Sunday morning up here on California’s northern coast and the living is cool.

And the hunt for triple-homicide suspect Shane Miller continues just south of where I’m at — he’s charged with killing his wife and two daughters last week over in Shasta County, about 200 miles east of here. Miller knows the area and has a certain expertise with firearms. In 1996, he was convicted of marijuana cultivation and in 2002 was convicted on pot charges again along with ‘possessing a machine gun.’

(Illustration found here).

The four-day-old manhunt is in some wild country, maybe some of the last unmolested ground in California: On Friday, there were around 50 officials searching for Miller in the Mattole Valley and Bureau of Land Management Kings Range Recreation area, also known as the Lost Coast.
Right along the way-rugged Pacific, the Mattole area is wilderness in thickness — the 101 highway skirts this to the east, although a drive through just a slice of the valley and the Kings Range is really-big impressive — and is about an hour’s ride south of where this laptop is located.
I’ve never been down there, but know a few folks who have: Big-epic wilderness with few people.
Affluent culture visits the area — from a Men’s Journal review last January of the Lost Coast:

To visit this tucked-away treasure — which makes even pastoral Big Sur seem commercial — we flew into Eureka and rented a car there.
Our meandering drive then took us through the Victorian-style hamlet of Ferndale; on to Cape Mendocino, a collection of gnarly shoals famous for shipwrecks; to Petrolia, a river valley town with Norman Rockwell flavor; to the hippie paradise of Honeydew, where marijuana farms and California drifters converge; and finally Shelter Cove, an adventure surfer’s paradise.

In reality in these things — a bit tougher being a local. And the general insight of folks up here is you don’t go into the wilderness unless you have a good reason, usually through work, or fishing/hunting. The never-rattling drive on sometimes unpaved, cliff-hanging roads is not worth it  — unless you live there.
And seemingly coincidental, yet a piece of a bigger puzzle, that within this vast beauty was California’s first oil wells in the town mentioned above with an obvious name, Petrolia.
From this detailed history of the situation by the Mattole Historical Society (pdf):

The discovery and export of oil and related products changed more than the location of Lower Mattole’s business and population center; it is difficult to overstate the impact of its promise on the course of history here.
If you can believe that the proposed name for the town was Petroleum, that there was a settlement in the Valley known as Oil City, and that the legal name for the U.S. Post Office at Bear River was Gas Jet, you can perhaps imagine the future those oil enthusiasts would have provided for us if they could have.

Indeed, most-likely their compatriots did accomplish the mission.

Via the MVHS‘s blog site and this timeline:

1848-49: First claim of white settler, A.A. Hadley, to have travelled Mattole Valley.
1854: First published account of Mattole Valley’s attractions by Mr. Hill.
Excellent rangeland, climate, soil, and plentiful fish and game attract white settlers.
Conflict with Natives inevitable and rapid.
1859: School district, third in Humboldt County, established.
District and town called “Mattole,” a Native word for this place and themselves, meaning “clear water.”
1861: Discovery of oil in the Valley first publicized.
1864: All but a dozen or two of the least troublesome Natives killed or captured.
Indian troubles considered over.
In 1868 measles kills most survivors.
1865: First oil shipped out by Union Mattole Co.
Principal town established and named “Petrolia.”
Oil boom short-lived, though experimental drilling and subsequent oil excitement recur periodically.

Fairly hardcore, brisk description there. The true business of Petrolia was ‘inevitable and rapid.’

And the circle is complete.
In a vast swamp of oil, and the fossil-fueled life that quickly followed, the oil fields of Petrolia, California, bled onto “gushers” all over the state, the country and the world. A result now 150 years later — a vicious changing climate due to all the consumption of oil (and coal, of course).
This very same Mattole Valley felt the heat — in 2002, the area’s major water supply, the 62-mile Mattole River, dried the shit-up and quickly altered living situations. A recent study conducted by nonprofit Sanctuary Forest Inc. concluded the local environment had  been maybe-forever mutated.

Last month, from the San Francisco-based Fog City Journal:

After years of study, McKee (SFI Executive Director Tasha McKee) confirmed that climate change including higher temperatures, less precipitation and longer dry seasons, were the primary contributing factors to low water flow levels, exacerbated by poor land-use practices.
The detailed study supported the general consensus around Whitethorn that the ever-changing drier climate was to blame.

Whitethorn is directly south of Petrolia in that big wilderness.

And circling way-on back around to real time: Last week, I contributed my small, but cumulative effort to global warming by putting another $20 worth of gas in my Jeep Comanche — pump price at $4.19 a gallon for regular.
Prices are rising down south: The Los Angeles County average price is the fifth-highest in the state behind the San Luis Obispo-Atascadero-Paso Robles area ($4.124), the Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Lompoc area ($4.117), San Francisco ($4.113) and Ventura County ($4.074).
We don’t count up here, I guess.

(Illustration found here).

Despite the world passing a terrible threshold last week — 400 ppm of CO2 in the environment for the first time in human history — the crazed lust for fossil-fuel continues, and next week will open the gate to another zone of pillage: The Arctic.
From the Houston Chronicle on Friday:

U.S. officials estimate the Arctic holds 13 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves, and 30 percent of undiscovered gas deposits.
Until recently, however, the lucrative resources that could reap hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues were frozen over and unreachable.
But global warming has melted sea ice to levels that have given rise to what experts describe as a kind of gold rush scramble to the Arctic.
…
The Arctic is getting hotter faster than any part of the globe.
Experts predict the region will be free of sea ice during the summer within about 20 years.
Sea ice is important because it keeps the rest of the world cooler, and some scientific studies suggest that its melting may be indirectly connected to the extreme weather in the United States and elsewhere in the past few years, changing global weather patterns, including the track of Superstorm Sandy.
The environmental changes could threaten not only polar bears, whales, seals and indigenous communities hunting those animals for food, but also islands and low-lying areas much farther away, from Florida to Bangladesh.
Yet the melting may be a boon for business.
New shipping routes could provide faster and cheaper passageway for worldwide exports and cargo hauling, including everything from food and electronics to cars and military equipment.
And it could also bolster global tourism with cruises in the region’s around-the-clock summertime daylight.
But the big prize is the vast and untapped supply of oil, gas, minerals and precious metals that are believed to be buried in the Arctic.
Already, there is a global race to get energy out of areas that in the past were locked up in ice and frozen ground.

The eight-nation Arctic Council will meet next week in Kiruna, Sweden, to work out plans. John Kerry is supposed to attend representing the US.
Representing what, though?

From the pump to the ass.