‘Green rush’ poisoning parks

Illegal marijuana grow sites in national parks are taking a toll on the environment and wildlife.

Referred to by some as the “green rush,” the burgeoning movement in California to make hefty sums of money from growing pot has been fingered for employing growing methods that are “killing wildlife, tainting water supplies and endangering hikers at national parks,” according to NBC News.

Last month, the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department’s Marijuana Eradication Task Force busted a grow site just outside Kings Canyon National Park that turned up 280 pot plants, shotguns and “large containers of poison used to protect the crops.”

The Pacific fisher—a weasel-like mammal, of which there are only 300 left in California—is being significantly affected: Eighty-six percent of those being studied in and around Yosemite National Park, Sierra National Forest and the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation (near Eureka) have been exposed to second-generation anticoagulant rodenticides (SGARs)—likely those used at marijuana grow sites.