Pubdate: Fri, 21 Jun 2013
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2013 The New York Times Company
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Felicity Barringer

MARIJUANA CROPS IN CALIFORNIA THREATEN FORESTS AND WILDLIFE

ARCATA, Calif. - It took the death of a small, rare member of the
weasel family to focus the attention of Northern California's
marijuana growers on the impact that their huge and expanding
activities were having on the environment.

Marijuana is approved by California for medical uses but still illegal
under federal law, leading to a patchwork of growers.

The animal, a Pacific fisher, had been poisoned by an anticoagulant in
rat poisons like d-Con. Since then, six other poisoned fishers have
been found. Two endangered spotted owls tested positive. Mourad W.
Gabriel, a scientist at the University of California, Davis, concluded
that the contamination began when marijuana growers in deep forests
spread d-Con to protect their plants from wood rats.

That news has helped growers acknowledge, reluctantly, what their
antagonists in law enforcement have long maintained: like industrial
logging before it, the booming business of marijuana is a threat to
forests whose looming dark redwoods preside over vibrant ecosystems.

Hilltops have been leveled to make room for the crop. Bulldozers start
landslides on erosion-prone mountainsides. Road and dam construction
clogs some streams with dislodged soil. Others are bled dry by
diversions. Little water is left for salmon whose populations have
been decimated by logging.

And local and state jurisdictions' ability to deal with the problem
has been hobbled by, among other things, the drug's murky legal
status. It is approved by the state for medical uses but still illegal
under federal law, leading to a patchwork of growers. Some operate
within state rules, while others operate totally outside the law.

The environmental damage may not be as extensive as that caused by the
19th-century diking of the Humboldt estuary here, or 20th-century
clear-cut logging, but the romantic outlaw drug has become a
destructive juggernaut, experts agree.

"In my career I've never seen anything like this," said Stormer
Feiler, a scientist with California's North Coast Regional Water
Quality Control Board. "Since 2007 the amount of unregulated
activities has exploded." He added, "They are grading the mountaintops
now, so it affects the whole watershed below."

Scott Bauer, of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, said, "I
went out on a site yesterday where there was an active water diversion
providing water to 15 different groups of people or individuals," many
of them growers. "The stream is going to dry up this year."

While it is hard to find data on such an industry, Anthony Silvaggio,
a sociology lecturer at Humboldt State University, pointed to
anecdotal evidence in a Google Earth virtual "flyover" he made of the
industrial farm plots and the damage they cause. The video was later
enhanced and distributed by Mother Jones magazine.

Brad Job's territory as a federal Bureau of Land Management officer
includes public lands favored, he said, by Mexican drug cartels whose
environmental practices are the most destructive. "The watershed was
already lying on the ground bleeding," Mr. Job said. "The people who
divert water in the summer are kicking it in the stomach."

That water is crucial to restoring local runs of imperiled Coho
salmon, Chinook salmon and steelhead, which swam up Eel River
tributaries by the tens of thousands before the logging era. Scott
Greacen, executive director of Friends of the Eel River, said, "It's
not weed that drove the Coho to the brink of extinction, but it may
kick it over the edge." By various estimates, each plant needs at
least one gallon and as much as six gallons of water during a season.

The idea that the counterculture's crop of choice is bad for the
environment has gone down hard here. Marijuana is an economic staple,
particularly in Humboldt County's rural southern end, called SoHum.
Jennifer Budwig, the vice president of a local bank, estimated last
year that marijuana infused more than $415 million into the county's
annual economic activity, one-quarter of the total.

For the professed hippies who moved here decades ago, marijuana
farming combines defiance of society's strictures, shared communal
values and a steady income. "Marijuana has had a framework that
started in the 1930s with jazz musicians," said Gregg Gold, a
psychology professor at Humboldt State University. "It's a cultural
icon of resistance to authority."

"In 2013," he added, "you're asking that we reframe it in people's
minds as just another agribusiness. That's a huge shift."

It is a thriving agribusiness. Derek Roy, a special agent enforcing
endangered species protections for the National Marine Fisheries
Service, said, "These grow sites continue to get larger and larger."
Things took off after 1996, when California decriminalized the use of
medical marijuana, Mr. Roy said.

The older farmers say that as the fierce antidrug campaigns waned and
the medical marijuana market developed, newcomers arrived eager to
cash in, particularly in the past decade, according to two growers who
spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"There is a gold rush," Mr. Greacen said. "And it's a race to the
bottom in terms of environmental impacts."

Now that Colorado and Washington voters have approved the recreational
use of the drug, there is a widespread belief that the days of high
prices for marijuana are nearly over.

As Mikal Jakubal, a resident of SoHum who is directing a documentary
film about Humboldt County's marijuana business, puts it, "Everyone
thinks, 'This might be the last good year.' " That helps fuel the
willy-nilly expansion of cultivation, the tearing up of hillsides and
the diversions that dry out creeks.

The worst damage is on public lands. There, extensive plantings are
surrounded by d-Con-laced tuna and sardine cans placed around
perimeters by the dozens, Dr. Gabriel said. Mr. Job of the land
management bureau said these illegal operations have 70,000 to 100,000
plants; they are believed to be the work of Mexican drug cartels.

But small farmers have an impact, too. Mr. Bauer of the State Fish and
Wildlife Department said that when he found the water diversion last
week and asked those responsible about it, "these people we met with
were pointing a finger all over the watershed, saying: 'We're not that
big. There are bigger people out there.' "

Federal environmental agents, including Mr. Roy and Mr. Job, have
brought two cases to the United States attorney's office in San
Francisco. The office declined to prosecute a case last year, they
said. A new one is under review. But, they said, manpower for
enforcement is limited.

Given federal prohibitions against profiting from marijuana, county
officials have a limited toolbox. "We have land-use authority, that's
it," said Mark Lovelace, a Humboldt County supervisor. He chafes at
the county's inability to establish a system of permits, for fear of
running afoul of federal law. His board did just pass a resolution
asking local businesses not to sell d-Con. (A representative of
Reckitt Benckiser, which makes the poison, wrote a letter of protest.)

Mr. Lovelace and others contend that legalizing marijuana would open
the door to regulation and put the brakes on environmental abuses.

In the meantime, the industry has begun to police itself. Some growers
have benefited from a program run by a local nonprofit organization,
Sanctuary Forest, that subsidizes the installation of tanks that can
store water in the winter, when it is plentiful, for use in dry months.

"There may be people who grow pot in our group," said Tasha McKee,
executive director of Sanctuary Forest. "I'm sure there are. We don't
ask that question."

A local group, the Emerald Growers Association, recently produced a
handbook on sustainable practices.

"There is an identity crisis going on right now," said Gary Graham
Hughes, executive director of the Environmental Protection Information
Center in Arcata. "The people who are really involved with this
industry are trying to understand what their responsibilities are."
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MAP posted-by: Matt