Indopedia All Things Marijuana
As Northern California’s cannabis growers prepare to shift their businesses to fit new medical regulations and expand to supply upcoming recreational sales, protecting the local environment has become increasingly important. So while some legal cultivators are actively getting together to discuss ways to improve water and soil sustainability, NorCal is still full of backwoods, illegal grow ops that aren’t as careful in their attempt to cash in on the green rush.
“An armed industry is taking over our national forests,” Mourad Gabriel, a wildlife disease scientist and executive director of Integral Ecology Research Center, told the Sacramento Bee.
Gabriel has been doing research in the hills of Northern California for 10 years now, and has come to one very harsh conclusion – black market cannabis grows are seriously threatening the local ecology and putting entire species of local wildlife at risk.
Black market farms contaminate rivers, bulldoze trees and most notably, use poisonous rodenticide to guard their valuable crops from the region’s abundant wildlife. In doing so, they’ve disrupted an entire food chain and started to kill off whole ecological…
