Marijuana cultivation in National Forests and Parks, environmental impacts, and policy failure: Disaster by management.

Western Social Science Association, Albuquerque, April 2009

Eugenie Rovai¹ and Christine M. Rodrigue²

¹ Department of Geography and Planning, and Social Science Program, California State University, Chico
² Department of Geography, and Environmental Science and Policy Program, California State University, Long Beach

The U.S. southern border has tightened post-9/11 to reduce undocumented immigration and respond to domestic political debates. To circumvent these, international drug cartels have moved production closer to their markets. Major marijuana growing operations have been established in remote wilderness areas, notably National Forest lands in the North State of California, though this is increasingly a national problem. Given the high value of the crop and the extreme violence of these criminal cartels, there is an increasing risk of encounters between these gangs and the unwitting visitor to these National Forest public lands: campers, hikers, hunters, and ranchers. Rovai's work has documented acute awareness of the situation among local law enforcement and National Forest staff, but they have little scope for effective action. Rodrigue's prior work suggests a framework for analyzing this tension between risk assessment at lower, local levels and effective management at higher, regional or national levels: "disaster by management." This paper explores such themes as normal accident theory, managerialism, stovepiping of information between competing chains of command, and the normalization of anomaly in the case of marijuana plantations in the National Forest lands of Northern California.