Illegal Marijuana Farms Endanger Wildlife on California’s Public Lands | National Geographic

So two teams coming off separate points on the ridge, press out with it.

Okay, right where we're at right now is what would be considered the lion's den of marijuana cultivation in California or North America. This is also a prime area for a lot of threatened endangered species. There's a marijuana garden about a half mile away, and hopefully, we can apprehend them. That risk of coming into a grow that has people that are defending their crop to the end with guns, there's always a risk there. Go ahead and get your team ready to make entry, start heading your way.

My name is Dr. Murad Gabriel. I'm the co-director of a nonprofit organization called Integral Ecology Research Center. Our specific mission is to generate and disseminate scientific information for wildlife managers, politicians, and other individuals involved in the conservation realm. We’ve been in this work since about 2013, looking at fisher ecology. Fisher is a mid-sized carnivore that relies on mature forests. They're kind of the honey badger of North America. You're pretty ferocious little guys.

We started finding out the Pacific fishers were dying from rodenticide toxicosis, so rodenticides—this type of pesticide—and so what was causing this? The only thing that was coming up was there was something around these forests that was placing these rodenticides out there. And it wasn't until a forest service special agent stated that your answer is marijuana cultivation on their public lands. The Emerald Triangle has been coined by marijuana cultivators as the central hub of where domestic marijuana cultivation kind of sprouted, and so that would be Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity County.

If you get rid of wildlife, you have no conflict with it. It doesn't destroy your plants; it doesn't eat your food. That's what these suspects constantly reiterate. I get rid of wildlife by poisoning them—multi-year contamination of soil, poisoning terrestrial wildlife, poisoning avian wildlife. I would ask any conservationist if that was occurring in an impacting threatened, endangered, or sensitive species? Is that a significant conservation threat? I would bet you 10 out of 10 conservationists should be like yes, that is. Yes, that is.

So from the time that we detect the site, what we'll do at that point is we'll begin investigating and starting to try identifying who's doing it through surveillance. Get as much intel as we can on them before we actually come in and do the raid. Yeah, they're turning left here. And then the drop point’s right underneath the power lines. Yeah, those reference.

In these cases, these really large grows are probably being run by a drug trafficking organization. And so they'll get whatever pesticides or fertilizers they need brought to them. They're gonna go down raw, so it's extremely important we stay behind these trees. Waiting for the suspects to show up in the vehicle, once they show up, hopefully, we can apprehend them.

Sounds like we're gonna go in and get him at the camp coming up. Stop it; I can explain what happened real quick. Oh, they were waiting. They saw the guys who were tending the plants, and then when the suspects were apprehended by canine unit, this officer and another suspect evaded. Horseman until they can actually catch up to him.

Can't you chain them? Loose? Uh-oh. Throws people—stay in sick to see those malathion Mercado nada nada. No guy says he doesn't use insecticides. Pretty surprised to find out. Alright, he said no carbofuran, but what we're finding is a spray bottle up there that’s got paint on the inside of the spray.

There's no insecticides or pesticides that we know of that are pink, other than the carbofuran. This is highly plausible that these are methamidophos, or carbofuran. That is it, probably dying. That house carbofuran, it takes literally a quarter of a teaspoon to kill a male African lion— a 600-pound male African lion—quarter teaspoon.

So, you know, don’t offend us on that. Iran, yes, don’t— it's very important to be there on that day. If that raid happened, and I was not there, and then I come out a week later, bears have destroyed the whole area. I'm gonna lose local growers are actually doing so, you know—nothing than that data.

How does the site compare to other ones you've seen before? This cookie-cutter ran. Poison, kill, plant. Poison, kill, plant, repeat. I mean, I mean, hate to be so blunt and simplistic about it, but that’s pretty much it. Poison, kill, plant.

They were talking about bringing some of Murad's group in from IERC to help document the site process, you know, some samples. But because it's getting late in the evening, we’ll do that environmental survey stuff more tomorrow. The raid happens, we go out there, document it, and then we go in there and clean it up.

I’m gonna go ahead and start marking this, guys. So if you guys want to follow me. Okay, whoa, what is this? I don't like that. You can see that it almost looks like calamine lotion that’s been diluted. That is a big, big, big red flag for us.

I am going to take samples. Murad's group helped us so much as far as assessing the sites. They analyzed the soil. They analyzed the plants; they help us identify how much damage there is to the resource and to the National Forest. I see there’s a bear puncture in this. I mean that is a bear getting, you know, several ounces in its mouth. If it’s carbofuran, and that bear is done.

It has federally been designated as critical habitat. And now we have what I call a death ring, a death pit. If that bear's raising young now, you didn’t kill that cell; you killed her and maybe her two or three cubs that she’s raising. That’s the ramifications that people need to grasp.

So, how do you see the way forward after this? You think the pesticides are just gonna continue to be this bad?

Well, you guys try to make a dent in it. Oh, we’re making a dent in it. Our organization is completely optimistic. There’s no way we’re quitting on this.

So another twenty-four, fourteen, fourteen fifty pounds. You gotta be relentless and show—know, pretty much what I say—no reclamation. Mercy, you clean it all up. You don’t give them this quarter where they can come up and set up shop any time and we contaminate the environment to go in, investigate, see the chemicals that are there, see how much trash is there, and to finally see it come out of that site.

I’m sort of reversing. The damage is a really, really great feeling. What we do is document environmental degradation, because what we’re doing is gathering data in order to demonstrate that contamination is occurring. I care about conservation—rectifying something that us as humans are contributing toward—and creating the scientific evidence so that policymakers and agency folks can make the best sound decisions.

That’s my main mission. It doesn’t matter what species it is; it doesn’t matter the topic. It’s conservation. I do this work because it’s a conservation issue. That’s my mission.