It's been well over a decade since the grape-based alcohol sector first outpaced tree cutting as Mendocino County's dominant state-sanctioned economic sector. This watershed moment — a product of many decades of changes in both…
Posts published by “Will Parrish”
Since the advent of the modern propaganda industry during the era of World War I, paid propaganda shills have become a fixture of large capital projects and national endeavors of virtually every sort. The shills’…
In Willits, many people have not taken kindly to the California Department of Transportation's asphalt imperialism, which entails spreading more than 140,000 dump truck loads of fill in Little Lake Valley, building bridges, disturbing creeks, killing fish, covering up wetlands, cutting down riparian forests, removing roughly 2,000 oak trees, taking away farm land. It is likely that even more overall harm will be done by a politically stilted mitigation plan that centers on excavating wetlands soils in the name of creating wetlands.
Last week, the US Congressional representative for California's North Coast, a former Natural Resources Defense Council attorney named Jared Huffman, threw the full weight of his legislative power behind the most environmentally destructive project in the recent history of Mendocino County, the California Department of Transportation's Willits Bypass. This more than $300 million project, as presently designed, requires the largest filling in of wetlands in northern California in more than 50 years.
New details have come to light regarding the US Army Corps of Engineers' June 20th decision to suspend the Willits Bypass' US Clean Water Act permit (404 permit): the first time the Corps has ever…
When it comes to large, earth-destroying projects of the sort rapidly unraveling this planet's life support systems, efforts by corporations and nation-states to “remediate,” “mitigate,” or “compensate” (the specific jargon depends on the specific project,…
In the latest bad news for Indigenous people whose cultural resources have been horribly impacted by CalTrans' Willits Bypass, Big Orange's construction crews have damaged another known archeological site. The incident took place on June…
The old truism that California's water “flows uphill toward power and money” is often literally true, but not always. The powerful and wealthy of Sonoma County, northern Marin County, and parts of inland Mendocino County…
California is the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet, a distinction it first attained in the early-mid-20th century. The Hoover Dam (on the Colorado River), which began operation in 1936, was the largest dam…