How Changing Marijuana Laws May Affect California’s Water and Wildlife

Mar 22, 2017 at 3:00pm

Alastair Bland, News Deeply

IN NOVEMBER 2016, California legalized recreational marijuana. The decision, supported by 56 percent of the state’s voters, allows marijuana to be shared, traded, grown at home and smoked without a medical reason. Using it medically has been legal for 20 years.

Though complex and strict regulations still apply to growing, selling and buying marijuana, things will probably simplify over the next year. The heart of the state’s industry has long been in the north coast region known informally as the emerald triangle. Most growers – thousands of them in the heavily wooded counties of Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino – currently operate illegally. However, many are now lining up at county offices to apply for cannabis production permits, and conservationists, growers and scientists are asking how the new era of pot production will affect the environment.

It may have positive effects. For instance, a grower seeking a commercial production permit must install a water storage system that can be filled in the wet winter season. Such a system would allow growers to keep plantations lush and green all summer without drawing water from creeks, which can easily be pumped dry during California’s hot and mostly rainless summers.

Mikal Jakubal, a Humboldt County resident who has grown marijuana for years at his residence alongside a tributary of the Eel River called Redwood Creek, believes cannabis can be grown sustainably, by capturing and storing water in the winter and minimizing the erosion from earth-moving activities such as building roads and clearing land to plant. Sediment that washes into creeks can smother the gravel beds where adult salmon and trout spawn, killing the unborn fish.

But Jakubal suspects many growers who apply for permits might make the required improvements only temporarily, reverting to less sustainable – and illegal – activities once they are on the books as legal growers.

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