Jackee Riccio, Executive Director & Co-Founder of Cannabis for Conservation
Guest Contributor
Data is the most important driver of any environmental policy. It starts with observations of phenomena, followed by questions and hypotheses, research of variables, and finally analysis. This is the scientific process—the process by which we glean new information, discuss findings with interest groups, and use that information to change our practices and policies. When science is used to inform new policies, we call this “adaptive management”, which is how we manage for declining species, conserve water, and restore habitat. This is the same process that has returned condors to the skies, and conserved critical habitat for Northern spotted owls. New data informs new management. Sometimes, new data is quite uncomfortable. Paradigms that we thought were true we find no longer are, and updated management is required. As scientists, we are obligated to adhere to this process, and policy that does not adaptively manage is not good policy at all. It’s not only uneducated, but it’s unethical. We need to adaptively manage for the communities and resources that make Humboldt the sacred place that it is. We deserve better than fiction—our people and environment deserve science, and policymakers that are in line with modern conservation strategy.
Measure A does not adhere to the scientific process, nor is it adaptively managed policy. And that’s why, as supporters of environmental science, you should not support it. This is why most environmental organizations will not support it. Measure A relies upon archaic examples from the “Green Rush”, when we had ten times the number of farms on the landscape, to justify their policies. They believe, incorrectly, that further regulating legal farms will result in statistically significant water conservation—enough to have biological impact on our watersheds. This is an outright falsehood. We know how much water legal cannabis is using, and it is a small fraction of the overall water usage of Humboldt, far behind domestic, non-cannabis agriculture, ranching, and unmanaged forests. Why further regulate an already heavily regulated industry with policies that produce no biological benefit? Since legalization, new water data has surfaced, the most recent study of which was published by the UC Berkeley Cannabis Research Center, which summarized usage data from 2018 on both permitted and unpermitted farms. The CRC concluded the following through a comprehensive model: even during peak growing season (July) in early legalization, when water storage was not even a requirement and unlicensed farms were more abundant, estimated extraction percentages did not exceed 1 percent of streamflow in 89 of 115 watersheds at the HUC12 scale, and only exceeded 2 percent in 12 of 115 watersheds. So, what does this mean? This means that at the County watershed level, further regulating the now less-than 1 percent of water usage by licensed cultivators would not meaningfully impact water conservation. Regulating other water uses would.
Furthermore, Measure A and its supporters falsely assume that by further restricting licensed cultivation (only 0.52 square miles in total across the County), negative impacts to fish and wildlife will be reduced. There is not a single, evidence-based conservation practice included in the initiative that would achieve this function, and that positively benefits biodiversity and abundance. If the proponents had wanted to provide quantifiable benefits to wildlife, the Initiative would have focused on policy that included practices to increase landscape heterogeneity, increase use of biodynamic or regenerative farming practices, reduce land cover simplification, increase native plant restoration, made accommodations for range-restricted wildlife, reduced edge effects, and managed for invasive species.
One of the major issues that the proponents of the initiative have with the current ordinance is that they felt left out of the decision-making process. And yet, they have utterly and completely left environmental interests out of the decision-making and development process of this supposed “environmental” policy. This hypocrisy clearly shows in the ecological uselessness of the proposed policies. It is well-known in conservation science that regulatory hoop-jumping and compliance of agriculture that provides no measurable impacts to wildlife can be catastrophic for conservation. It can severely reduce morale and farmer support of conservation, degrade private land conservation partnerships and access, and result in poor public opinion and even increased poaching, poisoning, and killing of wildlife. Any educated voter who supports modern conservation science would not support such pointless policy, especially one that targets the farmers who opted to join environmental compliance, and who voluntarily join conservation programs such as ours.
Lastly, Measure A goes against the modern conservation strategy in California’s Executive Order N-82-20 and Natural and Working Lands Climate Smart Strategy, our comprehensive strategy addressing climate resilience and biodiversity loss. This strategy not only identifies working lands (e.g., farms) as a “cornerstone of CA’s nature-based solutions center”, but as a “critical and underused sector in the fight against climate change”. Cannabis farms, as working lands, are certainly included as part of that solution, further evidenced by the availability and priority of state grants for farmers. Measure A should have made partnering with farms around common conservation values a central point of the initiative and pathways for farms to become our most functional working-land agroecosystems—in line with CA’s modern conservation strategy. Instead, they chose to vilify them.
Further examples of how this policy is ecologically useless (or even detrimental) are provided for biodiversity and habitat in our analysis at cannabisforconservation.org. Be an educated voter for the environment— vote “NO” on Measure A.