Law enforcement raided the illegal cannabis operation in Shasta-Trinity National Forest months before, but rotting potatoes still sat on the growers’ makeshift kitchen worktop, waiting to be cooked.
Ecologist Greta Wengert stared down the pockmarked hillside at a pile of pesticide sprayers left behind, long after the raid. Wild animals had gnawed through the pressurized canisters, releasing the chemicals inside.
“They’re just these little death bombs, waiting for any wildlife that is going to investigate,” said Wengert, co-founder of the Integral Ecology Research Center, a non-profit that studies the harms caused by cannabis grows on public lands. For all her stoic professionalism, she sounded a little sad.
For over a decade, Wengert and her colleagues have warned that illegal cannabis grows like this one dangerously pollute California’s public lands and pristine watersheds, with lasting consequences for ecosystems, water and wildlife.
Now, they’re sounding another alarm — that inadequate federal funding, disjointed communication, dangerous conditions and agencies stretched thin at both the state and federal level are leaving thousands of grow sites – and their trash, pesticides, fertilizers and more – to foul California’s forests.
Dozens of fertilizer bags wept blue fluid onto the forest floor. Irrigation tubes snaked across the craters of empty plant holes. The cold stillness felt temporary — as if the growers would return at any moment to prop up the crumpled tents, replant their crop and fling more beer cans and dirty underwear into the woods.
Wengert has tallied nearly 7,000 abandoned sites like this one on California’s public lands. It’s almost certainly an underestimate, she said. Her team knows of only 587 that have been at least partly cleaned up.
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No government agency can provide a comprehensive count; several referred CalMatters back to Wengert’s nonprofit for an unofficial tally.
Most of the sites Wengert’s team identified are in national forests, where “limited funding and a shortage of personnel trained to safely identify and remove hazardous materials” is driving a backlog in clean ups, a U.S. Forest Service spokesperson told CalMatters via an unsigned email.
Source: California Post – Breaking California News, Photos & Videos
