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◼ Cannabis Grow Damage Like ‘Worst Of Timber Industry’ - Daniel Mintz for The Arcata Eye

A five-county program assessing impacts on salmonids has named unpermitted grading as a major impact and one county supervisor said the effects of illegal grading connected to marijuana grows are as bad as those seen during the dark years of the timber industry.

Supervisor Mark Lovelace, who was one of the county’s most active environmentalists before being elected, made those comments as a result of a new regional study on habitat protection policies presented at the Jan. 10 Board of Supervisors meeting.

Dr. Richard Harris, the researcher who coordinated the study, said unregulated and illegal grading – including the grading that enables marijuana grows – is a problem. And Lovelace described its scale as massive in Humboldt County.

“It’s phenomenal,” he said, referring to photographs of grow-related grading that he’s seen. “And it’s shocking – and it compares with the worst of the worst from some of the bad years of the timber industry....” Read the rest

Actually - some have said - for years - that it has always been worse than the timber industry, and has gotten even worse in recent years since pot growing has become defacto legal in this county.