Marijuana Farming Thrashes The Environment

Ruining California, one toke at a time:

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 drainages.

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.

...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.