Sonoma county has a huge grape growing industry, a spinoff from the neighboring Napa valley which is poised to over take that world famous grape growing region in production and quality. Sonoma County contains large remnants of the great northward migration of the “Summer of Love”, the San Francisco hippy culture that flowed northward into the dope growing region of Humboldt County and points north in Oregon and Washington in the mid 70’s. Sonoma County’s second largest city, Sebastopol, was one of the first cities in the state to devote governmental effort towards declaiming itself a “Nuclear Free Zone” and has the highest Prius ownership per capita in the world.
Santa Rosa, Sonoma County’s governmental seat, had an Occupy movement that lasted longer than the one on Wall St. and currently has an ongoing radical organizing and agitation effort centered on the shooting of a teenage latino kid carrying an exact air gun replica of an AK47. This radical demographic bemoans the end of the apple groves which in the past were the major industry in the county along with dairy production. 80% of the old apple groves are now vineyards and the geriatric hippies see this as a violation against some ancient pact with the Earth goddess of your choice. This from the people touting “change” as a rallying cry to pretty much any cause de jour.
At heart, the rad enviros are more conservative than any of us, to the point of wishing the whole “western civilization” thing engineered back to the stone age and work ceaselessly to paralyze any and all “progress” which springs from capitalist vanguardism.
Actual change, the sort that springs from the human capacity to invent, is an anathema to them. They hate change and would have us spending our holidays in Druid groves slitting the throats of farm animals and humans in an endless panoply of ritual and ignorance.
Sonoma makes wine, Napa makes auto parts