Columbia, NYU, Berkeley--and Cal Poly Humboldt? "Rural" far northern California bursts into the spotlight amidst campus protests

When I went to bed last night, Columbia University and, to a lesser extent, NYU, were in the news in relation to student protests framed as "pro-Palestinian."  UC Berkeley has been in the news for several weeks in relation to the stances that students there have taken.   So, imagine my surprise when I awakened to news this morning that had humble and rural-ish Cal Poly Humboldt--until a few years ago even more humble Cal State Humboldt--in the news.  Here's what the California sun wrote this morning under "Developments Connected to the Israel-Hamas War":

Pro-Palestinian students began sit-ins at UC Berkeley and Cal Poly Humboldt on Monday. The Berkeley protesters pitched about 10 tents and demanded the university divest from companies linked to Israel. In Arcata, dozens of students barricaded themselves inside a building, drawing a heavy police response. Late Monday, campus leaders announced the cancellation of classes through Wednesday. Berkeleyside | Lost Coast Outpost

I have to admit I was pleased to see the Lost Coast Outpost, a little known news outlet, cited and quoted, though that is not terribly unusual with the California Sun, and it was parallel to Berkleyside, another informal news outlet.  

Later in the day, the Los Angeles Times reported under the headline, "Tensions grow at California universities as Gaza protests roil campuses from Berkeley to New York."  Though Humboldt was not mentioned in the headline, the lede was all about Cal Poly Humboldt: 

Officials shut down the campus of Cal Poly Humboldt on Monday night after masked pro-Palestinian protesters occupied an administrative building and barricaded the entrance as Gaza-related demonstrations roiled campuses across the nation.

Three students were arrested after law enforcement officers wearing helmets and riot shields descended on the public university in Arcata, in rural Northern California, and clashed with demonstrators who had set up tents inside Siemens Hall and erected a banner that said, “STOP THE GENOCIDE.”  (emphasis added)

“Free, Free Palestine,” supporters chanted outside the building. “Long Live Resistance!”

As sprawling pro-Palestinian protests and encampments escalate on university campuses across the United States, administrators are reacting with more forceful discipline as they try to balance pro-Palestinian students’ free speech rights with concerns for safety and other students’ counter claims of harassment and disruption.

Note the reference to Humboldt as "rural," while noting its location in Arcata.  That is arguably not precise given that Humboldt County, while sparsely populated, is metropolitan, with a population of 134,000.  Arcata, the city where the university is located, has a population of 18,000, but is part of the Eureka-Arcata-Fortuna micropolitan area.  That said, Humboldt County is sparsely populated, with 38 persons/per square mile, compared to about 94 per square mile in the United States. 

The story continues with more detail on what happened:  

Tensions flared quickly at Cal Poly Humboldt.

About 4:50 p.m. Monday, campus police received reports of dozens of students occupying the first and second floors of Siemens Hall, the university said in a statement. Classes in the building were canceled and students and faculty who were in the middle of classes were evacuated as protesters “began disrupting classes and vandalizing university property,” the university said.

According to the university, protesters blocked entrances and elevators with tents and in some locations shut doors using chains and zip ties, violating fire codes and “creating extreme safety hazards for those inside.”

After giving the protesters multiple warnings to exit the building voluntarily, campus spokesperson Aileen S. Yoo said the university contacted outside law enforcement agencies to assist in responding.

About 7:45 p.m., an officer told dispatchers that about 100 protesters remained near the building and police had attempted to take students into custody, but the crowd pulled them back, according to a report from Lost Coast Outpost. Another officer called for a pepper ball launcher.

Meanwhile, the New York Times mentioned Cal Poly Humboldt briefly, fairly deep in a story that featured NYU and Columbia prominently: 

At California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt, students took over a campus building, and barricaded the exits with chairs and trash bins.

Here is a link to today's Washington Post coverage, which does not use word "rural" but says at the end of paragraph 3, after discussing the University of Minnesota: 

On the West Coast, California State Polytechnic University at Humboldt went into a lockdown after student protesters barricaded themselves inside a building.

Finally, here is a link to the Lost Coast Outpost news as of this morning.  

Postscript:  here is a link to the Lost Coast Outpost update from the afternoon of April 24, 2024.

This is from a New York Times update on April 24, 2024: 

• California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt in Arcata: Dozens of protesters were occupying an academic and administrative building on Wednesday morning, university officials said. The campus has remained closed since Monday after an attempt by the police to remove the protesters from the building turned violent, leading to three arrests. On Thursday, officials said that the campus would remain closed at least through Sunday.

The Lost Coast Outpost reported on April 25, 2024 that the faculty had voted no confidence in Cal Poly Humboldt's president, Tom Jackson. 

It burns: the Humboldt pepper spray case

I apologize for the length of this post, but it's too complex a topic to put in a short blurb.

I learned about the use of pepper spray against protestors on the UC Davis on Facebook. Many people were linking to the first Youtube video of Lieutenant John Pike pacing back and forth spraying the protestors with a large can of pepper spray. It was disturbing and upsetting to say the least. Shortly after the original video came out some of my Facebook friends began posting a case I was very familiar with: Headwaters Forest Defense v. County of Humboldt.

Seeing that case name again gave me a burning feeling of my own. I felt intense shame, anger, and sorrow because the case was a subject of a difficult time in Humboldt county. The overall outcome of that period has had a negative impact on my family. The case came about due to the Timber Wars that occurred in Humboldt over the fate of the old growth redwoods in Headwaters Forest specifically, and the fate of the timber industry in Humboldt generally. It's a difficult subject that needs a lot of context.

The logging and milling of redwood and Douglas-fir trees has been one of the main industries of Humboldt county since its founding. One of the most important timber companies was Pacific Lumber Company, better known locally as PL.

PL was a good corporation originally. It wasn't the largest private land owner in California (that title goes to Sierra Pacific Industries), but it did hold the largest amount of privately held old growth redwood. Old-growth has a coveted tight grain when cut, and the wood is pest and fire resistant. It is popular for fences, decks, and other outdoor objects because it stands against the elements so well. These factors make redwood very valuable, and PL had a lot of it.

The old PL was owned and operated by the Murphy family, a timber family in every sense. They planned on slowly harvesting the old growth, managing the forests so that PL could operate for as long as there was a demand for lumber. But they made a fatal mistake, in the 1980s the family decided to make PL a publicly traded company. In 1985 PL was the victim of a hostile takeover, bought out by Charles Hurwitz and his company based in Texas, Maxxam. Maxxam was not a timber company, it was a vampire that took over companies with valuable assets and bled them dry.

Almost immediately lines started to be drawn. Three belligerent groups formed: Timber people, Environmentalists, and Maxxam. Maxxam began over logging PL's lands and running the company into the ground. Timber people were mostly from families that had been living in Humboldt before World War II and were very conservative. They hated Maxxam, but the burst in logging created jobs and it was felt that what Maxxam did to the company it owned was up to Maxxam. They thought that after PL collapsed there would still be the other mills of Humboldt to provide jobs.

Environmentalists were mostly people that had either come to live in Humboldt after World War II or came specifically for the protests and had no other connection to the county. They tended to be very liberal. The Environmentalists hated Maxxam for the damage being done by the intense logging.

You would think that the mutual hatred of Maxxam would provide an alliance between timber people and environmentalists, but both sides despised each other. Political and cultural leanings got in the way. Some militant environmental protestors further inflamed the conflict by pulling stunts like pouring sugar into logging tractor gas tanks, cutting fuel lines for loggers pickups, spitting on timber workers, and hammering in metal spikes into trees so when cut the saws would break (putting loggers at risk).

Some loggers would kick and punch protestors that tried to block their way into the forest. Protestors also accused loggers of intentionally falling trees near them when the protestors went into the woods to try and stop operations [after the pepper spray case, a protestor was killed when a tree fell by a logger brought down another tree that in turn fell directly onto the protestor. It was ruled an accident, though some protestors claimed it was intentional].

This is the environment that Headwaters Forest Defense v. County of Humboldt came to be in. Some environmentalists trying to stop the logging in the Headwaters Forest decided to do sit ins at the offices of PL and the then Congressman for Humboldt, Frank Riggs. Police responded to both scenes, and were confronted by chanting (sometimes screaming) protestors who had placed their arms in metal sleeves to prevent their removal. The sleeves were made so the protestor could lock their arms inside the metal tube so it could only be safely unlocked from the inside with the wearers help. Cutting into the sleeve would have risked serious harm to the protestors.

The police didn't really know what to do; the protestors refused to leave both offices. At some point the decision had been made to use pepper spray. The idea was that the protestors, once exposed, would want to release themselves in order to get relief from the burning. Additionally the decision was made not to spray the protestors. Instead Q-Tips were dipped into cans of spray that had been opened, and the Q-Tips were rubbed on each protestors eyes in a highly concentrated dose. The result was horrible (the police begin to use the spray at 6:30 in the video).

The protestors would sue the county for unnecessary use of force. And the case would become the topic de jour of Humboldt, stirring intense feelings. Many were angry at the police for the harm they caused, but there was also anger directed at the protestors by timber people. Who are these outsiders to come to our county to harm our way of life and then turn around and sue us? The case would become a focal point of the use of pepper spray by police on protestors, especially restrained protestors.

After several appeals and trials ending in hung juries, the third and final jury found the county liable for the excessive harm caused to the protestors and awarded them damages. The total of those damages? One dollar. The protestors claimed that this was fine as they were trying to make a larger point about police force. The jury could have awarded more to the protestors, but there were rumors that the jurors that came from timber families, while angry at the police for using such brute force against the protestors, were also angry at the protestors for all the trouble they'd stirred up in Humboldt. The one dollar award was for them a chance to give the protestors a middle finger. Again, this is just a rumor.

The case would be just one of the first of many events that would be a watershed of change for Humboldt. Politics was swept up in the fervor and Maxxam intensified it's efforts to strip everything of value from PL. The Headwaters Forest was given to the state in a land swap that was meant to make PL look good in the court of public opinion while at the same time minimizing the impact on Maxxam's profits. PL was left a bankrupt shell that was later bought at severely reduced function by Mendocino Redwood Company in 2008.

And PL is not the only victim from the Timber Wars. Many of the major mills either shut down or limited operations in Humboldt in part due to the increased regulation (spurred on by the Environmentalists efforts to stop Maxxam) and from the lost value of timber caused by Maxxam's massive sell off of lumber flooding the market.

This has hurt many timber families including my own. Our trucking fleet went from a high of sixty trucks (with about fifteen of those working two shifts) at the height of the 1990s to twenty-five today with talk of cutting it down to twelve or fifteen, maybe more. This is the same story for all trucking fleets and logging operations in Humboldt. We can all mark the downfall back to the events leading up to the pepper spray case.

So you can imagine the pain I felt at seeing the title Headwaters Forest Defense v. County of Humboldt start popping up all over Facebook. "Look" my friends were saying "Look, what UCPD did was wrong! Humboldt already had a similar incident! There's precedent." What they didn't know they were also saying "Look Scott, look! We found something painful from your childhood. We found the beginning of the end of your family's way of life."

Some people have been calling the UC Davis incident the "Spray heard around the world." I don't know how sure we can be of its impact quite yet, though it's created to opportunity for a slew of internet memes. But I can say that the Humboldt County incident was the "Spray heard around Humboldt county." And it sounded like a once proud industry dying.

Humboldt County is at a crossroads as locals anxiously anticipate the activation of Prop. 64

In November's election, California voters overwhelmingly opted to approve Proposition 64, signing the Adult Use of Marijuana Act into California law. The law allows the sale and cultivation of recreational marijuana. It also lays the groundwork for a sophisticated regulatory structure to collect taxes, grant licenses to cannabis businesses, and protect the environment. Drug reform advocates hailed the measure as a step in the right direction. However, in Humboldt County, one of the longest running cannabis cultivation areas in the country and part of the famed "Emerald Triangle," many growers and other stakeholders in the illegal industry were opposed. Humboldt originally became a nexus of cannabis cultivation precisely because of its remoteness and isolation from the bustle of the larger cities to the south. Long term growers in the area are now worried that the ruralness that protected them from law enforcement and allowed them to develop a culture of impunity will work against them in competing against growers able to produce cannabis close to consumers. Many small family operations are worried their business model will collapse with the addition of licensure, regulatory compliance, and competition from corporate interests. The clock is ticking toward January 2018, when the law goes into effect. What will become of Humboldt's biggest industry, and with it, the fortune of the county?

The answer is not simple: County government is working full-speed to set up the regulatory structure necessary to administer the newly-legal industry, but the high-stakes process is very contentious, and the repercussions of any given move are hard to foresee. A coalition of long-term growers in the area recently threatened the county with litigation over the re-opening of a pre-existing grow permit application period, arguing that it was contrary to the plain meaning of the (very new) statute. The litigation is the latest round in the conflict between legacy growers (those with pre-existing medically sanctioned farms) and new growers.

Cannabis regulation and the headaches it engenders place a heavy burden on county officials. Humboldt County received 2,337 applications for 2017's medical marijuana business permits alone- this includes grows, dispensaries, processing facilities, and testing labs. These applications go through a relatively well-refined process that was created after Proposition 215 legalized medical marijuana in 1996. The process for granting recreational-use licenses goes through three separate state-level agencies, and is brand new. Among those expressing concern about the difficulty of setting up a regulatory structure for a high-stakes new industry is State Senator Mike McGuire, who foresees enormous difficulty in implementing these regulations consistently and predictably in such a short time.

For Humboldt growers who are already worried about their future in an industry they fear may be dominated by out-of-town venture capitalists, the difficulty of complying with a complex set of untested regulations compounds their fears. A regulatory scheme shifts risk to the smaller pool of 'outlaw' growers who can't or won't comply. Outsiders are sanguine about the prospect:

“Candidly, the future for many current growers isn’t bright,” said Joe Rogoway, a Santa Rosa attorney specializing in cannabis issues. “The new marketplace requires a degree of capitalization and sophistication that inevitably will leave people behind. It’s capitalism. There will be winners and losers.”

The question is: Will Humboldt County lose? On the one hand, there is little incentive for business-savvy investors to make their play to enter the industry in the area, now that the remoteness of the area is no longer an asset in avoiding law enforcement. Shipping cannabis products from Humboldt is likely to be expensive and difficult compared to situating a cannabis business more centrally in the state. The much-vaunted excellence of the area's climate for cultivation is largely puffery, as cannabis is a robust weed that has been heavily altered through selective breeding to be tolerant to a wide range of climates, and is often cultivated indoors. Many local growers are (understandably) unequipped to become experts in this complex web of regulatory compliance. The transaction costs of the industry are about to skyrocket. With widespread cultivation and the application of sophisticated economies of scale, the Humboldt cash crop may see the bottom fall out, squeezing out local farmers.

On the other hand, the culture of Humboldt is tolerant of widespread marijuana cultivation. Local government is responsive to growers as stakeholders in county governance. Growers are a large local constituency who wield serious clout, and have significant institutional knowledge. A core of committed long term locals appear willing to get compliant. The county is also levying a local cultivation tax on growers, expected to yield approximately $7.3 million to be kept solely for county services. Provided the industry can survive the likely price effects of legalization, local services could be seriously bolstered by taxation. It does seem likely that a reduced cohort of the savviest local growers could weather the storm and ultimately thrive in the legal market.

Perhaps effects like the revenue expected to be collected by new taxes are the best reason to be optimistic. Humboldt County, despite its reliance on marijuana, is not populated solely by marijuana growers. The deleterious effects of illegal grows have taken a long toll on Humboldt. Migrant workers on illegal grows have been abused and exploited. Predatory growers, emboldened by a climate of outlaw impunity, sexually abuse their seasonal workers. Watersheds that comprise the runs of endangered steelhead salmon are drained and polluted. At the same time, the porous boundary between the illegal industry and the drug culture has produced a mental health crisis in the county that underfunded local services are struggling to keep up with.

Prop. 64 includes new protections for workers and for the environment. New streams of both local and state taxes are earmarked for improving drug rehabilitation services and other vital services. Bringing a wholly unregulated industry into the daylight is the move Humboldt County needed-- provided the bottom doesn't fall out on the commodity propping the whole project up. The next few years will likely produce huge upheaval in Humboldt-- only time will tell whether the county is relegated to a backwater as cannabis moves to more populous areas, or whether it can capitalize on its history and use tax revenues to improve county services.

Full disclosure: I worked for the Drug Policy Alliance during the 2016 push to get Prop. 64 passed.

The ripple effects of a pivot away from clean energy reach Humboldt County

Efforts to develop offshore wind infrastructure off the coast of California have run into a confluence of Trump administration priorities: reducing federal spending, eliminating clean energy projects, and undoing anything related to the Biden administration. In a widely expected move, the Trump administration announced that they were pausing all offshore wind leasing and reviewing existing leases for potential termination. 

Since that announcement, companies planning to build wind turbines off the coast of Humboldt County announced significant layoffs, a sign that those projects may no longer be moving forward. While the Trump administration's announcement did not immediately revoke the permits for the planned offshore wind sites off of Morro Bay and Humboldt County, development of these sites and the onshore infrastructure needed to build the wind turbines and carry the electricity to its destination markets requires a huge investment that offshore wind supporters believe would almost certainly require federal funding. Given the current administration's posture towards wind and other clean energy sources (not to mention towards the entire state of California), that funding will not be coming anytime soon. Thus, it is not surprising that the companies who already paid the U.S. government $757.1 million to lease tracts of the ocean for wind energy appear to be rolling back those plans and cutting jobs that would have been focused on those projects.

In addition to the direct impacts on those losing their jobs with these wind energy developers, the Trump administration's decision to pull support for offshore wind will affect those in Humboldt County who were hoping for the economic benefits that were promised to accompany these projects. As part of the lease bidding process, bidding companies were required to "commit to mak[ing] a qualifying monetary contribution to programs or initiatives that benefit the greater Humboldt County community." The agreement with the federal government provided for about 7.5% of the bid amounts to go to local stakeholders, a not-insignificant amount considering that the total bids amounted to over $750 million for parcels off Morro Bay and Humboldt County. It is unclear how much of that money the County and other local stakeholders have received.

Beyond the direct payments, however, local communities stood to gain from accompanying investments in electric infrastructure and in making significant upgrades to the Humboldt Bay Harbor District, as well as accompanying increases in economic activity in the local area. Now, whether any of those benefits will materialize is an open question.

Even before the Trump administration moved to scuttle clean energy development, many locals in Humboldt County were skeptical about the promised benefits from wind projects. Calmatters' Julie Cart, in her excellent reporting on offshore wind development in California, noted that local communities would bear social costs and face strains on infrastructure, including higher housing costs and utility upgrades. 

As previously discussed on this blog, Humboldt County has experienced a series of boom-and-bust cycles from different industries, including timber, fishing, and cannabis, that have brought prosperity to the region only to collapse and give way to economic despair. Humboldt County's Director of Economic Development, Scott Adair, shared that locals "are cautious about the flimflam, if you will, the over-promisers."

Adair also noted that, even if locals are skeptical, the fate of the project is out of their hands.

“This is a federal project that is happening to us,” Adair said. “We have a limited ability to be involved and to help steer or shape the outcomes of the project.”

County supervisors expressed some cautious optimism that underscores how the region stood to gain and how it has suffered from prior economic hardships: 

The supervisors said they are excited about the possibilities, but they also worry about the pitfalls and are bracing for disappointment. “I go into this with my eyes wide open,” said Supervisor Rex Bohn. “I pray this happens. I hope like hell this happens.

From outside of Humboldt County, offshore wind is considered critical to achieving California's zero-carbon targets for electricity. 

“There is an undeniable urgency,” said David Hochschild, chair of the California Energy Commission. “California has had unprecedented climate challenges. There is a fierce urgency to respond. We have to stop being academic on this. We have to build.”

But this urgency is not enough to justify the project's presence in Humboldt for many locals who have felt burned by prior experiences with extractive industry. Phillip Williams, a member of the Yurok Tribal Council, was extremely skeptical about relying on this project for economic benefits to the local communities:

“Everybody's lining up. It's almost like there's a predator. ‘Okay, these guys are weak. We can come in here and take advantage of this community that’s this desperate for dollars, because they've already depleted all their natural resources. What else can we extract from these communities, and these communities are so desperate, that they're willing to jump off the bridge blind, in hopes that there's gold at the bottom,’” he said.

Like other communities along the North Coast, Williams said the Yuroks need sustainable jobs, but not at any cost. More than a third of tribal members live below the poverty line, 60% of them children.

 Now that it appears likely that the project will be delayed, if not abandoned, skeptics in the local community may be breathing a sigh of relief. Their reactions to the proposed project certainly show the importance of local input and the potential pain that can be caused by major infrastructure development in rural and economically depressed areas. But the climate crisis continues unabated, and the Trump administration has not announced any proposals for economic development in Humboldt County to lessen the impact of the potential loss of offshore wind. 

Litigious Humboldt

For an out-of-the-way county like Humboldt, has seen a lot of big legal action recently. These lawsuits will have significant impacts on the future of the area.

Some of the biggest litigation involved the Pacific Lumber Company, also known as PL or PALCO. PL was originally a well-respected lumber company, with ample land and what seemed to be inexhaustible timber resources. That is until 1985, when PL was the victim of a hostile takeover.

After the Maxxam Corporation acquired PL, it began over harvesting the timber, causing a great deal of anger and divisiveness in Humboldt. There were allegations that Maxxam falsified documents dealing with timber harvests and sales of land, prompting District Attorney Paul Gallegos to file a complaint for fraud and personally try the case.

The case was eventually thrown out by the courts in 2008, but not before the case divided the county in an “us vs. them” battle culminating in an unsuccessful recall election against Mr. Gallegos in March 2004. PL’s legal woes continued when creditors squabbled over the remaining carcass of a once proud company that Maxxam ran into the ground. The restructured company, now known as Humboldt Redwood Company, is struggling to survive with a skeleton mill.

While PL seemed to be falling apart at the seams, another company seemed very stable: Humboldt Creamery, the local dairy co-op. With a number of high-profile contracts including making ice cream for Costco and providing the military with most of its powdered milk needs, the future of the co-op seemed bright. Until 2009 when the CEO, Rich Ghilarducci, admitted to cooking the books. He did so rather than admitting to co-op members that the Creamery was having financial problems.

The resulting chaos ended with the sale of the Creamery to a corporation and a 30-month sentence for the disgraced former CEO. Many dairy families thought that Mr. Ghilarducci was let off easy by an urban federal court not familiar with farm country values. The once proud co-op run by the dairy farmers themselves has now gone corporate, and the farmers aren’t too happy with the court's role in the downfall.

Now Humboldt finds itself embroiled in more litigation. CalTrans and the Federal Department of Transportation are looking to widen Highway 101 through Richardson Grove State Park. Large redwood trees flank the narrow road so tightly no long tractor-trailers can pass. The plan was to remove a few of the trees and widen the road to a point that more commercial vehicles could reach Humboldt and possibly spur an economic upturn in a county losing more and more blue collar jobs.

But environmentalists want to protect the trees, and some locals feel that better connections with the rest of California will damage the unique feel Humboldt County has as a mostly isolated area. They have begun filing injunctions to block the planned widening creating more tension between different factions in Humboldt. Some locals feel that a bunch of hippies with no roots in the area are abusing the legal system to stop progress.

Humboldt appears to be turning to the legal system to resolve more of its conflicts. Yet as a rural county, is this an expected behavior? For a county with more trees and cows than people, and which prides itself on being mellow and accepting, Humboldt certainly seems to have a lot of attorneys running around these days.

When an entire county goes to pot

I grew up in the Marijuana capital of the world: Humboldt County (“Humboldt”). Humboldt, which is part of the “Emerald Triangle,” is a region in Northern California consisting of three counties (hence the triangle reference): Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity. The Emerald Triangle has been world famous for its pot since the early 1980’s. That’s when it became one of the first places in America to grow marijuana that could compete with pot grown in places like Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean Islands.

The Pot industry in Humboldt was began by Hippy refugees who cultivated huge fields of marijuana in the most rural parts of the County. The majority of the county’s families who did not grow pot made their living by working for the thriving timber and fishing industries of the North Coast. However around the early 1990’s both of those legitimate industries had all but dried up. Now the economies in the Emerald Triangle, especially those in Humboldt and Mendocino counties revolve almost completely upon the revenue derived from exporting Marijuana.

It is no longer only the fringe elements of the region who grow enough pot to support their families. Thanks to sophisticated advancements in pot growing techniques it is now possible to grow thousands of dollars worth of pot indoors, and not just in warehouses. Now, much like in the Showtime series “Weeds” even Susie homemaker types can raise her family entirely on the money she makes by converting one of the three bedrooms in her house into an “indoor grow scene.”

Families who’s breadwinners who traditionally worked as loggers, truck drivers, and mill workers often turn to growing pot in order to get by. Much of the younger generation of Humboldt locals have grown up seeing this as one of their only options for making money. Take for example Tony Sasso now 42 and serving a 14-year sentence at the federal penitentiary in Atwater: He'd begun growing pot as a teenager in the mid-1980s, when police helicopters forced growers to hide their plants indoors.

His harvests paid for expensive trucks, skydiving in Maui, boogie-boarding in Chile and a five-bedroom home with a four-car garage. He eventually owned five ranches, including two in Oregon, and says he took in as much as $11 million a year.

"I grew up believing that the only way to make money was to grow marijuana, and I was good at it," said Sasso, Now with the production of marijuana skyrocketing in California thanks to the legalization of medical marijuana, profitability has declined sharply, and cases like Sasso’s are the minority. Now it is the average college student; high school drop-out; the single mother; the video game playing bachelor; and the young couple who all grow pot to make a living. It is conservatively estimated that one in seven homes now contains an indoor grow scene.

In urban parts of Humboldt County for example, electrical use per household has leaped 50% since 1996, when voters approved the state's medical-marijuana initiative, according to a study by the Schatz Energy Research Center at Humboldt State University.

In Arcata and unincorporated areas of the county, average electrical use rose 60% during that time -- while California's overall use remained virtually flat. This trend is only becoming more common. Unfortunately for many however, something will eventually have to give, whether that something is outright legalization; stricter county regulations; or landlords refusing to rent to anyone suspected of looking for a spot for their indoor grow or a combination of all three. What will happen to those who have no plan B? What will the economy of Humboldt County look like in twenty years? It remains to bee seen, but the trend is towards increased regulation, and decreased revenue.

Helicopters over Humboldt: a retrospective interview

Growing up in suburban Southern California, Humboldt County seemed like a completely different world. In some ways, I think it probably is. But stories about Humboldt—stories about environmental activists, cannabis cultivation, and, of course, Bigfoot—have always fascinated me. From bitter campus protests to its history as a major logging hub, Humboldt has been a major talking point on this blog for years. I wanted to contribute something to the already robust list of stories, but there was a problem: I have never been to Humboldt, and I don't have any stories about it!

My solution was to interview a friend, "M." He grew up at the end of a dirt road, on 44 acres of land ~15 minutes from the town of Redway. Initially, our conversation was general—we discussed his upbringing in the '80s and '90s and rural life in Southern Humboldt. But the piece of the story we kept coming back to (perhaps unsurprisingly) was marijuana. What M ultimately chose to share was, essentially, a brief oral history of cannabis cultivation in Southern Humboldt.

It started, of course, with the hippies. According to M, they were "mostly college-educated idealists, looking to live off the land." Most were looking for tranquility, self-sufficiency, an escape from city living. In rural Southern Humboldt, "they found it for cheap." These initial community members were "rich in natural resources, but not in money." There was an issue, though—In Southern Humboldt, you can't grow much. "It's an interesting landscape for agriculture. Most of it is... these vast conifer forests. It's not really agricultural land."

 Enter the Marijuana plant. 

"Cannabis, during those early years, was something that [people] perhaps stumbled upon as a means of generating income for their community." By the time M was born, it had blossomed into a "spectrum of growers." On the one hand, there were "those that were fully in it, willing to grow more, risk jailtime, and supply cities that were farther away." For them, cannabis was a livelihood. 

On the other hand, "you had the mom-and-pop operations that were just a small greenhouse, or a few plants hidden in the woods." For them, cannabis was just "used to supplement income from whatever job they had in the local community." By the '80s and '90s, both groups were facing serious challenges from local, state, and federal law enforcement.

At the heart of our conversation was a story about Vietnam-era helicopters flying low across the treetops around his home. 

You could hear them coming from miles away—and we'd all run out into the yard... to have that experience; ok, we're on a homestead, living in nature, on a homestead off the grid; to have that seclusion, that self sufficiency, and then to hear an army helicopter disrupt the tranquility was pretty strange...

This profound juxtaposition was the result of CAMP: the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting. Managed by the California Department of Justice, CAMP united local, state, and federal agencies in a concerted effort to eradicate illegal marijuana grow operations all over the State of California. Launched in 1983, CAMP activity escalated throughout the 90s. 

In Northern California, CAMP culminated in Summer 1990 with operation Green Sweep. During that operation, the federal government deployed active-duty troops to Southern Humboldt in a drastic escalation of previous drug-policing methods. The operation was met with large-scale protests, some of which became violent. According to M, the "community felt it was being targeted and really terrorized by this government-funded operation." 

Despite its attempts at deterrence, M felt CAMP only increased profits for determined growers: 

when you have these aggressive tactics, the beneficiaries are the ones that are able to continue [growing]. If you increase the focus and the efforts to disrupt the exchange of product... you increase the price. That's what happened: you had cannabis that wasn't initially of significant value, [skyrocketing] to four or five thousand dollars a pound. There were many in the community that felt the reward was worth the risk: friends and neighbors that either faced jailtime or were impacted by friends and family getting locked up for cultivation...

M recalled one community member, busted with what was later described as "a handful of sprouts. They slapped a 5-year sentence on him. He had a young daughter. But he knew the risks..." 

Sometimes, the dangers went beyond jail time. 

As far as the actual exchange of the product for cash, I've heard there were buyers that would come up from the city; they would go up to someone's house, and you would hope to establish some kind of rapport and trust. 

But finding a buyer, at least at first, entailed "meeting at the bottom of a dirt road, and hoping for the best." For one of M's high school classmates, this dynamic proved deadly. "[He] became affiliated with some buyers from the Bay Area... perhaps he didn't put a lot of trust in them. They came up and robbed him, he resisted, and they shot him. He was 17 or 18." 

"It's interesting," M remarked towards the end of our conversation, "to return to that time period and compare it to the traditional American high school experience." 

I am inclined to agree. 

M now works in Portland, Oregon as a registered nurse. When asked if he ever saw himself settling down back in Humboldt, he responded with a simple "no," adding briefly that "too much has changed."