During the search for double-murder suspect Aaron Bassler last summer, Chris Kelly, California program director of The Conservation Fund, said trespass marijuana gardens presented a more permanent and scary issue.
“It”s a terrible problem for all the landowners,” he said.
At the “Take Back Our Forests” public forum on Friday, March 30 at 6 p.m. at Cotton Auditorium, the Jere Melo Foundation will seek to tackle the environmental and property damage caused by trespassers, said Foundation Executive Director Sharon Davis.
“We are staying focused on the issue of public safety and environmental health. Unfortunately, it took the death of someone as visible as Jere to bring this issue to light, but our intent is to try to affect positive change out of the tragedy. Jere spent his career trying to clean up the forests and we hope to continue this effort,” said Davis.
Congressman Mike Thompson has called illegal grows on public lands a national emergency.
“Our public and private lands across California, and throughout the country, are being held hostage by illegal drug growers,” Thompson said, testifying before the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control. “In short, our public lands have been taken away from us. That is wrong and must be stopped.”
The upcoming forum has generated controversy in local call-in radio shows and Listserves. Fifth District County Supervisor Dan Hamburg pulled the county”s sponsorship from the consent agenda to express his opposition to continuing the war on drugs.
“If the kind of folks [Congressmen and assemblymen, large property owners, law enforcement] involved in this forum would turn their efforts to legalization instead of continuing to beat this dead horse, something positive might actually happen. It”s their opposition to legalization [or relative silence] that keeps these harmful laws on the books, sending thousands of innocents to long prison terms, costing billions, feeding the prison-industrial complex, etc,” Hamburg said.
The county supervisors voted to sponsor the forum, despite Hamburg”s opposition.
Davis said the Foundation is concerned with trespassing, not the politics of drug wars.
“This is not about the war on drugs or medical marijuana. It”s about people trespassing illegally, people who are usually armed, who create a toxic waste dump and leave it behind,” said Davis.
Melo”s security job at Campbell Timberland included dealing with a variety of trespassing problems. At the Noyo Watershed Alliance, Melo helped that coalition of city and state agencies, local nonprofits and timber companies identify trespassing problems. Although it was Melo”s job, the late councilman clearly had a personal passion for battling injuries to the entire forest and watershed. The Noyo Watershed Alliance identified the most serious problem as being trespassers in four-wheel drive and off-road vehicles causing severe erosion.
Other identified problems include garbage dumping, trespass hunting camps and homeless campsites. Davis said the Foundation hopes to help landowners deal with any and all of those problems.
In inland and more remote areas, marijuana grows are often the most serious environmental problem, land managers say. A recent five-county study found unpermitted grading, both for development and illegal grows, has become a top cause of damage to salmanoid streams.
These forests were originally put into a precarious position by legacy logging practices, including widespread clearcutting and bulldozer clearing of streams.
“I think it”s pure hype and hypocritical for folks involved in the logging business to talk about environmental damage by trespass pot growers, when the corporate loggers scalped hundreds of thousands of acres of forest land and ruined the local salmon fishery with their operations, said Nicholas Wilson, who has been publicly critical of crackdowns on growers.
“That”s especially true of the past four decades of corporate liquidation logging,” said Wilson
Last year”s Operation Full Court Press raids, in which law enforcement raided trespass grows on public lands, showed most of the 98 locations where eradication took place will need restoration, from the law enforcement effort, as well as the illegal grows. Marijuana grows create pollution with fertilizers, cause spread of invasive species and contribute to soil disturbance and erosion.
The Jere Melo Foundation website has a link to Operation Full Court Press information at its website http://jeremelo.org/?p=179.
The Conservation Fund is one of the county”s major private landowners, where the Fund is undertaking environmentally-friendly sustainable logging, from the Albion area to the southern county border.
With law enforcement overwhelmed with the number of grows, especially in late summer and fall, The Conservation Fund sends a helicopter to spot and avoid trespass grows on the lands it owns each year.
“When we spot grows, we just stay out of that area until well after harvest,” Kelly said.
“We don”t try to go in and eradicate them; we leave that to law enforcement. Although we have gone in with them, we don”t go in ourselves,” Kelly said
The helicopter spotted a few less trespass grows in 2011 than 2010, Kelly said, but still more than a dozen spots the nonprofit will avoid as it goes about its logging and restoration efforts.
“We are effectively locked out of our own property for fear of running into armed marijuana growing operations,” Kelly said.
The problem is national in scope, the recent senate testimony showed.
David Ferrell, the U.S. Forest Service”s director of law enforcement, said marijuana-grow sites have been found in 67 national forests in 20 states this year. But nowhere is the problem more acute than in California, where 7.4 million marijuana plants were eradicated last year.
At the senate hearing, Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims stated there had been nine known homicides related to marijuana growing operations.
How will the Foundation help with the problem, other than telling people about it?
Davis said the organization is new and hopes to get its agenda rolling at the forum. She said an important part of the vision is to facilitate communication among law enforcement agencies and property owners.
So far, the Foundation has been funded by private donors, but will seek grant funds, Davis said.
“Of course, I support putting a stop to environmentally harmful activities on all lands,” said Hamburg. “What I don”t support is throwing more state and federal money down what I consider to be a rat hole at a time when funds are so scarce,” Hamburg said.
Madeleine Melo, Jere Melo”s widow, has taken a leading role in the Foundation and will speak at the forum. The forum also includes presentations by law enforcement, timber company officials and the Willits Environmental Center.
Greg Guisti, UC Forest and Wildlands Ecology Advisor has created a PowerPoint presentation that has shocking photos and statistics, which will be shown at the public forum.
The Jere Melo Foundation had a booth at the Redwood Regional Logging Conference in Ukiah.
“On Education Day over 1,200 students attended and we talked to them about safety in the woods. We had photos of grow sites including trash, toxic chemicals and water lines that are left behind. Students were told that if they see these types of things in the forest to stop, turn around and leave,” Davis said. She said the Foundation would like to find ways to educate local students about the forest.
Davis comes to the job after being part of a spectacularly successful community effort. She was interviewed by 60 Minutes in her role as a leader in Otsuchi Recovery efforts, in which local people raised more than $250,000 for Fort Bragg”s Sister City in Japan, which was devastated by the earthquake one year ago.
A recent federal crackdown on medical marijuana ordinances in several counties may lead to even more trespass grows. County regulated, larger grows on personal lands have been eliminated. That leaves many people who want to work within the law locked out and benefits cartels willing and able to grow on remote public lands, according to marijuana industry publications.
“The primary reason people take the risk of trespass growing on public and corporate lands is the asset forfeiture laws, where people can lose their property if they grow commercially on it,” said Wilson.
“Legalization would greatly cut prices and the profit motive that drives trespass grows, and elimination of asset forfeiture would let those who do want to grow do so on their own land, where they would have far greater security,” Wilson said.
Hamburg said legalization could be a big benefit to the environment.
“I don”t hear a lot of complaints about stills littering the landscape,” Hamburg said.
At the time he was shot by Bassler, Melo was responding to a report of an illegal marijuana operation, but the pot part of the story turned out to be unfounded. Bassler was growing a small number of opium poppies in the area.
Bassler, who is also accused of killing forest manager Matt Coleman, was himself killed by police, ending the search of more than a month.
