Journalists who challenge power structures and investigate deeply into the causes of social ills scarcely get funded in the contemporary media marketplace. Please support me in bringing these stories of optimism and determination in the face of destruction to broader audiences.

No other place of equivalent size in the world has altered its watersheds as dramatically as California.  The Golden State is home to a staggering infrastructure of dams, reservoirs, power plants, pumping plants, canals, aqueducts, gates, tunnels, and other installations that are all about controlling where water goes and who receives it. 

The year 2013 was California's driest on record. The first six months of 2014 have been the hottest half-year on record. Reservoirs are drying up. Groundwater basins are diminishing at an alarming pace. Yet, the water demands of the state's gargantuan agribusiness empire, its sprawling metropolises, and its extractive industries (such as, increasingly, fracking) are only growing.

Politicians and business leaders are seizing on this crisis by pushing for the largest dam- and canal-building binge since the State Water Project of the 1960s and ’70s. The best known of these, the Delta Twin Tunnels, is just the tip of the spear for all manner of new schemes that would further constipate California's waterways and destroy much of what remains of its aquatic life. I described this phenomenon in a recent piece in Counterpunch & the Anderson Valley Advertiser.

Meanwhile, people all over the state are struggling to protect their watersheds, land bases, cultures, and livelihoods against these dominant political and economic currents. Among them are Indigenous people, who have already survived heinous violence and oppression to adapt and preserve their cultures, which are inseparably tied to their landbases. They also include people who have been weaving and reweaving connections to watersheds in various ways: Indigenous people, political radicals, small farmers, back-to-the-landers, and more.

These individuals' stories of determination and optimism, and their struggles against the West Coast's greatest financial and political powers, demand a wider telling. There's a saying in California that water flows uphill toward money.  If that dynamic is to change, it is essential that stories such as these become prominent parts of public consciousness, and that they arouse people to take greater action to change the dominant culture's destructive course.

In the last four years, I've written extensively for a Mendocino County newspaper, the legendary Anderson Valley Advertiser ("America's Last Newspaper"), and for the internationally-celebrated online journal and print magazine Counterpunch, My work has also appeared in Z Magazine, the Earth First Journal!, and Reclamations, and on web sites such as Alternet and Z Net.

What I Need & What You Get

Being that the contemporary media marketplace is dominated by corporations, it's fitting that I write nearly full-time for "America's Last Newspaper," but don't actually make enough money to meet basic living expenses by doing so.  The AVA does incredibly well, and is quite generous to its writers, especially for a newspaper based in a town with a population of 1,035 (about half the AVA's readers live outside Mendocino County).

This project will fund much of the hard work and time it takes to produce these stories, as well as travel costs (driving all around California) and clerical costs (such as filing California Public Records Act and Freedom of Information Act requests).

Not only will I serialize these pieces with weekly pieces in the AVA, but I will freelance my writings to various regional and national publications that have a thirst for unique, penetrating stories on California's drought.  Within a month, I'll also develop a web site and blog to highlight my work, which will include original pictures and art, and occasional videos. 

By supporting this project, you are helping the issues, people, and ideas I am presenting come more to the forefront of public consciousness.  You are also providing a young investigative reporter with a springboard to become more self-sustaining as a journalist, during an extremely tough financial era.

The Stories

• Some of the most powerful opponents of Gov. Brown's Delta Twin Tunnels project are the members of a small, federally unrecognized First Nations tribe who continue to carry out their cultural responsibilities on the McCloud River and in the Shasta Cascades: the Winnemem Wintu people.  The Winnemem are working against the odds to prevent the flooding of what remains of their traditional cultural areas by the raising of the Shasta Dam, which is a major element of the Brown administration's water plan.
  
• The marijuana industry is California's most profitable agricultural sector. What are the political and economic forces driving the pot industry's reckless and increasing destruction of watersheds (which smaller cannabis farmers also don't like)? What role does systemic racism play in the state's selective repression of the pot industry, and how does that response contribute to the industry's environmental toll?
• Fracking in California: where is it happening, who's profiting from it, where's it headed, and what is the impact on water? I've already written one story on this topic that broke new ground.
  
• In what is likely one of the greatest stories of personal cultural resilience ever to play out in California, the Mountain Maidu of the Upper Feather River watershed recently became the first non-federally recognized group of Indigenous people in California to receive state approval to steward their traditional landbase.  One of their aims is to create a successful model for other First Nations people throughout the state..
  
• The University of California plays an enormous, often contradictory, role in shaping not only California's water policy and infrastructure, but that of much of the world. Expanding on in-depth power structure research and reporting I conducted a few years ago, I'll expose the UC's historic and contemporary role in developing California's unquenchable thirst for water.
  

  
  

The Impact

The work I've done up until now has made some good contributions to social justice and environmental sanity in the California North Coast region.  Of particular relevance for this IndieGoGo project, my track record includes extensively documenting issues and campaigns concerning protection of the Russian River, Eel River, Gualala River, and Clear Lake basin watersheds, their human inhabitants, and their critters.

Happily, I know from my own experiences that this kind of journalism continues to have the capacity to afflict the powerful and comfort the afflicted.

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