Pubdate: Sun, 03 Feb 2013
Source: Austin American-Statesman (TX)
Copyright: 2013 Los Angeles Times
Contact: http://www.statesman.com/default/content/feedback/lettersubmit.html
Website: http://www.statesman.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/32
Author: Joe Mozingo, Los Angeles Times
Page: F2

POT FARMS WREAK HABITAT HAVOC

Growing Marijuana for California's Medical Cannabis Boom Hurting 
Wildlife in Parts of State.

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

In a 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 salmon recovery on California's 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 fragile habitats in parts of 
California. With little or no oversight, farmers have illegally mowed 
down timber, graded hilltops 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 increasingly ugly snapshots.

A study led by researchers at the University of California, Davis, 
found that a rare forest carnivore called a fisher, a smaller cousin 
of the wolverine, 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 use 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 County who worked on the study, is incredulous over 
the poisons that pot growers are bringing in.

"Carbofuran," he said of one pesticide. "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 pesticide 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 largescale pot operations in some of 
California's most sensitive ecosystems.

It is just one in a litany of pollutants seeping into the watershed 
from marijuana 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 flow caused by 
diversions to water marijuana, has caused a rash of toxic blue-green 
algae blooms in northern rivers over the past decade.

Those 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.

"It wouldn't matter if they were growing tomatoes, corn and squash," 
Higley said. "It's trespassing, it's illegal, and it borders on 
terrorism to the environment."

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, Bauer came upon 
a group of 20somethings with Michigan license plates on their 
vehicles, camping next to 400 pot plants.

"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."

That 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 
industrialscale greenhouses.

Scanning Google Earth in his office recently, Bauer came upon a "mega 
grow" that didn't 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 illegal 
pot operation would consume 2 million gallons of water in the dry season.

"There has been an explosion of this in the last two years," he said. 
"We can't keep up with it."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom