The study of cannabis is a personal one for me. Outdoor cannabis production in the rural Western U.S. has its roots in back-to-the-land movements of the 1960s. That’s when counterculture groups began growing cannabis surreptitiously as a source of income, a political statement, and a spiritual practice. I grew up in rural Southern Oregon, the child of hippies from that era. The communities where we lived were, at least in part, founded on and funded by cannabis.

In 2015, the year Oregon legalized recreational cannabis, I was home applying to graduate school. I was surprised to see that legalization was already starting to transform the landscapes I had grown up in—both ecologically and socially. I had friends who were growers, and had seized legalization as an opportunity to legitimize their businesses. But I had other friends who were raising alarms about the emerging industry’s potential environmental harms—from the high carbon footprint of indoor warehouses, to the water use for outdoor farms, to the poisons used on illegal public land grows. I decided to focus my dissertation research on understanding these developing conflicts, using tools from wildlife biology, landscape ecology, social sciences, and other disciplines to try to answer a wide array of questions about the cannabis industry. I wanted to understand: Where is cannabis production located, and why? What are cannabis farming’s impacts on a landscape? And finally, how does wildlife respond to active cannabis farms?

Because cannabis is still federally illegal, there is very little research on the crop or its dynamics. I realized I would have to start from scratch. To my surprise, I found that though these issues feel unique to cannabis, in reality, they run parallel to rural land use issues that predate its legalization. This means that addressing the concerns regarding rural cannabis production will provide a roadmap for resolving many entrenched issues relevant across the Western U.S.

One thing this means, of course, is thinking about water. Estimates of cannabis farms’ water use have varied greatly, and researchers are working to generate better calculations. But the amount of water that cannabis farms use isn’t the only issue at stake: geography, storage, and timing are also important. My research showed that cannabis hotspots are often located near rivers. This proximity could be a concern if farmers are drawing water from the stream or a shallow well, which could deplete or reduce the river’s water. Other studies from the Cannabis Research Center at UC Berkeley, one of my primary collaborators, have indicated that many farmers lack enough water storage capacity to be able to draw up and store water during the winter, to avoid straining rivers during the summer.

These issues mirror general worries that existing Western water policies are not prepared to handle the worsening water shortages associated with climate change. Current regulations don’t encourage farmers—whatever their crops—or other landowners to practice conservation or balance their water needs with those of rivers and fish. But perhaps concerns over cannabis, coupled with recent historic droughts, will be enough to finally update water policies for all.

Another Western issue that cannabis policy can help address is land use planning. In my research, I found that cannabis farming on private lands in Southern Oregon had a small overall footprint but one that had expanded rapidly. In the years following legalization, cannabis plots were generally clustered on larger parcels in areas that were not typically zoned for agriculture. This brought up questions about planning and zoning: Where should cannabis be located? Are current zoning codes effective for cannabis production? How would restrictions affect existing farms and equitable access to land?

Like water rights concerns, these planning challenges are not unique to cannabis production. Across the West, outdated land use codes and opaque planning processes frequently generate conflict between land users, reflective of disagreements about how to allocate land for conservation, recreation, development, and production. The increase of large-scale, area-based conservation initiatives, like California’s “30 x 30 plan,” are likely to intensify these debates in the coming years. If counties develop transparent and equitable planning processes for cannabis that integrate feedback from growers, neighbors, researchers, and regulators, they might be able to decrease such conflicts, and facilitate better community dialogue across all types of land use.

Finally, the rural location of many cannabis hotspots means that cannabis farms are often near wildlife habitats and in proximity to certain sensitive species such as Coho salmon and Pacific fishers. My research also suggested that some species can coexist with cannabis farming, while it deters others from the area. This raises concerns that cannabis development could cut wildlife off from needed resources, or disrupt local animal interactions and food webs. Conflict is also a concern: Many of the species that can coexist with cannabis, such as ground squirrels, can be crop pests that farmers may feel the need to kill.

Yet again, these concerns are not unique to cannabis—across California, new housing developments are encroaching on wilderness areas, and the concern about killing “pest” animals appears with almost any crop. Cannabis provides an opportunity to try to build sustainable farming into policy incentives, and to experiment with supporting farmers in ways that enable them to practice low-impact agriculture.

The social and ecological dynamics of cannabis production are a microcosm of questions of rural livelihoods and sustainability in the Western U.S. Other industries, such as timber, ranching, and industrial crops, like alfalfa, also need reform. But because the legal cannabis industry is still new, it offers an opportunity to learn to structure things differently.

There is still potential and political will for researchers, policymakers, and communities to come together to plan land use priorities, update water policies, guide development goals, inform sustainable best management practices, plan for climate disasters, and balance rural livelihoods.

This is hard work. But if we can figure out a way to collaborate on cannabis regulations, we will have a blueprint for solving the largest land use conflicts currently facing the Western U.S.

The post Could Cannabis Help the American West Solve Its Thorniest Environmental Issues? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Let’s face it. We are a nation of commitment-phobes, always eager to liberate ourselves from life’s constraints. Unhappy with your family of origin? Form a family of choice. Has your marriage soured over the years? Find someone new! In the 21st century, even an individual’s gender at birth is seen as changeable—and when we talk about sex change, we use the language of liberation: a man trapped in a woman’s body. From where we work to where we live, Americans see change—or is it exchange?—as a birthright.

This culture of impermanence has created what sociologists call “limited liability communities.” Whenever we attach ourselves to, well, anything, we reserve the right to quit when that attachment no longer serves our purposes. That’s what freedom of choice is all about, right?

Yes, but we rarely acknowledge that the flipside of all this freedom is weak attachments to people, groups, and, particularly, to place.

Toffler’s prediction has given way to a lot of contemporary handwringing about “placelessness”—the notion that a monotonous, standardized, and homogeneous American landscape, working in concert with new technologies, has disconnected us from the uniquely rooted locales that once grounded us in community. Not long ago, the National Trust for Historic Preservation launched a national campaign called “This Place Matters” to encourage communities to rally around iconic locales. A growing number of philanthropic foundations are funding a movement called “placemaking,” which emphasizes the role specific public places can play in building strong communities with a healthy sense of belonging.

This loss of a sense of place is generally seen as a modern malaise. We blame corporate chains and big box stores for draining the American landscape of so much authentic local expression. We lament how the Internet and digital technology have undermined the primacy of place. But it seems to me that what we call placelessness today is actually a much older phenomenon that tells us something more fundamental about the American character.

In his classic 1888 book, The American Commonwealth, Lord James Bryce, who would later become British ambassador to the U.S., bemoaned the remarkable uniformity of most American cities. “Some of them are built more with brick than with wood, and others more with wood than with brick,” he wrote. But it wasn’t simply a matter of architecture, he concluded; it was that these cities appeared to have no interest at all in preserving “anything that speaks of the past.”

A century later, essayist and cultural geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson argued that the “all-pervading sameness” of the American landscape was by and large the product of the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which together established a rectangular survey system designed to transfer public lands to private citizens in the simplest and most equitable way possible. This enormous grid, which you can easily see from the window of a plane as you fly over the country, covers two-thirds of the nation, from Ohio to the Pacific Coast, and from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border.

The standardized system ensured that the organization and planning of cities, towns, and subdivisions would neither be tailored to the natural landscape nor grounded in any specific local cultural tradition.

Sure, over time, parts of the grid developed their own special character. But more than 1 billion acres of interchangeable, rectangular spaces inevitably fostered, according to Jackson, “the temptation to consider all uses as temporary. Space, rather than land, is what the settlers bought, and it was so easy to buy, so easy to sell, that commitment to a specific plan for the future must have been difficult for many.”

An absence of connectedness to place also gave U.S. culture a special sense of physical freedom—along with peculiarly lonely landscapes. Think about it: For all of our sunny-side-of-the-street cheerfulness, there are few more quintessentially American images than a ribbon of highway tapering off into the horizon or an Edward Hopper painting of an isolated figure in an urban landscape.

Humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has written that place gives us security while space promises freedom. Human lives, he says, “are a dialectical movement between shelter and venture, attachment and freedom.”

That rings true, but I can’t help thinking about whether different cultures favor one side of the equation over the other. In the U.S., we have long been clearly biased toward space over place, and so a certain amount of placelessness has been our lot.

This doesn’t at all mean that we shouldn’t make concerted efforts to nurture a sense of place in America. It does suggest, however, that such efforts will be uphill struggles, pushing back against both our history and our grid.

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