The project, a collaboration between wildlife biologists at the University of California - Davis, the U.S. Forest Service, the Hoopa Valley Tribe, and other organizations, began with an examination into the causes of mortality in threatened fisher populations. Researcher Mourad Gabriel documented “multiple contamination sites from marijuana cultivation, specifically the mass abuse of anticoagulant rodenticide as well as other toxicants at these sites.” “It’s a novel threat,” Gabriel, president and co-founder of Integral Ecology Research Center and a researcher at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, told CNSNews.com, adding that “there’s a lack of data” regarding the environmental impact of illegal pot farms.
Gabriel hopes that his team’s research will garner greater awareness among the public and policymakers “on the misconceptions that marijuana cultivation has little to no environmental impact . . . We’re seeing a strong negative effect of marijuana cultivation on our public and tribal lands.” California’s biodiversity makes it home to a wide variety of endangered and threatened species, including salmon, spotted owls, great gray owls, and Sierra-Nevada red foxes. Much of Gabriel’s work is focused on the fisher, an animal in the weasel family that is a candidate for listing under the Endangered Species Act. “All of these species inhabit either previously or potentially occupied marijuana cultivation sites,” Gabriel pointed out, and “are either potentially at risk or currently at risk” due to contact with the rodenticide used to protect marijuana plants.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service awarded a $200,000 grant to the Hoopa Valley Tribe in northwestern California to research activities affecting tribal lands, which are “inundated with trespass grows” by drug trafficking groups “that are coming in [and] clearing their land to grow and cultivate marijuana,” according to Gabriel. “This is a vested interest of theirs, to protect their sovereign land.” Teams of volunteer have cleaned up and reclaimed 637 cultivation sites on public lands so far, according to Gabriel. These sites, found in only two out of 17 national forests in California, are “just a fraction of the grow sites that are currently present.”
The Humboldt County Sherriff’s Office used Google Earth technology to document 4,100 greenhouses that were cultivating marijuana plants on private land in the county in 2012, but only had sufficient resources to eradicate less than 2 percent of the grow sites due to limited funding. “If we were to have our drug task force go ahead and investigate two to three sites every day, it would take them multiple years just to hit every one of those 4,100 grow sites,” Gabriel explained. According to a 2010 report, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimated that “law enforcement around the world only seizes 10-20 percent of the drugs produced.” Mark Higley, wildlife biologist for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, noted an additional 215 grow sites that are “quasi-legal” because they are “growing openly with medical marijuana recommendations.” “It often feels like we are running around like Chicken Little saying, ‘The sky is falling,’” Higley said. However, “it is clear that the problem is real, widespread and possibly getting worse.”
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