I was among five people from inland Mendocino County who stayed with elder Dine' (Navajo) families at Black Mesa, an uplands mountain plateau on Navajo/Hopi reservation land in the high, frigid (especially at this time of year) northeastern Arizona desert. This expansive area, roughly sixty miles in diameter, has sustained continuous human occupation for thousands of years.
Posts published by “Will Parrish”
The past 160 years have involved the utter destruction of the vast majority of perhaps the most ecologically important natural communities there are here in California: its wetlands. Most of this destruction has involved the…
This past December 22nd, more than a month before The Warbler began a 65-day occupation of a Ponderosa pine in the southern part of the boggy town of Willits, CA, British forest defenders occupied trees…
My piece elsewhere in this issue of the AVA describes how Caltrans has appeared to violate Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, consistently and repeatedly, in its…
Native people in the greater California North Coast region tended to cluster in foothills along streams and creeks that flowed into river-cut valleys. These areas collectively supported what many scholars consider the largest concentration of…
When it comes to movies that depict real-life David vs. Goliath struggles of plain rural folks against ruthless parastatal corporations that destroy their hometown under a cloak of deceit, you really can't beat the Academy…
In the pre-dawn hours of August 18th, CalTrans contractor FlatIron Construction sent a fleet of dump trucks and excavators into one of inland Mendocino County's most historically pivotal sites, Mendocino Forest Products Co's shuttered Apache…
By the end of my third day of living high in the wick drain stitcher in the northern construction area of the CalTrans Willits Bypass (Saturday, June 22nd), I felt as though in the throes…
The first time I saw one of the Big Blue Towers, I was perched about seventy feet above it, albeit more than a half-mile to its north. It was this past Friday, May 17th, and I was sitting in a four-by-eight platform suspended from the crotch of a several-hundred-year-old valley oak tree, which stands like a sentinel on the edge of an Oregon ash grove north of Willits, adjacent to Highway 101.