High Time for Greener Weed

I recently moved to California, home of the original hippie and the source of 70% of domestically grown marijuana. Of course, being the relentless environmentalist that I am, I innocently wondered: “Is growing that much weed good for the environment?” The answer will bum you out.

Marijuana has been dubbed the “fastest growing industry in the Unites States.” As of September 2015, 23 states have legalized medical marijuana, and four states and DC have legalized recreational use outright. The national market for weed has been rapidly growing, checking in at $2.7 billion in 2014. As exciting as these trailblazing changes undoubtedly are for proponents of legalizing marijuana, the growth of weed as a legally recognized industry force us to confront the less desirable aspects of cannabis cultivation. It won’t come as a surprise to you, from the title and the theme of this blog, that the less palatable consequences are environmental impacts. Cue pot-loving tree-hugger wailing.

Cannabis, the plant species that marijuana is prepared from, is either grown indoors or outdoors, and the two methods have very different environmental consequences. Outdoor farming is largely problematic because it has, in many cases, led to depletion or degradation of water resources and threatened wildlife. Surprisingly (at least to me), marijuana requires twice as much water as wine grapes, and California’s illegal growers allegedly level hills, log swaths of forest, and divert creeks and streams for their thirsty crops. This is bad news for an already drought-stricken and erosion-sensitive environment.

Wildlife is especially threatened, in part from this depletion of surface water and loss of habitat, but also from pesticide and fertilizer pollution. Massive amounts of these chemicals are used to cultivate illegal pot grows and some of that inevitably makes its way into the food chain, runoff, and nearby water bodies. The impacts are seriously too numerous and devastating for me to list here, but include rodenticide – rat poison, essentially – killing off several levels of the food chain all the way up to beloved California bears, and fertilizers sparking algal blooms that clog up precious salmon streams.

Map of grows and daily water usage (California Department Of Fish And Wildlife)

Indoor farming is an entirely different beast. Indoor grows employ lighting and climate controls to mimic the bright sunshine and dry, warm air that cannabis is happiest in. However, indoor growing also results in seriously major energy use and downstream greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Illegal indoor grows are almost always run off the electricity grid, powered by discreet but “inefficient and carbon dioxide-spewing on-site diesel and gasoline generators.” Across the U.S., it’s estimated that indoor cannabis production makes up 1% of national energy consumption and the GHG emissions equivalent of 3 million cars. A single blunt (marijuana cigarette) from an indoor American grow releases 10 pounds of CO2 emissions. That’s the same as running a 100-watt light bulb for 75 hours.

The criminalization of marijuana or marijuana cultivation is partly to blame for the extent of these environmental threats. Through marijuana cultivation has been around in California for decades, it’s illegal here (and every state except Alaska, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington) to grow marijuana for recreational use. As a result, the large-scale farmers who run multi-million dollar operations retreat to remote areas of public forests, trespassed private land, and indoor grows to hide their very conspicuous operations from the law. Confronted with ever-increasing demand for their product, zero agricultural standards to abide by, and no safety nets like crop insurance (as there is in mainstream agriculture), growers have no reason to not use excessive and environmentally-harmful growth methods.

Most people who’ve weighed in agree that legalizing marijuana is at least one part of a solution. Regulation would allow for cannabis to be treated like any other crop. Bringing marijuana under the umbrella of agriculture allows the state to monitor water and energy use, prevent grows from disrupting fragile ecosystems, and establish best practices or technology standards. All of these policy upgrades are possible, though this is undoubtedly a quixotic forecast. You only need to look at post-2012 Colorado to see how legalization didn’t go as planned (the state and its municipalities didn’t anticipate such rapid growth and totally bailed on renewable energy requirements for the fledgling industry).

See the damage done by industrial scale pot growers via Google Earth (Mother Jones)

This argument also skirts over the fact that weed is still very illegal on the federal level. Marijuana is a legal patchwork quilt, with state and national rules dictating very different terms. Even if growing were made legal on the statewide level, federal regulations –which classify marijuana as a Schedule I controlled substance, the same category as heroin– could technically land growers in hot water. Marijuana use and cultivation will not be decriminalized on the federal level any time soon, and as long as the threat of potential federal enforcement looms over producers, there will always be some incentive to grow discreetly. But the U.S. Department of Justice has largely kept to its word that it will defer to state-level enforcement of marijuana. That has proven to be enough for Colorado and Washington producers to come into the light and will probably be enough for their California counterparts.

Despite these potential hurdles, bringing the weed industry into the mix of legal agriculture is an urgent necessity for California, where cannabis cultivation already makes up 3% of statewide energy use and poses serious long-term threats to ecosystem health. One upshot is that the state stands to gain $520 million in tax revenue from legalization and the sky-high costs of futile law enforcement are expected to decrease. All signs point to recreational marijuana popping up as a 2016 election ballot initiative in California, so there’s hope yet.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this fascinating, multi-faceted issue. The following bookshelf of phenomenal reads (also cited in the post) has been lovingly curated for those who want to dig a bit deeper.