Pubdate: Wed, 02 Jan 2013
Source: Albuquerque Journal (NM)
Copyright: 2013 Albuquerque Journal
Contact:  http://www.abqjournal.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/10
Author: Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times
Page: B3

POT GROWERS RUINING ENVIRONMENT IN CALIFORNIA

Farms in Forests Divert Water, Poison Land and Animals

EUREKA, Calif. - California scientists, grappling with an explosion of
marijuana growing on the North Coast, recently studied aerial imagery
of a small tributary of the Eel River, spawning grounds for endangered
coho salmon and other threatened fish.

In the remote, 37-square-mile patch of forest, they counted 281
outdoor pot farms and 286 greenhouses, containing an estimated 20,000
plants - mostly fed by water diverted from creeks or a fork of the
Eel. The scientists determined the farms were siphoning roughly 18
million gallons from the watershed every year, largely at the time
when the salmon most need it.

"That is just one small watershed," said Scott Bauer, the state
scientist in charge of the coho recovery on the North Coast for the
Department of Fish and Game. "You extrapolate that for all the other
tributaries, just of the Eel, and you get a lot of marijuana sucking
up a lot of water. ... This threatens species we are spending millions
of dollars to recover."

The marijuana boom that came with the sudden rise of medical cannabis
in California has wreaked havoc on the fragile habitats of the North
Coast and other parts of California. With little or no oversight,
farmers have illegally mowed down timber, graded mountaintops flat for
sprawling greenhouses, dispersed poisons and pesticides, drained
streams and polluted watersheds.

Because marijuana is unregulated in California and illegal under
federal law, most growers still operate in the shadows, and scientists
have little hard data on their collective effect. But they are getting
ever more ugly snapshots.

A study led by researchers at the University of California, Davis,
found that a rare forest carnivore called a fisher was being poisoned
in Humboldt County and near Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada.

The team concluded in its July report that the weasel-like animals
were probably eating rodenticides that marijuana growers employ to
keep animals from gnawing on their plants, or they were preying on
smaller rodents that had consumed the deadly bait. Fortysix of 58
fisher carcasses the team analyzed had rat poison in their systems.

Mark Higley, a wildlife biologist on the Hoopa Indian Reservation in
eastern Humboldt who worked on the study, is incredulous over the
poisons that growers are bringing in.

"Carbofuran," he said. "It seems like they're using that to kill bears
and things like that that raid their camps. So they mix it up with
tuna or sardine, and the bears eat that and die."

The insecticide is lethal to humans in small doses, requires a special
permit from the EPA and is banned in other countries. Authorities are
now regularly finding it at large-scale operations in some of
California's most sensitive ecosystems.

It is just one in a litany of pollutants seeping into the watershed
from pot farms: fertilizers, soil amendments, miticides, rodenticides,
fungicides, plant hormones, diesel fuel, human waste.

Scientists suspect that nutrient runoff from excess potting soil and
fertilizers, combined with lower-than-normal river f low due to
diversions, has caused a rash of toxic bluegreen algae blooms in the
North Coast rivers.

The cyanobacteria outbreaks threaten public health for swimmers and
kill aquatic invertebrates that salmon and steelhead trout eat. Now,
officials warn residents in late summer and fall to stay out of
certain stretches of water and keep their dogs out. Eleven dogs have
died from ingesting the floating algae since 2001.

The effects are disheartening to many locals because healthier salmon
runs were signaling that the rivers were gradually improving from the
damage caused by more than a century of logging.

"Now with these water diversions, we're potentially slamming the door
on salmon recovery," said Scott Greacen, director of Friends of the
Eel River.

In June, Bauer and other agency scientists accompanied game wardens as
they executed six search warrants on growers illegally sucking water
from tributaries of the Trinity River. At one, he came upon a group of
20-somethings with Michigan license plates on their vehicles, camping
next to 400 plants. He followed an irrigation line up to a creek,
where the growers had dug a pond and lined it with plastic.

"I started talking to this guy, and he says he used to be an Earth
First! tree-sitter, saving the trees," Bauer said. "I told him
everything he was doing here negates everything he did as an
environmentalist."

The man was a small-timer in this new gold rush. As marijuana floods
the market and prices drop, many farmers are cultivating ever bigger
crops to make a profit. They now cut huge clearings for industrial
scale greenhouses. With no permits or provisions for runoff, the
operations dump tons of silt into the streams during the rainy season.

Scanning Google Earth in his office recently, Bauer came upon a "mega
grow" that did not exist the year before - a 4-acre bald spot in the
forest with 42 greenhouses, each 100 feet long.

Figuring a single greenhouse that size would hold 80 plants, and each
plant uses about 5 gallons of water a day, he estimated the operation
would consume 2 million gallons of water in the dry season and unleash
a torrent of sediment in the wet season.

"There has been an explosion of this in the last two years," he said.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt