoe through the site and the concept is to work around nature instead of making nature adapt to us.

(water trickles) - [Narrator] This go-with-the-flow approach requires much of the Fair's infrastructure to be disassembled on a yearly basis.

(wind wooshing) (birds chirping) - This booth right here, I think this is a great example of it.

When it floods, it's pretty much completely open and the waters can move through.

- [Narrator] Opening the spaces up to the elements allows seeds to disperse and plants to regrow.

- [Mark] We try to have as little impact on the land as we can and let it recover quickly.

(drill zooms) - [Narrator] In the spring, booths are reconstructed in preparation for the Fair.

Builders can find recycled materials at the Fair's Wood World, and any new wood needs to be untreated and chemical-free.

(birds chirping) Booths that need specific repair get red tags.

- The message says, "The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have."

- [Narrator] In this case, the cheeky message refers to some broken beams that have been deemed unsafe.

- So they're pointing out that no matter how hard you work, things break.

We try, and be happy and friendly and apprise people of the problems without being dull.

We found that strict authoritarianism gets you nowhere.

(footsteps crunching) Ah, there we go.

It can be trippy around here.

(Malaska laughs) - [Narrator] Whatever the issue, there's a crew of volunteers ready to deal with it.

- All right, let's do it.

- [Narrator] In a uniquely fair-like way.

(upbeat music) (tools droning) - [Narrator] To look after the past, there's an archaeology crew.

To envision the future, there's a land use management and planning committee.

(birds chirping) And to handle more present-day issues.

- That's something that we need to take care of.

- There's the vegmanec crew.

- That's a safety hazard.

- [Narrator] Glenn Gregorio is one of its coordinators.

- The word vegmanec stands for vegetation management and erosion control.

Vegmanec.

(birds chirping) - [Narrator] Basically, the vegmanecs prepare the site for the Fair According to three measures.

- [Glenn] Safety, shade, and stilts.

(indistinct background chatter) We're trying to clear stuff out of the way, and that goes with thorns, any number of things.

Shade, it gets hot out here.

The shade's very precious.

And stilts, we have 15-foot stilt-walker that need to walk the path.

- [Narrator] Those practical considerations are rooted in a deeper philosophy.

- [Glenn] We have a value system that we apply where we want to cut as little as possible.

But we're going to need to lift this up out of the way and make this space usable again for the Fair.

(grunts) We're always balancing the Fair that wants to expand without long-term damage.

This is rose.

My crew is probably figure out how to save that if we can.

That's a big wild rose plant.

Respect.

(indistinct background chatter) We're trying to live our values.

So it's all these little tactics to the ultimate strategy of above all reverence for the land.

- Good Morning.

(crowds frolicking) - [Narrator] As the Fair's three-day run begins in July... - Welcome to Fair.

- [Narrator] The work shifts from managing the land to managing the 35,000 people who attend.

- Lovely, lovely, lovely.

That's a way to do it, yeah?

(lighthearted music) - [Amy] Recycle or die, yeah.

(laughs) - [Narrator] Amy Hand is one of the leaders of the recycling crew.

(objects rustling) - [Amy] We collect and process refundables, landfill, compost, and recyclables.

- [Narrator] The crew of nearly 200 volunteers works in shifts in the morning.

- [Amy] In the morning, we separate everything by hand to make sure we use the landfill as little as possible.

And the afternoon shift people are there to help you understand like that, yes, it does go in the compost.

- Ah.

- [Amy] and not the landfill barrel.

- Hey, that cup is compostable, I love rubbish.

(upbeat music) I love rubbish.

(upbeat music) This is made out of cornstarch, you've got a green stripe compostable, looks like a plastic cup.

Bamboozled.

You know, we live in a world of illusion.

This is compostable, don't put it over there.

It goes here.

(plastic clacking) - [Attendee] All right.

- [Amy] All food booths are required to use compostable products and durable flatware.

(can clacking) And we fill two semi-trailers with just the refundables alone.

(cans clacking) - [Narrator] In 2024, the Fair generated about 23 tons of landfill, but made almost 30 tons of compost all hand-sorted and processed on-site.

(footsteps clomping) (birds chirping) (tools rattling) To coordinator Thom Barr, the result is worth its weight in gold.

- It's all about the life that's in the soil.

Look how steaming rich that is.

This is the gold.

This is the payoff.

This is what makes this worthwhile because this is the soil that will grow the future of the Fair.

(rubble rattling) (upbeat music) - [Narrator] The work is hard and dirty, but no one seems to mind.

You know, we work and we play together and it becomes this really beautiful dance.

(truck droning) There's trucks and trailers pulling in and out and people sorting things by hand and lots of laughter, and it's a ruckus.

(upbeat music) Yeah, we might be a bunch of hippies hanging out in the forest, we good?

But our volunteers walk their talk in a lot of ways.

(upbeat music) The ethos of the '60s and the people who created this event, you know, caring for the land was part of that.

(indistinct background chatter) - [Narrator] If the world were really fair, you'd think that nature would smile on the kind hippies looking after it.

(indistinct background chatter) But the land where the Fair takes place is about to meet a devastating challenge.

- We've got this emerald ash borer problem.

70, 80% of this place is ash.

- [Narrator] The emerald ash borer is an invasive beetle from Asia.

(wood cracking) After wiping out entire ash forests in the Eastern US, it was found in the Tualatin Valley in 2022.

With no hope of eradicating the deadly pest, we may lose almost every Oregon ash tree in the region.

(birds chirping) (trees rustling) - People are saying up to 10 years and it's all going to be gone.

That's terribly frightening.

It's kind of doomsday-ish, but right now, we need to get trees planted because shade takes a long time to come back.

(birds chirping) - [Narrator] The Fair is hoping to save some of the site's most iconic Oregon ash trees, but treating them with pesticides is expensive and not a sure bet.

- We have some significant thinking to do of how it's going to impact the site, and then it's safety things.

You know, we'll have dead ash trees everywhere, but you know, the Fair's been going for over 50 years and it's not going to stop.

And so, we just have to figure out how to face this next challenge.

♪ Love is something if you give it away ♪ - [Narrator] Whatever happens, it's likely that the thousands of volunteers and generations of attendees will come at it with the same values that sparked the Fair's creation.

♪ It's just like a magic penny ♪ - Basically, we're an intentional family and these stewardship crews are very much the Fair, trying to live its consciousness and its intention on the land, and we practice it here so that we can bring it to the outside world and we're going to keep working through our issues because there is no other way ♪ You end up having more ♪ (upbeat guitar music) - Getting inspiration for your next adventure.

It's kind of why you're here, right?

Or you can support more of what we do on Oregon Field Guide and everything else you see on OPB, like going to opb.org/video and becoming a sustaining member.

(uplifting music)