Mike Dunford was a graduate student in the Department of Zoology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, where he studied evolution. Life as an army spouse has since moved him on to Pensacola, where he's currently trying to figure out what to do next. While he's doing that, he writes stuff here, although not usually in the third person. He's also a contributer to It's 4:20. Do you know what's happening in your National Parks?
If you listened to Morning Edition yesterday, you know exactly what I'm about to talk about: the environmental damage that pot farms have been causing in our national parks.
The problem is actually pretty simple: cannabis cultivation typically doesn't fit the certification guidelines of the National Organic Standards Board. To put it another way, ganja isn't a green crop.
Pot is a big business cash crop. It's also a crop that really can't be grown in large wide-open fields. Anyone who wants to make a big profit growing marijuana is going to have to find somewhere out of the way to grow the crop, and they're going to have to get the maximum yield out of the minimum amount of space. That's a situation that demands every possible advantage. Irrigation, fertilizer, pesticides, you name it, they use it. And there we have the problem.
Pot farmers have taken to farming on public lands. National parks, forests, and other wilderness areas are usually open to the public, and contain large stretches of land that are nowhere near civilization, where nobody lives, and where people rarely go. That's perfect for clandestine farming. It's a little inconvenient, and the farmers get to do a lot of backbreaking work carting all the supplies in, but hey, no pain, no gain. And that's just what's been happening. Pot farms have been found, and they're leaving behind environmental damage that will take a huge amount of effort and a hundreds of thousands of dollars to repair. And, of course, we know that it's virtually impossible to ever fix everything.
That's just one more reason to stay away from weed, I guess - it's not an environmentally responsible industry.
Comments
One more reason to legalize the production, sale, possession, & use of marijuana: getting out into the open where (a) it can be regulated & (b) we as a society can make some money off it (sales tax) instead of sinking millions into incarcerating people--not to mention that the hypocrisy of permitting the consumption of alcohol while trying (unsuccessfully) to eradicate weed.
Posted by: Elf Eye | September 28, 2006 5:02 PM
Not to mention the tremendous consumption of energy for indoor pot farming. Kinda the inverse of biofuels, instead of harvesting sunlight to make biomass, we are using Carbon based electricity to run growlamps...
Posted by: bigTom | September 28, 2006 6:22 PM
Not to mention smokin' up a whole lot of pesticides with your giggleweed. Of course, it's probably still better than paraquat. (Yes, I know that dates me somewhat ....)
Posted by: Julie Stahlhut | September 28, 2006 6:54 PM
I agree about the question of responsible industry Mike, but the legalization question should be properly discussed or it only grow as a problem.
Posted by: James Taylor | September 28, 2006 7:48 PM
I fully expect that if they outlawed the consumption of chocolate, illegal cacao-growing operations would spring up to meet the demand; with similar if not identical associated problems to those described.
Illegality, in and of itself, provides a positive incentive to use bad techniques.
There is no code of standards for dope production as there is for legal farm produce; and since these people are using other people's land for their activities, even ordinary common-sense good practice is not applicable. Selling inferior dope, or dope grown in an environmentally-damaging way, won't earn you any harsher a penalty than selling pukka organically-grown stuff. It will, however, probably earn you more money for as long as you stay in business.
Posted by: AJS | September 29, 2006 8:51 AM
In London and the surrounding areas, the police are currently finding nearly one cannabis factory a day. These are usually two or three bedroom houses in otherwise unremarkable residential areas. They have been rented by a gang, the interiors ripped out and every spare square foot turned into part of a high intensity hydroponic dope farm.
A sister of a friend of mine had her house nearly destroyed like this - she'd rented it out as a side effect of getting divorced, so this wasn't the best time for the news. Nor was the fact that her building insurance refused to pay for the damage: despite the fact that she'd got proper landlord's insurance that covered accidental and malicious damage by tenants, the insurance company maintained that the farm wasn't put there by accident and that the purpose wasn't malicious... nasty, eh?
All this is happening because cannabis is a valuable, fast-growing, popular crop. Telling people not to use it hasn't had much of an effect, to be honest.
Similarly, industrial hemp farming is getting a lot of interest now, because the plant has a wide range of uses in food, biofuel and fibre products and is recognised as a low-input crop with many environmental advantages. If you are going to grow things on a large scale, cannabis sativa is a sensible thing to grow.
The major difficulty is that cannabis sativa, even the hemp variants with negligable drug content, is illegal to grow without special licence that in some legislations is impossible to get.
It might be an idea to ask whether the harm done by keeping the plant illegal outweighs the harm that would be done by controlling it in other ways -- and an idea to ask why such a discussion is quite so difficult.
R
Posted by: Rupert | September 29, 2006 9:04 AM
This article, and the comments with it, reminded me of the mention that the DEA reports 98-99% of the marijuana destroyed by law enforcement is "ditch weed", basically feral cannabis with practically no THC.
I checked, and here's an article from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). I followed a link in that article and found this table as a source.
Here's where it gets bizarre. The table is a state-by-state breakout, and most states report ZERO ditch weed eradicated. The grand total is over 218 million plants, and 212 million were reported out of Indiana. That's right. Of this 98% figure, practically all is from one state. I knew law enforcement statistics were screwy, but this takes the cake.
Posted by: jackd | September 29, 2006 5:19 PM
Indiana's been a hotbed of feral cannabis for half a century now. I remember hearing in the 70s that it was because cannabis had been raised there during World War II to produce fiber, since the war had interrupted trade with Pacific sources, like the Philippines. No idea if that's true or not, but that was the story.
Posted by: jeffd | September 30, 2006 1:12 PM