Cannabis Chronicles

Folks have been using public lands, like National Forests, as a location for guerilla style marijuana grows for a long time. Back in the 70’s and 80’s we remember backpackers on the Pacific Crest Trail being warned to use extra discretion if they encountered marijuana patches.

We were told that it wasn’t out of the ordinary for such gardens to be guarded by individuals outfitted with firearms, and there were stories of booby-traps capable of disabling and killing hikers who stumbled into the wrong place.

Whether such stories were truth or myth, it certainly does make sense that guerilla growers are capable of causing some serious environmental destruction. National Forest and National Park lands certainly aren’t the ideal places to grow Marijuana, they are not prime agricultural land, and are usually remote and highly erodible. If the lands were highly suitable for agriculture, they never would remained under the domain of the National Forest Service in the first place.

Third world countries often have problems with maintaining their national parks. Population and economic pressures often cause these parks to be filled with “squatters” and individuals without other homes. The pollution and environmental degradation under conditions like these is enormous. Now, pot prohibition is bringing a similar fate to a National Forest near you.
 

Marijuana Crops Also Bad for Environment
Toxic poisons, waste foul public lands
by: Alex Breitler - Record Staff Writer (environmental reporter)from: The Record (Stockton, CA) - August 06, 2007

California - Come September, marijuana growers who have labored for five months in some of California’s most remote country will abandon their secret gardens, taking their multimillion-dollar crops.What will they leave behind? Irrigation tubes that snake for a mile or more over forested ridges. Pesticides that have drained into creeks and entered the food chain, sickening wildlife. Piles of trash and human waste in the most rugged and bucolic drainage.

The environmental consequences of marijuana gardens - or plantations, as they’re more aptly called - are increasingly apparent as law enforcement continues its statewide crackdown on the illicit operations.

“They basically trash our public lands,” said Matt Mathes, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service in Vallejo. Officials in Calaveras County so far have eradicated 26,000 plants in raids on pot gardens in the back country.

The finds in Calaveras are merely the latest of many; a multi_agency campaign counted a record 1.67 million plants seized in California in 2006, half a million more than the year before.There’s not enough money to thoroughly rehabilitate many of these sites, Mathes said. At Sequoia National Park, officials estimate it costs $11,000 per acre to fix the damage.

The trash goes first, packed out sometimes by National Guard helicopters or hotshot firefighters once fire season is over. Restoring native plants and fixing soil erosion problems are longer_term issues which, officials say, are sometimes never addressed.”Unfortunately, we really can’t clean up all those sites like we would like to,” said Ross Butler, assistant special agent in charge of the Bureau of Land Management’s Sacramento office.”We go in, we get the weed,” Butler said. “Everything else just kind of ends up staying behind.”Pot is especially a problem in foothill counties such as Calaveras, he said. Gardens as large as 4 or 5 acres are cultivated year after year, and by the time officials find them, the environmental damage is done.
Empty cans, egg containers, food wrappers, gas cylinders, dirty magazines and lean-tos are left behind.

And then there’s the makeshift pit toilets, the smell of which sometimes tips off the cops that they’re close to stumbling upon a plantation.

“It’s just a huge mess,” Butler said.

Another concern revolves around endangered species. Pesticides are used to keep rodents out of the marijuana; those rodents, including wood rats, are a primary food source for the California spotted owl.

At Whiskeytown National Recreation Area near Redding, park rangers investigating a tadpole die_off in a creek wandered upstream and found a small dam in which someone had rigged an open can of fertilizer. According to testimony later delivered before Congress, rangers crawled on their bellies up steep slopes and found marijuana gardens perched atop cliffs.

Supporters of legalizing marijuana say the environmental destruction that accompanies these hidden gardens would not occur if pot was treated like any legal agricultural product.

“There is a reason you never hear of anyone planting clandestine vineyards in the national parks,” said Bruce Mirken, a spokesman for the Marijuana Policy Project in San Francisco. “Marijuana can be grown safely in an environmentally responsible way, or it can be grown dangerously.”