The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

Reefer Madness in National Parks

Who would have thought that the drug war would make a casualty of our national parks?

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Outside Online // Kate Siber :: "Covert Marijuana Farming Threatens National Parks” :

For countless years national park rangers have been finding the occasional marijuana specimen tucked away in the underbrush, but recent discoveries of large plots of the illegal plant on federal land point to an increasingly pernicious problem.

These illicit growing projects—in many cases believed to be organized by Latin American drug cartels—wreak havoc on natural resources, and the armed men who protect them threaten the safety of law enforcement officers and park visitors.

California's Sequoia National Park in particular has seen a steady increase in the number and size of marijuana farming projects discovered in the last ten years, with a dramatic jump in 2002 findings. Last year alone, rangers removed 34,000 plants from the park and found evidence of 20,000 others that had been successfully harvested. In previous years, rangers have generally found no more than 1,000 plants.

Park caretakers are tormented by the damage covert marijuana growing does to resources, especially in designated wilderness areas, which are meant to remain unmarred by human activity.

"The lands involved [in this issue] have been set aside for the highest level of protection," said Bill Tweed, chief naturalist for Sequoia National Park, "and we're having a major assault on our natural resources. We're having vegetation chopped out, pesticides, poaching, severe disturbance of the soil, which leads to erosion, and depletion of riparian resources because water is being diverted. All of this adds up to a whole sweep of resource damage issues."

Marijuana growers in national parks have built complex irrigation systems to divert water from streams for up to half a mile, and have cleared and terraced tracts of land to the detriment of local ecosystems. Insecticides and fertilizers used by the growers have also tainted groundwater supplies and killed fish in nearby streams.

In addition to the harm done to land and water, park officials say that these illicit farming projects threaten the security of visitors. Law enforcement officers have had shoot-outs with marijuana workers, and hunters and hikers have been shot at after stepping into the wrong territory. The growers—who are frequently illegal immigrants from Latin America—have been known to wield automatic assault weapons like AK-47s to protect their cash crops.

The problem has grown to nationwide proportions but is most troublesome in California, Utah, Arkansas, and in parks with international borders like Texas' Big Bend National Park and Montana's Glacier National Park. Sequoia National Park's foothills are prime territory because of their remote location and ideal growing conditions.

It's possible that national parks have recently become popular targets for this illegal activity because of the increased vigilance of border patrols since 9/11. Marijuana sellers are increasingly opting to grow the weed domestically and face less severe punishments than they would receive for international drug trafficking.

"Why take the risk of risk of smuggling marijuana over the border when you can come here to grow it?" asked Sgt. Marsh Carter, who has led drug enforcement efforts in Sequoia National Forest.

What the author doesn't say is that the problem also has a great deal to do with the president's neglect of the park service's public safety personnel — a neglect that has had fatal consequences.

In January 2002, Interior Inspector General Earl Devaney released a report describing Interior's 4,400-person police force as operating in "a disquieting state of disorder." He singled out the Park Service as an agency that "suffers from extreme organizational dysfunction."

A few months later, a federal workers' advocacy group called Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) found that attacks against National Park Service rangers had risen from ten incidents in 2000 to 104 in 2001. (Kris Eggle's was the only death.) It's hard to tell if there really is more crime or if the big jump comes from improved record keeping—and that's the point. "The Park Service keeps better track of popcorn sales from its concessionaires than it does of hazards to its own workforce," says Eric Wingerter, 29, PEER's national field director.

In July, a law-enforcement-reform task force assembled by Interior Secretary Gale Norton submitted its findings, confirming Devaney's conclusion that the agency is a mess. Norton appointed Larry Parkinson, a former senior FBI official, to the new post of deputy assistant secretary for law enforcement and security. So far, though, Norton and Parkinson's big idea has been to turn the jack-of-all-trades park ranger into more of a specialist. Under their blueprint, law-enforcement rangers would concentrate solely on crime, while resource-protection rangers would perform more traditional duties.

Critics argue that role shuffling is not the answer and say that increasing staff is the only solution. Just ask Organ Pipe superintendent William Wellman, 56. "Right now we're down to almost nothing in terms of manpower," he says. "Normally we'd have eight rangers in winter, but because of job transfers we're down to four, and two others that rotate in on temporary duty."

Of course, the larger question hovering over this issue is why the federal government has ignored the policing shortfall for so long, especially given the current climate of fear about domestic terrorism. In Organ Pipe, the tide of illegal immigration involves more than just Mexican nationals slipping across the border—rangers have also arrested Chinese, Russian, and Middle Eastern aliens attempting to cross. Meanwhile, President Bush's $4.9 billion National Parks Legacy Project, which debuted in 2001, focuses on maintenance and keeps funding for law enforcement at the 2001 level of $94 million.

According to that story, the Park Service gives Organ Pipe just six agents a day to police 331,000 acres of land. That's an agent for every 55,000 acres — meaning that each man has to try to cover an area almost four times the size of Manhattan.

With law enforcement stretched so thinly, it's no wonder that drug cartels have decided to treat our national parks like personal gardens. If we don't care enough to protect parks, why should they?

Posted by Greg Greene at June 25, 2003 10:11 PM