Many sites have scattered carcasses of deer and bears that were poached by laborers, who shoot almost anything that comes near their site. This aggressive behavior protects the plants and provides supplemental protein in the laborers diet. However, the vast majority of these carcasses are left to rot and to be eaten by vultures because growers cannot viably consume or preserve all of the meat from large mammals before it rots. The scavengers that successfully feed on carcasses have an increased risk of developing lead poisoning because they begin eating at the point of bullet entry where inner flesh is the most exposed and easily accessible. By eating from a gunshot wound, scavengers consume bullets containing lead. Over time, lead can accumulate in their bodies and cause lead poisoning. Lead poisoning caused by hunting is cited as the number one killer of the California condor, an endangered species, and poses one of the most significant threats to wild scavengers in California.Sustained inhabitance poses a significant hazard to fire prone areas throughout California. Cultivator activity can cause wildfires and the presence of a marijuana garden obstructs firefighting efforts due to safety issues. “On the Hume Lake Ranger District of the Sequoia National Forest, a wildfire in 1999 was started by a campfire in a marijuana garden. Firefighters found the garden and had to stop fire suppression activities in the area until law enforcement secured the area. This problem occurs several times every year.” Cultivators use campfires and burn volatile gases for cooking during the dry season in areas vulnerable to fire. Under prime fire conditions, a stray spark, improperly connected tank,pipp mobile systems or overturned stove can initiate an out of control fire with drastic and widespread consequences. A crucial function of sustained inhabitance is to perform counter-surveillance efforts.
Cultivators are trained by cartel employees, often veterans of the Mexican army, and equipped with weapons ranging from shotguns to assault rifles. A station is setup at a vantage point above the grow site so a watchman can detect and alert his colleagues to approaching scouts or the presence of pedestrians. While entering sites, laborers sweep trails of any prints so they can patrol for signs of entry by others. One positive development is that the use of booby-traps has drastically declined. However, the protective behavior of inhabiting guards has become increasingly aggressive year to year as a result of escalating grower competition, law enforcement pressure, high crop value, and DTOs’ demand for harvest delivery.Men on patrol have been known to threaten anybody they encounter, and even harass law enforcement and forest service employees at their homes.Their engagement in armed standoffs with law enforcement scouts has increased in conjunction with the occurrence of gunfire. By shooting at site detection scouts, cultivators create a two to three day window during which they harvest all of the buds they can carry out, and flee the area before a larger task force can return. The rate of violence and harassment towards pedestrians has also increased. In June 2006, two individuals in a remote area north of Covelo, California, came near a marijuana plantation and were shot and killed.”Two months later, in October 2006, “a man hunting in a remote location within the Mendocino National Forest was fired upon by four individuals after he inadvertently approached the edge of a grow site.”Both instances lead to the discovery of the plantations that the gunmen were trying to protect.
Due to the illegal status and consequently hazardous state of marijuana plantations, law enforcement agencies are the primary organizations responsible for site reclamation on public lands. “In the past, site reclamation has not been considered much, if any, by the law enforcement community.”Environmental cleanup and remediation are crucial to mitigating the effects of remote cultivation. Since the objectives of law enforcement agencies have changed, leaders have recognized the significance of clean up in counter-cultivation efforts, and have emphasized site reclamation in their large scale marijuana control plan. Even so, environmental cleanup and remediation remain the most neglected tasks associated with post-raid site processing. The main barriers to reclamation efforts are the high costs and intensive labor needs. Enforcement agencies, land managers and volunteer groups are increasing post-eradication cleanups, but reclamation efforts remain inadequate when compared to the damage that cultivators create. The remoteness of Cannabis grow sites makes clean up both time consuming and arduous. Clean up crews remove marijuana plants, disassemble water diversion and drip irrigation systems, and clean up camp sites and surrounding areas. As forest technician Madison Thomson states, “[cultivators] pack everything in and nothing out. We [the conservation fund] don’t have enough money or enough manpower to go into these places and clean them up. It’s a big eye sore.” Depending on the number of people, available funding and equipment involved, the site cleanup process can take anywhere from a number of days to several months. More often than not, cleanup is not completed at all. From the perspective of law enforcement agencies, it is crucial for grow sites to be cleaned up. Undoing the work cultivators put in and removing grow infrastructure minimizes the incentive for cultivators to come back. Otherwise, cultivators readily return to a location to save countless hours preparing the grow site. Equipment and trash that is dispersed across cultivated landscapes provides visual evidence of marijuana cultivation activities. Sites that are not cleaned up are indistinguishable from active cultivation plots, and provide evidence that may result in raids on unoccupied areas. The most important piece of equipment used for optimizing the cleanup process is a helicopter. Helicopters enable cultivation equipment and trash to be removed quickly and in large quantities.
Clean up crews fill up hauling nets with marijuana plants, irrigation tubing and trash bags. The nets are connected to an extended line and flown to a designated area for transport to a disposal location. A clear area is critical for helicopters to drop lines with nets into sites for equipment removal. Heavy tree canopy and forest fires hinder the use of helicopters, and greatly reduce the efficiency of cleanup efforts. What cannot be flown out due to inaccessible site conditions, limited time allocated for helicopter use, or limited funding to pay for helicopter costs, must be hiked out on peoples backs or left to rot. Marijuana removal and destruction is a historical focus of law enforcement agencies that subsists today, despite the reality that plant removal after raids actually accomplishes little to remedy the environmental damages. Plant eradication provides a measure of operational success, prevents cultivators and civilians from attaining marijuana from already raided areas, and enables land alterations including terracing and mounds to be rectified. However, the effort put into plant eradication is needless in sites that will not be cleaned up because abandoned sinsemilla Cannabis will rot and will not reproduce to grow in subsequent years. During eradication, officers, land management employees and volunteer laborers use machetes and loppers to cut down Cannabis plants at the stems. On large plots, the work is both physically demanding and time consuming. Depending on the location of the site, different strategies are used to remove eradicated plants. Traditionally, a common method was to leave the cut plants on the ground to decompose. Today, this generally occurs only in the most remote locations to prevent plant acquisition by outside parties. Another historically prevalent practice was to burn the marijuana plants on-site. However, this process releases carbon into the atmosphere and poses a potential risk of fire spreading to surrounding vegetation. To prevent forest fires, this option requires constant monitoring and can only be done during certain times of the year. The final option is to airlift or hike plants out to a landfill or a location suitable for burning. The most important structure to remove is the water diversion system. Removing miles of irrigation tubing is one of the most intensive aspects of cleanup in terms of time, effort, and money. It is the most important infrastructure to remove because DTOs invest large quantities of money and labor into its installation. When irrigation systems remain intact, DTOs retain a major incentive to return to eradicated sites in subsequent years,industrial drying rack which perpetually prevents ecological recovery. Irrigation lines alone can fill multiple helicopter removal bundles, each weighing about five hundred pounds when full.The most environmentally harmful element of irrigation systems is the dam or cistern that is used to create a catchment from which cultivators extract water. Removal of catchments requires great care to restore original flow patterns, while minimizing sedimentation and alterations to primary and ephemeral flows. Additional clean up aims to remove equipment, supplies, piles of cleared vegetation and remains from human inhabitance: this includes bags of fertilizer, chemical containers, propane tanks, camp dwellings, food preparation areas, latrine sites, scattered trash and more. The scattered trash includes composed of plastic wrapping, notebooks, clothing, tin cans, hiking packs, beer cans, pruning saws, rope, and more. It is important to gather and remove these scattered remains so that eradicated sites can be distinguished from active ones. The latrine, however, cannot be simply picked up and taken away. Cultivators generally dig at least one hole deep into the ground to be used throughout the duration of their stay. Nothing is currently done to remove the excrement aside from covering up the hole, marking the location, and allowing the contents to filter through the soil. Holistic remediation efforts attempt to restore landscapes to pre-alteration conditions, which entails watershed maintenance, surface restoration, vegetation management, and wildlife promotion. While there are astounding regularities from one DTO site to another, remediation efforts still must be suited to specific landscapes and management goals because the individual problems of each site influence reclamation solutions.
Watershed maintenance centers on restoring water courses by removing cisterns and dams. Dams must be removed in a way that will not wash the dam components downstream. This requires careful consideration about how to release collected water in a controlled manner to its original path. However, the process of diversion may permanently alter the direction of ephemeral water flow and the way in which it accumulates in pools. Equally important in preserving watershed function is preserving landscape drainage. Restoring the integrity of watershed drainage goes hand in hand with rectifying land alterations such as reservoirs, terracing and displaced vegetation that alters surface and subsurface water flow. Remediation teams attempt to fill reservoirs, holes and sumps, re-contour slopes, and disperse vegetation.It is important to fill any holes dug by cultivators because they can trap and kill small mammals. Remediators use rakes and shovels to re-grade slopes and flatten mounds to smooth soil surfaces. While re-contouring can be significant, soil replacement is inevitably an imperfect process. The removal of logs providing terrace support can cause rapid erosion, which makes terrace remediation complicated and difficult. The original grade is never reproduced perfectly, but over time, the decomposition of organic matter and normal physical processes replace soil losses. In addition, crews perform restoration tasks such as “filling in planting holes and covering the hillsides with small branches and duff to help prevent [further] erosion.”Clean up crews use the slash piles created by cultivators to control erosion in areas with bare soil. It is important to disperse cleared vegetation, to remove large berms that obstruct site accessibility, and to redistribute piles from streams and creeks. Remote landscapes generally recover very well with time through “natural or unassisted regeneration.”The dark and rich organic soils provide abundant nutrients to new sprouts, and the more inhospitable landscapes are well suited for native plants. For example, large trees that are topped off will take tens to hundreds of years to recover if at all; but successive plants will thrive in the newly sunlit areas. When remediators do restore vegetation, they spread seeds of native plant species or plant seedlings. This can provide habitat, prevent further establishment of invasive plants and mitigate erosion. Habitat maintenance and restoration is a major concern for cultivated areas containing threatened or endangered species. In certain cases, plant restoration requires regular monitoring to gauge effectiveness. The success of plant recovery depends on each site, but the most vital factors in site recovery are the prevention of cultivator return and the passing of time. Little can be done to remove the presence of chemicals from the biomass.