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It's the culture, stupid.

I spent most of the afternoon outside the biggest logging industry elbow-rubbing fest in years with stilt-walking rabble-rousers from the Oxygen Collective and their new friends from BassNectar.

The new duo (31 of them in all) has been touring around the Pacific Northwest on their bio-diesel bus throwing parties and pulling off some pretty amazing cultural interventions. They're last stop in Vancouver pulled in over 1,100 blissed-out city kids eager to be entertained. And entertained they were--Psy-hop beats by Bassnectar under a backdrop of hard-hitting video imagery of old growth logging from the Biscuit forest in Southern Oregon.

It's one of the best examples of a burgeoning consciousness, hard to describe, but easy to recognize, that you can feel growing out of the streets in San Francisco, New York and up and down the coasts--connecting urban jungles with the earth and one another. It's a current I didn't notice much before the Seattle protests in '99, fusing creativity and community and growing alternatives to the dominant consumer culture.

If the battle is one of culture--winning hearts and minds--then these guys have it nailed.