A soft rain falls on the mountains and on the ancient, shaggy redwoods that darken the Eel River canyon. This river once was the horn of plenty — one of the greatest salmon streams on earth. These days, the river isn’t quite dead. But it seems to be in the fourth stage of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief.
Those famous stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance. Think of the five stages of grief as an environmental progress report. It is said that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. Dams, logging, and commercial fishing nearly wiped out the Eel’s annual spawning run of about a million anadromous fish. That was a tragedy. Now, the few salmon and steelhead that make it back to the river each year to spawn appear to be going up in smoke in California’s “second Gold Rush,” pot farming. That isn’t tragedy. It’s a Cheech and Chong movie.
This time, the villains aren’t Charles Hurwitz and his Maxxam Corporation buzz-cutting the redwoods to refinance junk bond debt. This time, it’s a new breed of entrepreneur growing marijuana on an industrial scale and trashing the environment by using dangerous chemicals and pumping the watershed dry.
A long time ago, back in the Summer of Love, hippies decided to flee San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and “get back to the land.” They settled into communes and homestead farms in rural enclaves in Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity Counties. Some of these flower children began growing pot in what came to be called the Emerald Triangle. Any hippie with a green thumb could grow pot organically in the sun, and it was less a business than a laid-back lifestyle.
In his famous novel Ecotopia, Ernest Callenbach told a visionary story about how Northern California, along with Oregon and Washington, seceded from America. Citizens of this new republic, preaching a philosophy of bioregionalism, created an ecological utopia by merging their shared political and cultural beliefs with principles of environmentalism. The novel, published in 1975, was said to have a tremendous impact on the counterculture and on the “green movement.”
That was then; this is now. The mellow vibe is gone. Utopia has become dystopia. The Deadheads, while still around, have been elbowed aside by greedheads and carpetbaggers cashing in on an economic bonanza. A lot of the original tree huggers and back-to-the-landers were shocked by the new wave of “pot miners,” who seemed to the Love Generation to be as rapacious as loggers. After California voters approved medical marijuana — and recreational use became quasi-legal in this state — small homestead pot farms began expanding to keep up with demand. Many local growers, some of them the sons and daughters of the original hippie pioneers, along with thousands of newcomers to the Emerald Triangle, ramped up production to reap enormous profits from the sale of both medical and black-market marijuana. The new “Green Rush” was as unrestrained as California’s old Gold Rush. (“The miners came in ’49, / the whores in ’51, / they rolled across the barroom floor / and created the Native Son,” as an old San Francisco song puts it.)
An estimated four thousand pot farmers are now cultivating marijuana in Humboldt County. With medical marijuana providing the growers with a protective shield, they no longer have to conceal their operations. Farms and greenhouses have come out into the open and are operating brazenly. The image of land-poor hippies growing a little organic weed just to get by has given way to wealthy entrepreneurs whose luxury automobiles and brand-new pickups are a familiar sight in the tiny river town of Garberville, population 913. Garberville is the kind of town where Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong could pass for public intellectuals. The hub is conveniently located on the South Fork of the Eel River, in the heart of a region that is to quality pot what the Napa Valley is to wine.
Over last summer — the driest on record in California in 500 years — 24 tributaries to the Eel River went completely dry while cannabis farmers were pumping water to irrigate their plants. “The safe assumption is that marijuana cultivation had taken most of the water,” said Scott Bauer, a biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife who is in charge of coho salmon restoration on the North Coast. Each dried-up stream was an important spawning tributary for salmon and steelhead, Bauer noted.
“Weed” grows like a weed in California. But the yield can be increased, and the growing time shortened, through irrigation. Marijuana is an annual plant that grows only in the summer, when there is little or no rain in our state. Prime time is a 150-day growing period from June through October, when California’s rivers are at their lowest. Each plant requires six gallons per day for optimum growth, 900 gallons per season, according to the pot industry’s bongmasters. A thousand-foot-square “grow” consumes about 360,000 gallons seasonally, according to the industry’s own internal documents. Bauer estimated that as much as 18 million gallons were drawn just from a single tributary’s watershed that his crew mapped, one that drained 35 square miles of terrain — in a watershed that contains 3,700 square miles, much of it under pot cultivation.
Agriculture and logging are both heavily regulated. Permits must be obtained for everything from using water to grading roads. But few pot farmers bother with the technicalities, because their industry isn’t regulated at all. Medical marijuana is legal, but there are no laws overseeing how it is grown. Diverting water is illegal without a permit, but pot cultivators do it anyway, running hoses and plastic pipes directly into streams and pumping the water up to their plants. Few are cited, because manpower for enforcement is limited. A lot of the water diversion takes place in headwaters that flow into critical fish habitat.
Bauer says he doesn’t care that they grow pot — only that they take out permit applications and abide by his agency’s regulations on water use. This means limiting the amount of water they can take when streams are low and keeping their pumps from sucking fish out of the streams along with the water.
“Our department’s mission,” said Bauer, “is to protect public trust resources, and whether they’re growing grapes, oranges, or marijuana, it doesn’t matter. What matters is keeping water in the stream for the salmon.”
Water diversion isn’t the only environmental problem. Forests are being cleared for pot cultivation on both private and public lands. Mountaintops are being leveled and graded on hills prone to erosion and landslides. Most of the Eel watershed is in private hands, former timberlands under reforestation after decades of logging abuse. Bulldozers are pushing tons of soil into creeks, choking them with sediment. Roads are being carved and graded on hills to access remote sites. Growers dump used potting soil into places where it washes into creeks after it rains. The noise from generators running day and night disturbs the peace and quiet of nature. “Grow trash” accumulates along the streambeds in the form of plastic and garden hoses, building supplies, miscellaneous garbage, and even human waste. Many pot growers live on remote farms that lack toilets or septic systems.
A lot of damage is being done on public land by Mexican and Central American nationals operating clandestinely in the redwoods and inside our parks and national forests. These foreign outfits are using pesticides so strong that they are banned in this country. It was once suspected that major Mexican cartels were behind this. But the role of Mexican organized crime seems to be smaller than once believed, and most nationals appear to be working independent of big gangs like the Sinaloa and Zeta cartels that control pot production in Mexico. Petroleum products that generate power at remote sites leach into groundwater. Diesel fuel, fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides stored improperly or used in an unsafe manner often seep into soil, polluting groundwater. The nitrogen runoff from fertilizers causes severe algal blooms in creeks, depriving streams of oxygen that fish and amphibians need to survive. Pot is a monoculture, and that tends to attract pests, such as mice and wood rats, that eat the tender shoots of young plants. In greenhouses, a suite of five powerful pesticides gets sprayed onto plants to kill spider mites, and nobody knows what toxic effects might come from smoking this weed. While there are a handful of organic pot farmers in the region, many lay on the pesticide with a heavy hand.
Animals are attracted to the sticky, aromatic plants. Pot farmers can’t buy crop insurance, so they take out their own deadly insurance. Growers put down poison baits and build pesticide “fences” along the perimeters of their plantings that are lethal to wood rats, ground squirrels, gophers, and deer. The preferred brand of poison is d-Con, mixed into ground-up tuna and sardines and left in open cans along the perimeter of a pot patch. Bears that are attracted to the baits and other garbage are shot by growers. Native predators, such as raptors, bobcats, coyotes, fishers, and martens, are dying after eating rodents that have been contaminated with warfarin, a powerful anticoagulant that causes internal bleeding when ingested. This rat poison is showing up in the corpses of Pacific fishers, a rare weasel-like predator already on the brink of extinction in California. Fishers eat fish and rodents, and their corpses are being found even in the most remote backcountry.
Scott Greacen, executive director of Friends of the Eel River, sees pot cultivation as the biggest challenge to the watershed since the “Timber Wars” of the 1990s. He believes the solution to the problem is in legitimizing and regulating the industry. As pot floods the marketplace and prices drop, growers are cultivating bigger crops to turn a profit. Satellite imaging that can be viewed on Google Earth Maps shows that the number of pot farms has doubled in this region from 550 to 1,100 in just the last two years. So has the size of the operations, including large-scale marijuana farms and industrial-scale greenhouses on both private and public lands. In addition to these expanding operations, smaller mom-and-pop plantings continue to spring up all over the hills. “The logical solution would be to end federal prohibition and legalize this nationally,” said Anthony Silvaggio, an environmental sociologist with Humboldt State University’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Marijuana Research. Silvaggio and a student put together the Green Rush Google Earth Tour video, which shows the spread of industrial pot growth. Silvaggio said federal prohibition is the biggest obstacle to state regulation, because it drives marijuana cultivation underground, and state agencies that receive federal funding don’t want to become involved in federally prohibited activity. “Salmon are going to take the brunt of this until the federal government gets its act together,” he said. “It’s political theater. Salmon don’t run on human electoral timelines — nature runs on another timeline.”
“As an ethical matter,” said Greacen, “it would be good for us at a federal level to move to legalization. My guess is that if we can move the North’s Coast existing marijuana industry into a legal status, we can deal with 90 percent of the serious environmental impact right off the bat.” Until California has a regulatory system in place, he said, conservationists will be hampered in their efforts to help Eel River salmon recover after a century of environmental abuse.
The worst ravages to the Eel occurred in the last century from dams, logging, mining, overgrazing, and commercial fishing — and from a pair of disastrous floods in 1958 and 1964 — that reduced the spawning runs of chinook and coho salmon and steelhead to maybe 3 percent of the Eel’s historic numbers. In 2010, only about thirty-five hundred salmon and steelhead returned to spawn. But in 2012, a high-water year, an estimated thirty thousand anadromous fish came back, the highest count since the 1958 flood. It looked like salmon were on the rebound, thanks to better land-management practices. But water diversions from pot farms could slam the door on salmon recovery.
The idea that pot is harming the environment has gone down hard in a culture that has always prided itself on its hippie ethos. There are local groups working to end “trespass grows” and “pot pollution,” and some of these organizations include organically minded pot farmers. The Emerald Growers Association, a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes medical cannabis and a well-regulated pot industry, is seeking to curb illegal practices and maintains that delicate ecosystems can be protected through wise stewardship and sustainable farming. They have published a handbook of “best practices” for pot cultivation. These include the use of containment ponds to prevent toxic runoff from fertilizers and pesticides and collection ponds to store winter rainfall for use in the dry season as an alternative to diverting water from creeks. Pot growers are being encouraged to secure permits before clearing and grading land and to hire certified foresters before cutting trees.
Kristin Nevedal, a founding chairperson of the Emerald Growers Association, told National Public Radio that pot growers are convenient scapegoats and that part of the problem is growing suburbanization. “The truth is,” she said, “if you flush a toilet up in the hills, you’re a part of the problem.”
Getting pot growers to accept government regulation won’t be easy. While a few operate within the rules, many operate totally outside the law. Pot growers are famously paranoid, and for good reason. After all, most “medical marijuana” winds up on the black market. Few trust the government. Nobody narcs on a neighbor. It’s an outlaw culture steeped in the code of omerta. And pot is still a federal crime, so most growers work under the radar.
Then there’s the simple fact that a lot of growers are getting rich by adopting a laissez-faire attitude. No restraints or environmental regulations means nothing gets in the way of profits. Take the money and run —and leave the environmental mess for somebody else to clean up.
Pot growers aren’t the only ones benefiting financially. Everyone seems to be in on the action — from real-estate developers, to horticultural suppliers, to Girl Scouts selling cookies in front of pot dispensaries. The pot industry feeds any number of smaller businesses, and these businesses value the relationship.
Colorado and Washington State recently legalized the sale of recreational pot — the first states to do this — and California appears to be heading in the same direction. But the famous trout rivers on the Colorado Front Range aren’t in much danger of being ruined like California’s streams. In part, it’s because the waterlines are already drawn out there in ranch country. But also because Coloradans had the mother wit to regulate strictly how marijuana could be cultivated and distributed. California needs to do the same thing before it’s too late and we all need medical marijuana to ease the pain of losing our salmon fishery. Pot — whether for medical or recreational use — can be grown hydroponically in greenhouses closer to urban water supplies. But the greenhouse method wastes a frightening amount of electrical energy, due to the intensive lighting, fans, and generators needed for growing indoors, and the resulting carbon footprint is huge. Ideally, pot could be grown on traditional farms, just like other crops, if prohibition is lifted. And then there would no longer be any need for pot growers to hide their operations in the woods and in our wildlands.
No one should be polluting or stealing water from a river like the Eel, which has been granted federal Wild and Scenic status. Industrial pot farming shouldn’t be allowed to push salmon closer to extinction, not on the Eel, or on the Klamath, or on the Trinity, or in any other watershed where pot is grown and salmon are a threatened species.
And anybody who cares about this should think twice before lighting up. As Cheech and Chong say in their classic comedy skit, “Dave’s not here.” And neither are the salmon.
