"Each plant uses 5 gallons of water a day."...
12/23/12, "Pot farms wreaking havoc on Northern California environment," LA Times, Joe Mozingo
"Burgeoning marijuana growing operations are
sucking millions of gallons of water from coho salmon lifelines and
taking other environmental tolls, scientists say."
"State scientists, grappling with an explosion of marijuana growing on
the North Coast, recently studied aerial imagery of a small tributary of
the Eel River, spawning grounds for endangered coho salmon and other
threatened fish.
In the 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
recovery on the 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 the fragile habitats of the North Coast
and other parts of California. With little or no oversight, farmers
have illegally mowed down timber, graded mountaintops 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 ever more ugly snapshots.
A study
led by researchers at UC Davis found that a rare forest carnivore called
a fisher was being poisoned in Humboldt County and near Yosemite in the
Sierra Nevada....
Mark Higley, a wildlife biologist on the Hoopa Indian Reservation in
eastern Humboldt who worked on the study, is incredulous over the
poisons that growers are bringing in.
"Carbofuran," he said.
"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 insecticide 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 large-scale operations in some of California's most sensitive
ecosystems.
It is just one in a litany of pollutants seeping
into the watershed from pot 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
due to diversions, has caused a rash of toxic blue-green algae blooms
in the North Coast rivers over the last decade.
The 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.
The effects are
disheartening to many locals because healthier salmon runs were
signaling that the rivers were gradually improving from the damage
caused by more than a century of logging.
"Now with these water
diversions, we're potentially slamming the door on salmon recovery,"
said Scott Greacen, director of Friends of the Eel River.
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, he came upon a group of
20-somethings with Michigan license plates on their vehicles, camping
next to 400 plants. He followed an irrigation line up to a creek, where
the growers had dug a pond and lined it with plastic.
"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."
The 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 industrial-scale greenhouses. With no permits or
provisions for runoff, the operations
dump tons of silt into the streams
during the rainy season.
Scanning Google Earth in his office
recently, Bauer came upon a "mega grow" that did not 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 operation would consume 2 million gallons of water in the
dry season and unleash a torrent of sediment in the wet season.
"There has been an explosion of this in the last two years," he said. "We can't keep up with it."
Every grow has its own unique footprint. Some farmers on private land
avoid pesticides and poisons, get their water legally, keep their crops
small and try to minimize their runoff. Urban indoor growers might not
pollute a river, but they guzzle energy. A study in the journal Energy
Policy calculated that indoor marijuana cultivation could be responsible
for 9% of California's household electricity use. Other producers, like
the Mexican drug trafficking groups who set up giant grows on public
lands right next to mountain streams, spread toxins far and wide and
steal enough water to run oscillating sprinkler systems.
But it's not just the big criminal groups skirting the rules. Tony
LaBanca, senior environmental scientist at Fish and Game in Eureka, said
less than 1% of marijuana growers get the permits required to take
water from a creek, and those who do usually do it after an enforcement
action.
Responsible growers could easily get permits, with no
questions asked about what type of plant they're watering, LaBanca said.
They just need to be set up to take their water in the wet season and
store it in tanks and bladders.
Fish and Game wants to step up
enforcement, but the staff is overwhelmed, he said. The agency has 12
scientists and 15 game wardens in the entire four counties on the North
Coast, covering thousands of mountainous square miles.
Until the last few years, dealing with marijuana cultivation was usually a minor issue. Now, LaBanca said, it is "triage."...
Deputies had severed the irrigation lines during the August raid, but
when Higley returned in September to study the environmental impact,
some of the line had been reconnected to sprinklers and plants had
re-sprouted. He saw a wet bar of soap on an upturned bucket and realized
workers were hiding nearby.
On this return visit, the site was
empty, and he started picking through the rubbish. "That's d-CON rat
poison right there, 16 trays."
At a dump pile next to the
creek, he found propane tanks, more rat poison, cans of El Pato tomato
sauce, and empty bags of Grow More fertilizer, instant noodles and
tortillas.
A lot of the trash had been removed during the
sheriff's eradication — dozens of empty bags accounting for 2,700 pounds
of fertilizer and boxes for 10 pounds of d-CON (enough to kill 21
spotted owls and up to 28 fishers), as well as two poached deer
carcasses and the remains of a state-protected ringtailed cat.
"It wouldn't matter if they were growing tomatoes, corn and squash," he
said. "It's trespassing, it's illegal and it borders on terrorism to the
environment."" via Free Republic
"Wildlife technician Aaron Pole surveys a forest trashed by growers.
Carbofuran, an insecticide lethal to humans in small doses, is found
regularly at large-scale pot farms. Also flowing into the watershed are
rodenticides, fungicides, diesel fuel and other pollutants
(Genaro Molina, Los Angeles Times / November 15, 2012)".
.
George Soros gave Ivanka's husband's business a $250 million credit line in 2015 per WSJ. Soros is also an investor in Jared's business.
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- I'm the daughter of a World War II Air Force pilot and outdoorsman who settled in New Jersey.
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