provinceorstate:sonoma county

How this tribe got their coastal California lands returned (http://...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/6992111

How this tribe got their coastal California lands returned

Source: Raw Story

“The Kashia Band of Pomo Indians has called the coast along what is now Sonoma County, California, home for more than 12,500 years. There, the ‘People from the Top of the Land’ occupied lands that stretched out about 30 miles along the coast near Fort Ross and about 30 miles inland. Like many California tribes, the Kashia were violently removed from the best portions of their lands during the formation of the U.S. In 1915, the Kashia were allocated just 41.5 acres of land for their reservation. But in 2015—100 years later—the Kashia regained ownership of the heartland of its culture: 688 acres of land on the Pacific Coast. ‘We’re a coastal people,’ says Kashia Chairman Reno Keoni Franklin. ‘A number of our ceremonies (...)

This disease has killed a million trees in California, and scientists say it’s basically unstoppable - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/05/02/this-disease-has-killed-a-million-trees-in-california-and-scientists-say-its-basically-unstoppable/?tid=sm_tw

Healthy forests are especially important at a time of climate change — they’re an incredible tool to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Dead forests, on the other hand, can light the spark for wildfires, which are already showing a long-predicted uptick in activity.

In California’s coastal forests, health is anything but good. Since 1995, a fungal pathogen that causes a phenomenon dubbed ‘sudden oak death’ (a far catchier name than that of the pathogen itself, Phytophthora ramorum) has taken out millions of oak and tanoak trees, particularly along the coast extending northward from Monterey County. That includes areas of Marin County, Sonoma County and Big Sur.

The pathogen is a fungus that affects different trees differently, and not all are susceptible. It will tear through a forest and kill some trees while leaving others standing.

But in some trees, the pathogen causes tree trunks to crack open a ‘canker’ and literally bleed out sap. The disease is actually related to the pathogen that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1800s.

“Millions of acres of land have been affected in coastal California,” says Richard Cobb, a postdoc at the University of California, Davis, who studies the disease. “It spreads via wind and rain, and it’s made some really big jumps to different parts of the state and into Oregon. It probably spread into California via the nursery trade. And it has been moved around the country a lot, also within the nursery trade.”

#forêt #Phytophthora_ramorum #pathogène #climat

Jacob Appelbaum: The American Wikileaks Hacker | Culture News | Rolling Stone
▻http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/meet-the-american-hacker-behind-wikileaks-20101201?page=3

His aunt took custody of him when he was six; two years later she dropped him off at a Sonoma County children’s home. It was there, at age eight, that he hacked his first security system. An older kid taught him how to lift the PIN code from a security keypad: You wipe it clean, and the next time a guard enters the code, you blow chalk on the pad and lift the fingerprints . One night, after everyone had gone to sleep, the boys disabled the system and broke out of the facility. They didn’t do anything special — just walked around a softball field across the street for half an hour — but Appelbaum remembers the evening vividly: “It was really nice, for a single moment, to be completely free.”