This isn’t really the type of recreation for which the National Parks were intended:

Famed for the biggest trees in the world, Sequoia National Park is now No. 1 in another flora department: marijuana growing, with more land carved up by pot growers than any other park.

Parts of Sequoia, including the Kaweah River drainage and areas off Mineral King Road, are no-go zones for visitors and park rangers during the April-to-October growing season, when drug lords cultivate pot on an agribusiness-scale fit for the Central Valley.

I got a few chuckles at the beginning of the article – at first glance the situation seems terrifically humorous – but as you read on the seriousness of the problem becomes more apparent. These farms – which, if I might reiterate, are springing up in National Parks – utterly destroy the local environment, not to mention the effluent effects of pesticide use, garbage dumping, and water diversions.

Public safety is also a concern – as you can imagine, these farms are protected not by law but by force, and any parkgoer or Park Service official who approaches is putting themselves in a pretty threatening situation. As someone who prefers the backcountry to more traveled routes, I find the fact that the farms don’t tend to be in popular or easily accessible areas to be of little comfort. All of these problems were attested to by a personal friend who worked in Sequoia National Park and had to cope with the situation as a park of her job. The following is from an email that she sent to me today regarding the Times piece:

The woman quoted in the article, [Sequoia restoration ecologist Athena] Demetry, was my boss for the two seasons I worked up there, so the folks I worked with were involved in the restoration end of things. I didn't ever go to one of the sites, but I heard lots about them, and apparently the whole area just gets trashed. We had to watch out when we went hunting for weeds (as in, non-native species, not marijuana) in that area, because we were always going way off-trail into areas where there weren't any visitors. They said you have to watch out because aside from being heavily armed, these guys booby-trap the camp, by doing things like hanging fish hooks up at eye level where you might walk into them.

Unfortunately it seems to be the drug-related piece of the issue that gets the press, rather than the effect that crop growing has on our publicly preserved lands. Sequoia Kings Canyon spokesperson Alexandra Picavet says it best:

"People get blinded by the marijuana issue…. We don't want people planting asparagus on the land, either. This is agricultural assault on a national park, no matter what they're growing."

At the same time, the reason that the agriculture in question is encroaching on protected land is that it’s illegal, and the public safety concerns would not likely be a problem if the conflict weren’t over drugs (can you imagine having a gun pointed at you for accidentally stumbling on someone’s super-secret asparagus farm?). The point remains, as my friend so astutely pointed out, that environmentalists need to be concerned over the consequences of the products they consume, whether it’s gasoline, excessively-packaged food, or even pot.