Oak Accord

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Mimi Casteel, Invitation to join the Willamette Valley Oak Accord

At the Annual Meeting of the Willamette Valley Wineries Association, February 2017

Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you today about the movement we are now calling the Oak Accord. This movement sprung organically from conversations about the relationship between biodiversity and agriculture. Most if not all of us are familiar with the term biodiversity and have a general sense of its literal meaning, but less of a grip on why, as farmers, winegrowers, and winemakers, we should care.

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Mimi Casteel on Stewardship

For the public announcement of the Willamette Valley Oak Accord, March, 2017

I spend a lot of time thinking about words and meaning. We underestimate the way our words, the rhetoric of our time, designs the present and the future, though we need only open a history book to have that lesson proved definitively.

Two words I have spent a lot of time around lately are steward and owner. The word steward has roots in the roots stig, for hold, household or pen, and the old English weard, which in its long history is mostly adverbially used to mean ‘turned toward, bend toward’ but later ‘to keep guard, watch, protect and preserve’

And then owner, whose roots ‘own’, from agen, literally mean ‘possessed by’. I’ll just let everyone sit with those.

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