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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, Executive Director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And joining me is Scott Bauer, the Remediation Coordinator at CDFW for Cannabis Remediation. Hey, Scott.

All right. So we are going to be talking about cannabis and its environmental impacts, both from present cannabis operations and from historic operations as part of the legacy of the Green Rush, and what CDFW and others are doing to try to clean up this mess. So let's start in kind of like almost the prehistory of cannabis in the Emerald Triangle and build to the present. So I want to talk about that first generation of cannabis farmers and the way that maybe they kind of set the table for the impacts that we ultimately are seeing. Yeah.

SCOTT BAUER:

That's a lot, but I think we can start back-to-the-landers, right? Would you want to call it the late ’60s, ’70s? And we're talking very small operations hidden from plain sight. Those were the days of CAMP, cops against marijuana production, right? And pretty heavy-handed on fairly small operations.

WHEELER:

And that heavy-handed response, I think, informed how grows ultimately were pushed, right? If we are going to have cops with helicopters, having then the most kind of out of the way, high in the headwaters, most dispersed, least agricultural as we think of it way of doing cannabis, that became kind of the norm up here.

BAUER:

Yeah, I mean, people were growing literally in the trees, bagged plants up against trees. And you could argue the impacts were probably pretty limited, right? I mean, these weren't big operations.

WHEELER:

And because of cops and because of the scarcity that cops imposed, we had prices that made it so you didn't have to have big operations. You could support a family on relatively few plants compared to today.

BAUER:

Yeah, definitely. And I think though, but then that transition, right, with, was it Prop 215, right? Yeah. 1996, I think. So we had the medical component come in and we saw that, so I started getting involved about, well, it was 2010 was the first operation I ever went to and it was this massive grading, basically built a road, pushed all the dirt from that, from the road cut off the mountain, 5,000 cubic yards of dirt into a stream. And it was like, wow, that was kind of, I think seeing a whole different level of cultivation, right, this is like in the era of medical marijuana, it was growing, the size of operations were growing and people were using that proposition and it was to mask illicit cultivation. So it was a way to kind of go bigger and the price was still really good, price was real high, but we started seeing this transformation of large scale operations, which was heading us towards the path of Prop 64, right? I mean, bigger operations, we all kind of knew we needed to go somewhere different with all this, but it was a pretty substantial change from the days of the back to the landers to this whole different scene.

WHEELER:

Yeah, to this agricultural product. So this green rush generation has been widely maligned and I feel somewhat rightfully for its environmental impacts. So let's kind of catalog the various environmental impacts that we started to see. You mentioned grading. How is grading related to environmental pollution?

BAUER:

One of the bigger issues, really, is grading, is that taking a bulldozer and an excavator and clearing off the land, clearing off the trees, so you're essentially eliminating habitat first, and then you're pushing that dirt, that soil, typically right off the mountain and ending up in a stream. And when you put dirt into streams, if you remember from the days of logging, the industrial logging that we've all cleaned up now, for the most part, and we've regulated to the point that people feel more comfortable with it, but the dirt in the streams fills pools, it smothers spawning habitat for salmon and steelhead, and it just reduces productivity.

So it's a really large impact, especially for our fisheries resources. And we recognized that years ago, and the Fisheries Restoration Grants Program has spent millions of dollars putting roads to bed, you know, old logging roads, Cal Fire and the Department of Fish and Wildlife and the Water Board are all regulating timber harvest, but soil has always been a big deal. Dirt in the streams is a bad thing, and the habitat fragmentation. We cataloged a lot of that back in 2012 and 2013, and we're like, this is really becoming an issue. And maybe the individual sites are 20,000 square feet of cultivation or 10,000, but then you have the buildings, and then you have, you know, they're clearing the trees because they want more sunlight. And pretty soon you've just lost an acre of habitat, and you couple that with the neighbor and the other neighbor, and pretty soon you've really fragmented the habitat.

So it is soil is the number one, dirt is the number one issue, but it's also the habitat fragmentation.

WHEELER:

And so like many other agricultural products too, we started to see a pretty rapid increase in the use of pesticides of all stripe, from things that you might be able to find in your localized hardware to things that you are prohibited from owning in the United States. Do you want to talk about pesticides?

BAUER:

Yeah, I mean, I kind of started seeing malathion, yeah, stuff you could buy over the counter, but it was, you'd see stuff like it was for ornamental use and they're using it on a product that people are smoking. So there'd be the malathion, there'd be the sevin, and then you started seeing metamidophos and carbofuran, things that we banned in the U.S. what, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, highly toxic stuff that I will say wasn't that common in Humboldt County. It was pretty rare to find that on a medical marijuana, if you want to call it that, or illicit site, but you would see it on the public lands. See the really nasty stuff out there.

WHEELER:

Oh, and that's maybe a good place to distinguish between the different kinds of grows that we had. So, you had folks who were perhaps growing for this medical marijuana market. You had folks growing for a more illicit black market for distribution out of state. And for that second category, it was kind of divided into folks who had a homestead, who owned property, who maybe had still some skin in the game and could contribute to their community versus the trespass public land, let's go on to the national forest, cut down some trees, and bring in a crew of folks to run this grow in the middle of nowhere. Let's talk about trespass grows for a sec.

BAUER:

Yeah, I mean, those were much more common back, when could we say that, back around 2000 to 2017. And basically, we would call them cartels. That was a primary group of people, organized crime, growing on our public lands and obviously high priority for us, right? I mean, people are recreating, they're walking down a trail and they run into a guy with an AK-47. I mean, that was like, those are true stories. It happened to my friend, yeah. Yes, I mean, we can't have that. And so, those people, like very commonly, were using banned pesticides that they smuggled across the border or couldn't read the label, but you knew what it was. And that has really waned over the years, like there's still hundreds and hundreds of abandoned sites on our public land that we're in the process of getting cleaned up.

But very different from the homesteaders. I think people that were homesteading and were cultivating on their land, they typically had more concern about what they were using, pesticides, that kind of thing, fertilizers. But when you got onto those trespass grows, it was like bags of nitrogen and bottles of pesticide. And those are going into our streams. Like you might be pumping water out of a stream when you're hiking, not realizing that there's a grow above your water source. So it's been a big, significant issue over the years.

And luckily, actually, I got to say, we're starting to see a little uptick. Like it's coming back, don't understand why, but I'll say gratefully, we're seeing less of that trespass activity. It's really shifted, and that was kind of a shift in the mid 2015 or something, where we saw basically organized crime buying properties and kind of growing in plain sight. Growing amongst all the other cultivators and finding the same practices, it was pretty clear you'd get there and you'd be like, oh, we know this, it's metametaphos, it's like carbofuran. Like, oh, it's those people that we busted on public land, have bought property, use a straw buyer, all kinds of crazy ways to hide. But that's what we're kind of seeing today. We've seen them move into those private lands.

WHEELER:

So with all of these new grows or expansion of grows, I think that something pretty obvious occurred, which was we started to have oversupply or the sort of market dynamics that once existed fell apart where maybe supply was moderated by law enforcement. It became this lawless time where grows were increasing in size and then therefore the price fell out the bottom. And then that required people to grow even larger in order to make the same profit that they previously did, which then and so on and so on and so on. I think that we all understand that kind of market force. And so the problems really felt like they jumped in this period.

BAUER:

Absolutely. I think that's probably around 2016, 2017. I think right after Prop 64, you saw this kind of larger scale operations. Yes, it's self-perpetuating. Like, well, I'll grow more, but then the price goes lower, so you grow more. And I want to think back and right around legalization, we thought, or there was a study maybe, that the state of California required 1,700 acres of cannabis for its consumption. And I think at that point there was already double that or triple that, right? I don't know where we are today, but significantly more than what the supply, what Californians need, and so that drives price, right? It's been a real challenge for cultivators to maintain when the price is so challenging for them, you know?

WHEELER:

And I think the one other area that I wanted to focus on from this kind of Wild West period of cannabis production was water use. So we have folks up in the headwaters of many streams, either directly diverting from surface water flows, or they would tap into springs and seeps and the literal headwaters of water courses. And cannabis can be a thirsty plant. You want to riff off of that.

BAUER:

Yeah, you know, I think I'll start with so much of those water diversions are headwater because it also want head pressure, right? They want to bring the water downhill and get enough pressure to run it through their water lines. But our concern over the years and when we first started regulating it is you're taking the water, the coldest water, the water that our fish absolutely need in the summertime, those cold springs, those perennial water sources that feed into our bigger system, South Fork Eel, Mainstream Eel, you name it. And when you dry those up, what does that mean for what we call refugia, you know, summertime rearing of our...

And a lot of people, I have to explain to people like salmon and steelhead, they breed in our streams, but their babies don't just leave, coho salmon, steelhead, even some Chinook, different life cycles of Chinook will spend a year, maybe even two in a stream. So they have to be there in the summertime. And so when you're diverting all these little cold springs and you're drying them up, the streams were... And you couple that, I'll say, with not only the amount of people cultivating and at the time years ago, people weren't worried about conservation and you see overflowing pots, overwatering, all that. But so many users, streams and coupled with drought, 2015 was, I think, a pretty crazy year. And those streams would dry up faster. Maybe they always dried up at some point and had isolated pools, but that was just a...

It's always been a concern, right? Cultivating and we never saw that 20 years ago, right? New industry, taking cold water from our headwater streams is a challenge, especially when we've invested literally tens of millions of dollars to do restoration. And then here's this new activity, right, that's taking water when we built all this great habitat. Well, habitat's only as good as the water that flows through it. And so naturally we're going to be concerned about that.

WHEELER:

You are listening to the Econews Report. And joining me is Scott Bauer, the remediation coordinator at CDFW for cannabis remediation. We are talking about cannabis and its environmental impacts both from present operations and from historic. So the next story or next chapter in the story is Prop 64. And the way that this allowed the state of California and agencies like yours, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to begin to regulate cannabis production. And I think that this is a happy chapter in this story, generally speaking, or for the environment, it's a happy chapter. For many growers, this is maybe not that great of a part of the story. So voters legalized recreational cannabis use. Humboldt County has stood out among other counties in having a robust land use regulation and a permitting vehicle, and has brought together a bunch of different agencies to help regulate this crop. What is the, what is in your view as someone who's been watching this, what is the effect of Prop 64 been on, on moderating the impact of cannabis production?

BAUER:

It's been a welcome thing, right? I mean, Humboldt County was the first ordinance in the state, first cultivation ordinance in the state. There's still counties that don't even have an ordinance. So like, luckily as locals, we have this, we had some forethought. Prop 64, basically, I don't know if there's many initiatives that actually set aside money to do environment, to do not only enforcement regulation, but to do restoration. So we're essentially guaranteed a portion of the funds generated from tax revenue from cannabis. And I got to say, what a pleasure it is to see something, see the forethought into something like this, right? We legalized it and we also recognize that there are environmental issues associated with this product and let's provide the funds to not only regulate it, but to do restoration. So it's been a great thing.

WHEELER:

You know, I think the amount of stored water that people had on their farms has dramatically increased, which has reduced the pressure on those seeps and springs in the hot summer months that has been fantastic and I think has been noticeable. We've seen, I imagine a decline in the use of pesticides because they are not permitted on commercial cannabis products. And grading. If we said that the first most major issue of cannabis farms was grading and the impacts of soil movement, having a process by which we could regulate and then go back and try to correct and cure poorly graded roads or landings, that seems like it's been huge.

So just for you, Scott, just to give you an understanding of where I am in my understanding of all of this, when I first started EPIC in 2014, this is all anyone could ever talk about was cannabis, right? It was exhausting. You know, I started this job. I was like, yeah, you know, I'm going to go fight for spotted owls. And I was, I guess, fighting for spotted owls, but it was against cannabis, which was not what I had anticipated. And now the amount of issues that are raised to me from cannabis production are strikingly small. So from just the community chatter on environmental impacts from cannabis, it seems like Prop 64 has been largely a win.

BAUER:

I would second that. I will say it's been interesting, the transformation just in the past five years, where Humboldt County, we were on the forefront of not only like an ordinance, but on enforcement. And so illicit cultivation is fairly, not fairly, it is super limited in this county. We just don't see it anymore. But the problem with that is we pushed it into other counties that don't have this kind of, from enforcement perspective, we've got the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Water Board, the Sheriff's Department, Humboldt County Sheriff, we have this pretty tight coalition, works together, we know each other. And so we're very effective.

And so by being so effective, we forced them out of our county, out of Humboldt County. So you see Mendocino County, you see four other counties that don't have that kind of structure. Now they're in, I'll say it, it seems like they're where we were 10 years ago, which is wild, but we have a better, we're able to respond faster and try and cut that off. But being effective has, in what we've done to regulate it, has moved the problem and moved out of state too. Oregon saw a big influx from our work and we should give ourselves a pat on the back for what we've done, but unfortunately it's transferred the problem, you know?

WHEELER:

Yeah, fair point there. Yeah. So this problem though of overproduction, oversupply and the effect on prices, that was something that Prop 64 did not cure. So it seems even today that we have more legal cannabis than we can smoke or eat or drink or however you're consuming it these days in the state of California. And that has, you can feel that in a place like Southern Humboldt. Large so-called desert grows or greenhouse grows elsewhere in the state of California where there are perhaps more scant environmental review from county ordinances maybe have hurt our farmers.

And we've seen, I would say just kind of a general decline in total number of cannabis farms. And that also I imagine impacts your work and we're finally getting to the remediation part which is we have this legacy both of pre-Prop 64 green rush farms, both public and private or whatever on public land and on private land. And now we also are having to deal with folks who made a go at it on the legal market and were not successful. So give us kind of a picture of the landscape as you see it.

BAUER:

I'm glad you brought up the, you know, the desert too. Like we've done in enforcement wise, we've been pretty effective at at least stopping it quickly, but like restoring habitat in Humboldt County, much easier due to climate, right? Abundant rainfall, good soils, but when you disturb the desert, what is that going to take to remediate, to restore? So that's really disappointing and we're working on that. But here in Humboldt County, you know, there's hundreds of abandoned parcels, abandoned cultivation sites, and I worry every day about, I go to some of these sites and you find the old plastic skins from the greenhouses and you crush them in your hands and it's fairy dust, literally microplastics.

So we have this huge effort that we need to do and part of my role, this newer role is trying to remediate all those properties and maybe it's more than hundreds, it's like literally an unending supply of work to do. So we have this big challenge before us in the state, both the illicit sites that we conducted enforcement on 10 years ago and from people that just made a go of it, like you said, and they can't do it and in fact, they have no money left to do the actual, like putting their property to bed. So that's like the work before us now and it is statewide. We have abandoned sites all over the place. We're actually, and then I could probably dive into the Cannabis Restoration Grant Fund. That's a part of Prop 64 money to do restoration and so we're using that money to not only do cleanup on sites, but to actually work with qualified cultivators, got a bunch of money out there we're working with trying to help our cultivators that are struggling achieve all the regulatory components of their cultivation. So they have rules. We require things to be done, Department of Fish and Wildlife through our permitting program. The Water Board requires things to be done to make the cultivation, let's just call it like less than significant impact and then we have, you know, Department of Cannabis Control that also has their rules.

So we're trying to work with keeping people, keeping their businesses thriving through our qualified cultivator program. We have money going to restore fixed roads to actually thin forests. So we've got a bunch of money out there working hard to try and not only work with abandoned properties. And I will say that the county, we're working closely with the county to try and figure that out. Like, what does it take with an abandoned property?

WHEELER:

Yeah, so how do you triage it? If you said that there's hundreds of sites, there's one of you. Yeah. And I understand that you are not literally the person putting microplastic into a garbage bag and taking it off site, but it is a larger problem than I think that we are currently equipped to deal with. So how do you figure out where to go and what to do?

BAUER:

Well, that's what we're figuring out right now, right? I mean, you can look at images of Murder Mountain and how many abandoned sites are out there. And actually, a lot of those have been cleaned up, surprisingly, but we have whole areas, call them communities of cultivation, that are just abandoned. Like, what is the most important, right? To me, getting the trash off the land is number one.

I think it's easy to do. We should be trying to do that everywhere they exist. But then we need to start looking at prioritization of watersheds, right? What are our key watersheds? We know that through all these different components, like what we do with our Fisheries Restoration Grants program through SHARP, where we're looking at habitats and trying to focus our restoration efforts. That is a real challenge that I'm working on today.

WHEELER:

Don't look at the plane as you're flying it.

BAUER:

Yeah. Yeah. But we do have a lot of good partners, nonprofits, I'll say. We're always encouraging people to apply. Help us do this work because there's a lot of expertise, as you know, Salmona Restoration Federation, Friends of the Eagle. There's an abundance of people that want to help, but we need to figure out what is critical to me, like microplastics, and that's my personal feeling. It's not an apartment metric or anything, but just because what we see, what we see on the landscape and just being to thousands of these properties, but we have a long ways to go to figure it out, and we're going to spend a lot of money over time.

But we know, I always say, Humboldt was first in a lot of things. We're first in ordinance, first in cultivation, back to the landers, and we're first in the end of the green rush. We're the first to experience that, like now what, right? The qualified cultivators, people that are trying to make it, we want to help them, and then we want to figure out what to do with all the abandoned stuff, and it's a statewide problem. I just talked to some more folks in region five, which is Southern California, and it's like, all right, they have those desert properties, like what do we do with that? How do you restore a desert environment? The Joshua trees have been cut down, whatever, tortoise habitat's gone. I'll say I'm excited to do that kind of work, but I realize it's going to take a village to do it, and that's the non-profits, that's the contractors, and that's the old cultivators. They have experience. They can help.

WHEELER:

So, so briefly, we only have a minute or two left. If you are a cultivator, if you're interested in learning more about these grant opportunities, where should folks go, where would you direct them to go?

BAUER:

Oh, you know what, I would start with go to our webpage, Department of Fish and Wildlife, easy Google search, and you can go to the Cannabis Restoration Grants Program. We have a storyboard up and it has like funded projects. We're funding a lot of research too, but you can see what we've been doing. And then you can, I think it even has the players involved and you can reach out to those people. I've had conversations with people that cultivated for years about got equipment experience. It's going to take a lot of us to get involved and it's definitely room. I see it as like, if you remember the Jobs in the Woods Program, I see this as like another Jobs in the Woods Program. Let's get people hired up that were once cultivating to do the remediation. That's exciting. I think that will benefit all of our communities.

WHEELER:

All right, well, I'm going to leave, and this is my editorial and not Scott's. I want to make this clear. If you are a cannabis user, you are contributing to the solution, in fact. Your tax dollars are going back into CDFW, into these grant programs. That's fantastic. I think that there's been a push because there have been folks who are struggling from the cultivation side to lower taxes on consumption and the idea that then maybe that will help the economic picture for these growers.

I think that we're just stealing money from environmental restoration and remediation when we do that, though. We're also stealing it from kids with adverse childhood experiences and other vulnerable populations that are also being funded from Prop 64 tax revenue. So here is my call to maintain taxes. How brave of me. For money's sake. I'm a good tax and spend liberal. Well, Scott, I really appreciate you coming on, and we'll have you on in the future where we can talk about what the next chapter in our relationship with this interesting plant is.

BAUER:

I appreciate it, and I appreciate what you do, so thank you.

WHEELER:

All right, join us again next week on this time and channel for more environmental news from the North coast of California.