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.

Eventually I’m going to get in trouble for blogging things that are two weeks old, but that’s what happens when you’re busy. In truth, I only found this article a couple days ago, though it’s another week and a half older than that:

A small but growing body of research is finding that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, while increasing crop yield, decrease the nutritional value of plants. More than a hundred studies, for example, have found that when CO2 from fossil-fuel burning builds up in plant tissues, nitrogen (essential for making protein) declines. A smaller number of studies hint at another troubling impact: As atmospheric CO2 levels go up, trace elements in plants (such as zinc and iron, which are vital to animal and human life) go down, potentially malnourishing all those that subsist on the plants.

At first I thought of the results I’ve seen from FACE experiments, but those results only address levels of nutrients that crops need to survive. As CO₂ levels increase, so too does plant growth until another nutrient becomes limiting, a role often taken by nitrogen. This leads to plants with low levels of nitrogen and other nutrients, which to summarize the more in-depth coverage of the Grist piece, is not so good.

The really important part, to my mind, is the fact that this turns the pro-warming stance of groups like the Greening Earth Society completely on its head. The fact aside that the FACE experiments don’t support the idea of a post-climate-change agricultural boom and the formation of a new Eden, this new research suggests that even the food that we will be able to produce in a carbon-rich atmosphere is likely to be less nutritious for us, as well as for the rest of the biosphere on which we depend.

How many different ways can climate change be cast as a human health issue rather than “just” an environmental one?

(From the user blogs because there's a whole lot to the "organic" issue. Check out the USDA's National Organic Program and the California Organic Foods Act of 1990. -chris)

Just wanted to point out an interesting article about Horizon's "organic" milk over at Salon.com. (If you don't have a subscription to salon.com you can click the link to see one of their ads for a free single day pass.)

... Horizon is emblematic of 21st century agriculture. It's a brand of White Wave Foods, itself a division of $10 billion Dean Foods, the largest milk bottler in the country.

Water is not the fashionable issue for environmentalists right now – lately we tend to worry much more about electricity, for reasons that should be fairly obvious (see pete’s recent articles if it’s not) – yet aquifers in the western United States are being rapidly drained to provide water to the growing population of the West.

The Central Valley Project was started back in 1935 to help promote development in the arid center of California by subsidizing water from the northern part of the state that was being supplied to farmers in the dry south. The federal government is on the verge of renewing the 50 year old water subsidies, which drastically lower water prices for some of the largest industrial farms in California’s central valley.

When the United States toppled the Ba'athist government in Iraq almost two years ago, the American media repeatedly showed footage of Iraqis pulling down the now famous statue of Saddam. Though few people outside of Iraq may have known about it at the time, that statue wasn't the only thing that was torn down:

Saddam drained more than 90 percent of the 5,800 square miles of marshes during his regime, in part to punish the Shi'ite Marsh Arabs who opposed him, in part to provide access to the border with Iran during his country's long war with its neighbor and in part to save water for cities upstream.

[...] As soon as Saddam was ousted by U.S. troops, farmers blew up dikes and earthen dams that had held the water back.

Paul Bremer, in his role as chief of the occupation authority in Iraq, ordered a change to Iraqi patent law before he left the country last June. The order was only one among 100 orders left behind by Bremer - all of which carry the force of law until such time as an Iraqi government alters or repeals them - and it effectively makes it illegal for Iraqi farmers to save and reuse any seed from "protected" varieties of crops. These include "new, distinct, uniform and stable" varieties bred almost exclusively by agribusiness corporations such as Monsanto.

The term of the monopoly is 20 years for crop varieties and 25 for trees and vines. During this time the protected variety de facto becomes the property of the breeder, and nobody can plant or otherwise use this variety without compensating the breeder. This new law means that Iraqi farmers can neither freely legally plant nor save for re-planting seeds of any plant variety registered under the plant variety provisions of the new patent law. This deprives farmers what they and many others worldwide claim as their inherent right to save and replant seeds.