Intentions

"Hilltops have been leveled to make room for the [California marijuana] crop. Bulldozers start landslides on erosion-prone mountainsides. Road and dam construction clogs some streams with dislodged soil. Others are bled dry by diversions. Little water is left for salmon whose populations have already been decimated by logging. The idea that the counterculture’s crop of choice is bad for the environment has gone down hard here. For the professed hippies who moved here decades ago, marijuana farming combines defiance of society’s strictures, shared communal values and a steady income. “These grow sites continue to get larger and larger.” […] “There is a gold rush, and it’s a race to the bottom in terms of environmental impact.”—Felicity Barringer (link)

"Three to five percent of the long sisal leaf consists of a tough fiber demanded in temperate zone countries for use as twine in baler and binder machines operating in grain fields. For a variety of reasons, the world price for hard fibers rose to an unparalleled high in 1951. This price stimulus combined with government incentives led to the establishment of the first extensive sisal plantations in the states of Paraiba and Bahia [Brazil]. Subsequent boom years in 1960-62 further stimulated expansion of the crop, and, in some areas as much as fifty percent of the total land was planted in sisal. […] A concomitant of the introduction of sisal was the widespread abandonment of subsistence agriculture. This was particularly true of small landholders who, in the years of highest prices, were motivated to fill all or most of their small plots with sisal plants. […] The process is nearly irreversible because sisal, once planted, is very difficult to eradicate." —Daniel Gross (link)

"From Figure 1 we can see that something very dramatic happened in the late 1960s. This was the availability of low cost synthetic competition in the form of Polypropylene slit film twine. Its use as a sisal substitute in cordage started to take off around 1970 and its growth has scarcely paused during the past thirty years. I have little doubt that this pattern will continue during the next decade, as projected in Figure 2. Polypropylene, having penetrated sisal's core markets in agricultural twine and cordage, in effect capped the price possibilities for sisal. This, in turn, forced raw sisal prices down."—Gordon Mackie (link)