A war to halt logging in Northern California reignites. Will it end differently this time?
Michael Hunter slammed a mallet onto a hand-held drum, the beats ringing out in rapid succession.
Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam! Bam!
"The drum is always loud enough it seems like," he said, "where people rally around the drum."
Hunter is tribal chairman of the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians, and on this sunny Sunday, dozens of people clamored around him in the parking lot of Jug Handle State Natural Reserve. Across Highway 1, nearly 50,000 acres of stately redwoods rose like a chorus of elders: Jackson Demonstration State Forest, the Pomo people's ancestral land.
Hunter was kicking off a series of demonstrations here along the Mendocino Coast to protest the redwoods' destruction from state-sponsored logging and research.
The Jan. 23 gathering was the latest rallying cry in a decadeslong war over
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