The billboards are the project of a new organization, Peace Roots, formed in response to the shock of 9-11, and in particular to the administration's declaration that the only patriotic response is to support the war against terrorism.

According to the organization's press release, "the goal is to show patriotism defined as the search for peaceful solutions to current conflicts, by those who love this country and the freedom it represents." Founder Michael Gorman, an organic farmer in Baja California, is a member of a group known as the Farm, a utopian community in Tennessee the seeds of which originated in the Bay Area during the Vietnam War.

Eventually, many of these people left the land to branch out into other activities, but members have stayed connected. "It's our community, and we're really deep-rooted that way." said Petaluma's Linda Speel, a Farm community member who is now a special education teacher at Terra Linda High School. "There are hundreds of us in the Bay Area. When [Gorman] called upon us all, we came together."

When they met in Petaluma a few months after 9-11, teleconferencing with people from all over the country, "not everyone was in agreement. Like any group, we were confused, trying to figure out what happened." Their first project was initiated by another teacher, Judy Meeker in Brentwood, Tenn., who decided to have her students create a quilt to be sent to Afghanistan.

Speel's students also created a quilt, and now two more quilts are in progress at Harmony School in Occidental and another at Sebastopol's Analy High School. The quilts are delivered by Global Exchange in
San Francisco.

The billboard project was next, suggested by a member who lives in Oregon. The idea is "to get some support out there, to get people to think about it. There was all that controversy, that if you were a peacenik you were anti-American," said Speel. "We want to find ways of dealing with [terrorists] in a lawful way and not becoming criminals ourselves."

Peace Roots is one of a number of organizations springing into existence since the terror attacks. West County Women for Peace bought a full-page ad in the Press Democrat on Christmas Eve opposing the prospect of going to war.