Huge pot-growing operations are trashing Los Padres National Forest, and no one’s cleaning them up.

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The site in Los Padres isn’t the kind of mom ’n’ pop dope farm that used to proliferate across California’s golden hills. Following CAMP’s creation in the ’80s, militaristic helicopters began swooping down on rural California. Camo-clad officials often searched and seized personal property along with plants, inciting charges of civil rights violations, and family-run pot farms became rarer. Now, it seems, the risk of growing pot on public land makes more economic sense if it’s on a large scale.

According to law enforcement officials, the bulk of today’s illegal pot supply comes from industrial operations run by Mexican drug rings on remote public land in the West. “It isn’t just your normal counterculture person that’s out growing a pot crop someplace,” says John Bradford, Monterey District Ranger for Los Padres. “Over the past eight to 10 years we’ve been seeing a lot more drug cartels.”

“Where it used to be the hippies and the beatniks growing dope, now it’s organized crime,” Gould agrees. “There appears to be a lot more of it going on.”

The numbers back him up. CAMP has busted more sites every year since 2001, eradicating a record 1.7 million plants in California in 2006. Eighty percent of those were cultivated on public land. Almost 31,000 plants, or 2 percent of the total, were eradicated in Monterey County last year. Busted gardens in Los Padres, which spans five counties, range from a few hundred to tens of thousands of stalks, Gould says. The largest he can remember had roughly 40,000.

As the fields of pot proliferated, land managers took note of the damage. In radio interviews and newspaper articles, they describe growers clearing south-facing slopes of existing brush, terracing the earth and digging pits for cannabis seedlings. That causes erosion, which can clog up streams and murk up fish passage. Growers often manipulate the streams themselves – digging irrigation canals, building dams or lining creek banks with plastic to deliver more water to their crops. That, too, can funk up ecosystems by making less water available to native plants and wildlife downstream.

The young plants are sometimes placed inside wire mesh to keep out birds and rodents. Pot-growing websites suggest that wood rats and gophers, in particular, have a taste for dope.

“The best fence in the world will not keep rats away from your plants!” advises 1stMarijuanaGrowersPage.com. “Ultimately, you may find it is easier to grow in a greenhouse shed in your own backyard rather than try to keep the rats from eating your outdoor plot.”

Studies have shown that rats doped up with THC tend to get hungry sooner than their sober counterparts. Lab monkeys, given the opportunity, self-administer the drug. Veterinarians have described stoned pets exhibiting dilated pupils, glazed eyes, increased sensitivity to sensory stimuli, disorientation, sleepiness, drooling and “bizarre behavior.”

In other words, pot affects some animals in ways similar to how it affects humans. Given the abundance of renegade pot gardens on public land, it’s reasonable to assume that there are some stoned rats stumbling around Los Padres.

“My understanding is that the rats will gnaw on the plants itself, or they may get into the growers’ supplies,” Gould says. “[Growers] tend to camp along the streams they’ve tapped into, and that’s where we find the pesticides. I find rat poison and those really large rattraps. Then we find that the native wildlife will get caught up in that.”

Forest Service staff also find evidence of fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides at busted pot gardens. On the Los Padres site alone I discover three different brands of fertilizer, a hand-pump pesticide product and gopher killer pellets made with highly toxic zinc phosphide. Once introduced to the environment, these kinds of pesticides can ripple up the food chain, poisoning cougars, coyotes and condors that eat the tainted varmint. Totally unregulated in the hands of illegal growers, ag chemicals can do serious damage to the air, soil, water and wildlife.

Finally, consider the impacts of lonely growers who bring the comforts of home to their camps in the wilderness – washing their bodies and clothes in the streams, burning propane, running leaky generators, littering plastic. “Just everything you can imagine if you were gonna go out and live in the woods for months on end,” Gould says. “They don’t pack out their trash, and they’re re-supplied weekly or biweekly. It just builds up.”