The Environmental Catastrophe in Your Joint
“Trespass grows,” which feed the marijuana black market, do great damage to the planet.
On a cold morning this fall, I was clinging to a paracord line, descending through heavy brush on what felt like a near-vertical hill in Shasta-Trinity National Forest, in front of me a team of influential ecologists, behind me a team of affable, heavily armed law-enforcement agents. We were deep enough into the forest—bushwhacking into vegetation, miles and miles down a fire road—that anything human-made would have looked out of place. Then I saw a suitcase. A child’s coat. Pots and pans. A pair of jeans. Chapstick. Ramen packages. It looked a little like the site of a plane crash, except for the thousands
