The Brief

With utility bills rising faster than inflation, a house that produces more energy than it consumes might sound appealing.

Robert Fortunato's "Green Idea House" has been doing that for over a decade. He remodeled his family's 1959 house into a 2,150-square-foot environmentally friendly home, and he says he did it for less than the cost of a traditional remodel.

"It's one of the first net-zero energy, zero-carbon case study houses that was built for less cost than standard construction," he says, and the remodel involved "standard construction materials and off-the-shelf technologies that anyone can use."

Shepherding such a project requires a lot of time and energy from the homeowner. There's research and planning, some stubbornness when it comes to working with contractors and suppliers and now some updates for a climate that's warming faster than expected.

Still, Fortunato's family ended up with a stylish, contemporary, four-bedroom, two-bath home. While a project like this is not for everyone, Fortunato hopes others will learn from his family's experience and take on similar projects. In that spirit, here are five lessons from the Green Idea House.

You'll need to get into the power business

In planning for the remodel, Fortunato wanted to stop using climate-warming fossil fuels as much as possible.

"We had just seen so many instances where the oil companies were not being responsible for the environment," he says.

But reducing fossil fuel use was a challenge.

"We had a gas hot water heater. We had a gas furnace. We had all gas appliances," he says.

Disconnecting from the local gas company saved some money during the remodel because he didn't have to reinstall gas pipes throughout the house. And in replacing appliances, they chose electric ones, including an induction stove.

To replace gas and to supply electricity in his home, Fortunato got into the power generation business. He installed 26 solar panels on the roof that generate all the electricity the house uses, plus enough for two electric cars.

"We really haven't had an electric bill or a gas bill in the last 13 years," Fortunato says. He did have to pay $18,000 upfront to install the panels. He estimates his family saves about $4,800 a year in utility bills, so it took four years to recover that initial expense before the electricity became almost free (there are still utility connection charges, since he remains connected to the grid).

Spending money on rooftop solar is not affordable for everyone, and the industry has gained a reputation for high-pressure sales tactics. NPR has reported on ways to protect yourself.

There's lots of research and planning

From the street, Fortunato's three-story, modern house fits in with the neighborhood of expensive modern and Mission-style homes.

One of the features is the flat roof, which extends five feet over the front of the house. It hides the solar panels, which some consider ugly, so they can't be seen from the street. The extended roof has another purpose that saves energy.

"Sixty percent of the energy that is saved, in terms of heating and cooling, is through that overhang alone," Fortunato says. In the summer, it shades the southwest-facing house when the sun is higher in the sky. "And then in the wintertime, the sun rises low in the sky across the horizon. And the sun goes into the windows and actually heats up the house for free."

Taking advantage of a home's location and then planning construction in this way takes research and planning. Fortunato says the concept he employed is an ancient one, adopted from Indigenous cliff dwellings in what is now Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.

On the other side of the country, the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities (CGBC) employs the concept for its HouseZero office in Cambridge, Mass. They are adapted for that location with fins that shade the windows.

"Rather than horizontal overhangs, those are vertical ones to allow the control of the sun on the east and west, where the sun is lower in the sky," says Ali Malkawi, professor of architectural technology and director of the CGBC.

The HouseZero functions as both a laboratory and the CGBC headquarters. The building "contains several miles of wire and hundreds of sensors," but he says this high-tech part has to be paired with good design.

"You cannot apply a technology in a building that is not designed well, that's taking into consideration all these simple principles that we knew for hundreds and hundreds of years," Malkawi says.

In the Green Idea House, one example of this is an open stairway that doubles as a "thermal chimney." It keeps the house cool without air conditioning and saves more energy.

"We kick open the two vented windows at the top of the chimney, and the hot air just naturally evacuates," Fortunato says.

Hermosa Beach's celebrated mild climate contributes to the success of technologies like this. Fortunato says a house in a place with more extreme weather likely would have to deploy other measures to keep it comfortable.

In planning this remodel, Fortunato also tried to avoid the need for electric lighting during the day.

"If the sun is out, we actually don't need to turn on any of the lights in the house, in any of the rooms," he says. Several skylights bring light inside, and in the evening, efficient LED lighting helps reduce electricity consumption.

You have to ruthlessly stick to your plan

Using LED light bulbs is a relatively easy solution that most Americans have adopted, as the lighting industry also switched to the energy-sipping technology. But other features of the Green Idea House do not have consumer momentum and industries working in their favor. Pursuing them required Fortunato to remind contractors and suppliers of his goals to make sure they're achieved.

For example, the brown metal siding on the house was selected because it was made in a nearby factory in Fontana. Fortunato wanted to avoid burning fossil fuels to have it delivered across the country.

At the end of the ordering process, he confirmed with the supplier that the siding would come from the local factory.

"And then he said, 'Well, no, you ordered a color brown that only Texas makes,'" Fortunato told NPR, with some exasperation. He asked what colors come from Fontana. "And it was very similar. And we said, 'Let's go with that.'"

Fortunato also "replaced an old garage door opener that used 15 watts just sitting there continuously." The new one uses about 80% less electricity, waiting to sense when someone pushes the button. It's a small savings but important to Fortunato.

It's important to figure out your goals and question motivations to make sure the goals are actually accomplished, says Chris Magwood with the clean energy nonprofit group Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI).

"Having me as a consultant is like having that annoying 2-year-old in your house because I just go, why? Like, why a solar house?" says Magwood, who wrote a book about designing more efficient houses.

He says if choosing solar is about the environment, rooftop solar panels make more sense for homeowners in states that burn a lot of coal for electricity, such as West Virginia. But they may not make as much sense in a state that gets most of its power from cleaner sources, such as California.

Magwood says constructing an efficient home takes a lot of time and dedication, though he says it's getting easier with certification programs like Energy Star and LEED. They ensure contractors and manufacturers meet efficiency standards.

You might have to update your plan

When Fortunato began remodeling his house 15 years ago, some of the technology that's common now was just starting to be sold. That includes heat pump water heaters, which save energy by moving heat from one place to another instead creating heat with an element or flame.

Fortunato installed two of these efficient water heaters — one for hot water and another to supply radiators that heat the home — in his garage, which gets plenty of heat from the sun. But he says contractors treated the concept like "science fiction."

"They gave me quotes for five or six times what it should cost to actually install the thing. They were estimating their learning curve, and they wanted to charge me for it," he says. So, he had to explain how the water heaters worked.

Fortunato designed the house without air conditioning to save energy. He assumed the climate would warm about four degrees Fahrenheit over the life of the house.

"I think we've already broken that threshold," he says. Scientists do say temperatures have been rising faster than projected. So, he installed shades on the skylights to reduce the temperature in the house. "And we might go to a very small air conditioning unit if, in fact, we need it."

Fortunato is learning that as humans continue burning the fossil fuels that heat the climate, he has to make other adjustments, like regularly washing off his solar panels.

"We live on a busy street, and all of the carbon-burning cars deposit this layer of black soot that needs to be cleaned off the solar panels," Fortunato says. "It's so ironic, right? The thing we're trying to fight actually is depositing this thing that reduces the production of the solar panels."

Don't expect everyone to follow your lead

Fortunato and his family hoped their experience would encourage others to build their own Green Idea House.

"We wanted to make the house something that anyone would want to live in," he says, so they tried to strike a balance between affordable and attractive. That was after seeing some efficient homes that he says looked like "spaceships" and "mud huts."

The family has offered to share what they learned, led many tours through the home and even hosted a reality show to spread the word.

But houses like this that produce more energy than they use still are just a fraction of a percent of the 140 million housing units in the country. Fortunato says that's "very disappointing." Ultimately he hopes the money his family saves will help convince others to build homes like his.

"Just rough math, about $200 a month for the house and about $100 each for the cars," Fortunato says. That's $400 a month in utility and gasoline savings that could keep adding up, 15 years after the Green Idea House was finished.

Hiring grew a little warmer last month after a chilly year in 2025.

A report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on Wednesday showed U.S. employers added a better-than-expected 130,000 jobs in January — but an annual update shows hiring last year was much weaker than initially reported.

The news comes amid worries that the nation's jobs engine has been sputtering. Employment gains for November and December were revised down by a total of 17,000 jobs.

Once a year, the Labor Department updates its jobs tally with more accurate but less timely information drawn from unemployment tax records. Wednesday's revision shows there were nearly 900,000 fewer jobs in the economy last March than originally counted. On average, employers added only 15,000 jobs a month in 2025.
"This does not remotely look like a healthy labor market," Federal Reserve governor Chris Waller said in a statement anticipating the revision.
Waller urged his central bank colleagues to cut their benchmark interest rate last month in an effort to prop up the sagging job market. But most Fed policymakers voted to hold rates steady in January, after three rate cuts last year.

Healthcare and construction led way

Healthcare and construction were among the few industries that saw significant job gains in January. The warehouses and transportation industry lost jobs, and the federal government continued to shed workers. Manufacturing added 5,000 jobs while hospitality added just 1,000.

The unemployment rate dipped to 4.3% from 4.4% the month before. That's quite low by historical standards. The unemployment rate among African Americans also fell, but remains elevated at 7.2%.

Some of the weakness in job growth last year may reflect a drop in the number of available workers. The Trump administration has slammed the door on most people trying to enter the country, while aggressively deporting immigrants who have been living in the U.S. illegally. At the same time, many native born baby boomers are reaching retirement age and leaving the workforce.

But Waller says that explains only part of what's weighing on the job market.

"Employers are reluctant to fire workers, but also very reluctant to hire," Waller said in is statement. "This indicates to me that there is considerable doubt about future employment growth and suggests that a substantial deterioration in the labor market is a significant risk."

A few years ago, there were two job openings for every unemployed worker. By December, that had dropped to less than one. That slack in the job market means employers don't have to pay as much to attract and keep workers. Average wages in January were up 3.7%, compared to a 3.8% gain in December.

The monthly jobs tally is usually released on the first Friday of the following month, but the January count was delayed a few days because of last week's government shutdown.

Copyright 2026 NPR

Traffic collisions in Los Angeles killed 290 people last year, and more than 150 fatal collisions involved pedestrians, according to Los Angeles Police Department data.

That means L.A. is far from the goal it set more than a decade ago of reaching zero such deaths by 2025. Still, there was a 6% decrease in traffic fatalities compared to 2024. That tracks with trends that appear to suggest traffic fatalities are dropping nationwide.

“I was happy to see the decrease, but I believe we can do better,” Lonyá C. Childs, commanding officer of the South Traffic Division of the LAPD, told LAist.

Childs said prioritizing education about safe driving habits and enforcement of speeding and red light rules could further reduce traffic violence in L.A.

Traffic fatalities claimed more lives in the city last year than homicides, which, according to police data, are also on the decline. At a January rally demanding action on traffic violence, L.A. City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez pointed to this fact and said the city’s political institutions aren’t doing enough to bring traffic fatalities down.

“They don’t act with the level of urgency that they would [when] something is more sensationalist,” Soto-Martínez said. “But every single day, people are dying in our streets.”

How does L.A. compare nationally?

The early 2020s saw a sharp increase in traffic deaths nationwide, which researchers hypothesize is due to drivers adopting riskier behaviors on the road. The rate of traffic fatalities grew at a faster rate during that time period in L.A. compared to the U.S. as a whole, according to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Preliminary federal data show signs that traffic fatalities are decreasing nationwide.

“So changes that we're observing now are, in my mind, the transition out of the peak that happened [during] the COVID-19 pandemic,” Matthew Raifman, a transportation researcher at UC Berkeley, told LAist.

Data from the LAPD indicate that 2025 is the second consecutive year that traffic fatalities on city streets have decreased, but they remain higher than pre-pandemic levels.

Raifman said that, generally speaking, a sustained decrease over a three- to five-year window is a strong indicator of increased safety on roads.

What is the city doing about traffic violence?

In 2015, then-Mayor Eric Garcetti adopted a policy framework known as Vision Zero to zero out traffic deaths by last year.

The city has so far invested nearly $350 million as part of Vision Zero, according to data from the office of the city administrative officer.

Most of that money has supported making high-priority corridors in L.A. safer through various infrastructure projects, public outreach and speed surveys.

The city has also invested $13.5 million under the Vision Zero umbrella to fund overtime for LAPD officers to conduct speed safety enforcement along city streets that see the highest number of traffic-related injuries and collisions.

An audit released in April 2025 found that a lack of cohesion across departments, an unbalanced approach and insufficient political will ultimately hampered the city’s Vision Zero program. In response, the L.A. City Council late last year approved a suite of recommendations to revamp the program. 

In a statement, the office of L.A. Mayor Karen Bass said it “fully supported the implementation of the City’s new recommendations to strengthen traffic safety and achieve the goals outlined in Vision Zero.”

L.A. is expected to launch speed safety cameras throughout the city later this year. The program, which five other California cities are also piloting, will cite speeding drivers on dangerous roads.

The city’s Department of Transportation released the proposed locations for those cameras on Feb. 10.

Attorney General Pam Bondi is testifying Wednesday on Capitol Hill, where she's expected to face questions about the Justice Department's targeting of President Donald Trump's political foes and its handling of the Epstein files.

Bondi's appearance before the House Judiciary Committee comes one year into her tenure atop the Justice Department, a tumultuous period marked by a striking departure from the traditions and norms that have guided the department for decades.

Watch the hearing, set for 10 a.m. ET Wednesday, live:

Since taking the helm, Bondi has overseen the firing of career prosecutors and FBI officials who worked on Capitol riot cases or Trump investigations, investigated and prosecuted prominent opponents of the president, and dropped prosecutions of his allies.

The changes also extend to the department's workforce. The section that prosecutes public corruption has been gutted; the Civil Rights Division, which protects the constitutional rights of all Americans, has seen a mass exodus of career attorneys; and some U.S. attorney's offices — including most recently the one in Minnesota — have been hit by resignations.

In her public appearances, Bondi, who is a former Florida attorney general, has defended the department's actions and sought to tout what she says are major accomplishments — going after cartels and violent crime and helping in the administration's immigration enforcement.

She also says she's made "tremendous progress" toward ending what she says was the department's weaponization in recent years against Trump and conservatives. Biden-era DOJ officials deny they politicized the department, and they point to the prosecutions of prominent Democratic lawmakers and even President Joe Biden's son Hunter as evidence.

Accusations of politicization at DOJ

For decades, the Justice Department has enjoyed a degree of independence from the White House, particularly in investigations and prosecutions, to insulate them from partisan politics.

Critics say that under Bondi, that independence has disappeared and the Justice Department has helped enact Trump's promised campaign of retribution against his perceived enemies.

Last year, for example, the president openly directed Bondi to go after former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James — two high-profile political adversaries of the president.

"We can't delay any longer, it's killing our reputation and credibility," Trump said in a social media post addressed to Bondi. "They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!"

Days after that, a new acting U.S. attorney hand-picked by Trump secured an indictment against Comey, overruling career prosecutors who had doubts about the strength of the evidence.

A few weeks later, that same prosecutor secured an indictment against James.

Both cases have since been tossed by a federal judge, who found that the prosecutor was unlawfully appointed. The Justice Department is appealing that decision.

Other perceived opponents of the president or individuals standing in the way of his agenda have also found themselves under DOJ investigation, including Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, California Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff and former Obama-era intelligence officials James Clapper and John Brennan.

Despite the uproar from DOJ veterans and many legal experts, Bondi still enjoys Trump's support — publicly, at least — as well as the backing of Republican lawmakers.

She has faced criticism from some Republicans, however, over her handling of the files of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The criticism has been focused on the department's failure to meet the deadline to release all of the Epstein files, as required by law, as well as the heavy redactions to many of the documents.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Law enforcement raided the illegal cannabis operation in Shasta-Trinity National Forest months before, but rotting potatoes still sat on the growers’ makeshift kitchen worktop, waiting to be cooked.

Ecologist Greta Wengert stared down the pockmarked hillside at a pile of pesticide sprayers left behind, long after the raid. Wild animals had gnawed through the pressurized canisters, releasing the chemicals inside.

“They’re just these little death bombs, waiting for any wildlife that is going to investigate,” said Wengert, co-founder of the Integral Ecology Research Center, a nonprofit that studies the harms caused by cannabis grows on public lands. For all her stoic professionalism, she sounded a little sad.

For over a decade, Wengert and her colleagues have warned that illegal cannabis grows like this one dangerously pollute California’s public lands and pristine watersheds, with lasting consequences for ecosystems, water and wildlife.

Now, they’re sounding another alarm — that inadequate federal funding, disjointed communication, dangerous conditions and agencies stretched thin at both the state and federal level are leaving thousands of grow sites — and their trash, pesticides, fertilizers and more — to foul California’s forests.

Dozens of fertilizer bags wept blue fluid onto the forest floor. Irrigation tubes snaked across the craters of empty plant holes. The cold stillness felt temporary — as if the growers would return at any moment to prop up the crumpled tents, replant their crop and fling more beer cans and dirty underwear into the woods.

Wengert has tallied nearly 7,000 abandoned sites like this one on California’s public lands.

Greta Wengert, co-founder and co-director of the Integral Ecology Research Center, leads a team documenting the chemicals and environmental damage caused by an illegal cannabis site in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.

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It’s almost certainly an underestimate, she said. Her team knows of only 587 that have been at least partly cleaned up.

No government agency can provide a comprehensive count; several referred CalMatters back to Wengert’s nonprofit for an unofficial tally.

Most of the sites Wengert’s team identified are in national forests, where “limited funding and a shortage of personnel trained to safely identify and remove hazardous materials” is driving a backlog in clean ups, a U.S. Forest Service spokesperson told CalMatters via an unsigned email.

The federal government, the spokesperson said, has dedicated no funding for the forest service to clean them up. And it’s leaving a mess in California.

A new playbook  

The federal government owns nearly half of the more than 100 million acres in California. But it’s California’s agencies and lawmakers taking the lead on tackling the environmental harms of illegal grows — even as the problem sprawls across state, federal and privately managed lands.

The California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s policy is to clean up all grows spotted on its 1.1 million acres of wildlife areas, ecological reserves, and other properties, officials say.

Staff assist with clean ups on federal lands “when asked,” said cannabis program director Amelia Wright — typically on California’s dime. But, she said, “That’s not our mandate.”

Fees and taxes on California’s legalized cannabis market fuel state efforts — supporting the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s cannabis program and funding tens of millions of dollars in grants for rehabilitating places damaged by cultivation. These grants can cover clean-ups and sustainable cultivation projects, or even related efforts like fish conservation.

The department has helped remove almost 350,000 pounds of trash and more than 920 pesticide containers from grows on public lands over nearly a decade.

An aerial view of Post Mountain, where cannabis is grown on private land near the Shasta-Trinity National Forest.

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But former Assemblymember Jim Wood, a North Coast Democrat, said that as he prepared to leave office in 2024, progress on cleanups was still too slow.

“It doesn't reflect what I see is the urgency to watersheds, and the water and the people that are served by them,” he said.

In 2024, lawmakers passed Wood’s bill directing the Fish and Wildlife department to conduct a study to inform a statewide cleanup strategy for cannabis grows. The law requires the department to provide regular reports to the legislature about illegal cultivation and restoration efforts on lands both public and private.

To Wright, that’s a path forward, however prospective it may be.

“It just feels like such redemption right now for many of us,” Wright said. “It's a one of a kind program. So we didn't have a playbook — we're still creating it.”

But the study, which Wengert’s organization is conducting on the state’s behalf, isn’t due until next year. Meanwhile, the bloom of illicit pot grows on private land has been demanding California's attention, a growing problem since voters legalized cannabis in 2016.

“It's like whack-a-mole. They pop up in a new location, and then we have to go there — but the impacts are occurring across the landscape,” said Scott Bauer, an environmental program manager with the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s cannabis office.

The California Department of Justice told CalMatters it recently identified a “substantial increase of illicit cannabis cultivations on or adjacent to public lands.” Of the 605 sites where a multi-agency state and federal task force ripped out illicit cannabis plants, roughly 9% were on public lands — up from an average of 3 to 4%.

“Everybody thought with legalization that a lot of these problems would go away,” said Wood, the former assembly member.

But, he added, the sites remain. “It’s a ticking environmental time bomb.”

And the contamination, new research confirms, lingers.

‘This site will sit on this landscape’

On a cold November morning, down one dirt road and up another, ecologist Mourad Gabriel led a safety briefing at the grow site in Shasta-Trinity National Forest.

Gabriel, who previously spearheaded a U.S. Forest Service effort tackling trespass grows on public lands, co-founded the research center with Wengert and now co-directs it with her. He’s also her spouse and a foil to her calm watchfulness — dismayed by the state of the forest one moment and bounding off to investigate an interesting mushroom or animal scat the next.

“Please don't push the red shiny buttons, or lick the big pink things,” Gabriel joked at the mouth of a well-worn path growers had carved into the woods. (Carbofuran, a dangerous and illegal pesticide often found on grow sites, is bright pink.)

The team, Gabriel explained, wasn’t there to clean up the grow. They didn’t have the money for that. Instead, he said, shouldering his backpack and strapping on a first aid kit, they were there to document the contaminants as part of a U.S. Forest Service-funded investigation into wildlife around cultivation sites.

“This site will sit on this landscape until someone acquires some level of funding,” Gabriel said. “And no one can really push it, until we actually get that data.”

Jenna Hatfield, a member of Wengert’s team, takes notes at the grow site.

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Wengert and Gabriel have spent years collecting data at grow sites like this one. They’ve found carcasses of creatures so poisoned even the flies feeding on them died, and detected dangerous pesticides in nearby creeks more than a year after raids.

In recent work they published with scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, the team found that illegal grows pulsed pollutants from plastic, painkillers, personal care products, pot and pesticides into the soil that could be detected months or even years later. Some contaminants also showed up in nearby streams.

The pollutants diminished over time — absorbed into the landscape and washed into waterways. By the time the researchers tested for them, the concentrations had declined to levels lower than those found in agricultural soils.

But, they point out, remote habitats and sensitive headwaters are not where these chemicals are supposed to be. Past a marshy flat cratered with holes and piled with poison-green insecticide bags, Gabriel, Wengert and ecologist Ivan Medel trailed an armed U.S. Forest Service officer to a massive trash heap cordoned off by barbed wire.

Medel wedged himself through the strands and handed empty fertilizer bags dripping blue liquid out to Gabriel.

Force-feeding waterways the excess nutrients in fertilizer can upend entire ecosystems and spur algae blooms. The site is in the greater South Fork Trinity River watershed — vital, undammed habitat for protected salmon and other fish species.

“That was pretty nasty,” Gabriel said, as one bag spilled liquid over his gloved hands. He counted up the haul. “Twelve bags right there.”

By day’s end, the team discovered enough empty bags and bottles to have held 2,150 pounds of fertilizer and more than 29 gallons of liquid concentrate. All of that, the growers had poured into the land.

A scientist walks through empty planting holes at the illegal cannabis site, where growers chopped away brush and laid irrigation lines.

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A federal void

In 2018, a federal audit lambasted the U.S. Forest Service for failing to clean up — or even document — trespass grows in national forests.

The agency was finding and eradicating cannabis grows in national forests effectively. But its failure to consistently clean them up, the audit said, put “the public, wildlife, and environment at risk of contamination” and could allow growers to return more easily.

Little has changed. From 2020 through 2024, when Gabriel worked for the agency, a spokesperson said the Forest Service “prioritized reclaiming sites over investigating active grows.”

But the agency said it still has received too little funding and has too few personnel trained to work with often hazardous materials. And the backlog persists. How big it is, the Forest Service wouldn’t say. After declining an interview request and taking two months to reply to emailed inquiries, a spokesperson said CalMatters must submit a public records request.

The Forest Service now is shifting the responsibility for cleanups to individual forests. That, too, contributes to the backlog, the spokesperson said.

U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman, a California Democrat and ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said he has tried repeatedly to direct more funding to cleaning up trespass grows on federal lands, but with little success in Congress.

“We have tried just about everything,” said Huffman. “It’s clearly not enough.”

Now, under the Trump administration, the Forest Service is even more understaffed. A spokesperson said while law enforcement staffing “has remained steady,” roughly 5,000 non-fire employees “have either offboarded or are in the process of doing so” through “multiple voluntary separation programs.”

Huffman put it more starkly. “They’ve been gutted,” he said. “The Forest Service right now has a sign on the door that says, ‘We're out of the office. We're not sure when we'll ever be back.’”

Mourad Gabriel, co-founder of the Integral Ecology Research Center, looks at a bottle found in the abandoned camp.

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Cleaning it up

The Shasta-Trinity grow stretched for more than 6 acres through national forest land. Trash, and the smell of pot, were everywhere.

Law enforcement officers had removed the mouth of the irrigation tube diverting water from a nearby creek, but all the piping remained. It slithered over downed trees, past the craters of another abandoned grow to a waterfall where leaves and black tubing snarled in the rocks.

Gabriel clambered up the waterfall, where he discovered a sock and a plastic bottle with the top sliced off — a makeshift filter the growers used to keep the line clear of debris. He hung the bottle on a tree branch, like a ghoulish Christmas ornament.

Few organizations are qualified to do science-informed cleanups, and none work as widely as Wengert and Gabriel’s.

California’s Cannabis Restoration Grant Program is paying the team more than $5.3 million to conduct the legislatively mandated study on cleaning up grow sites, and also to train and support tribal teams and other organizations to do this work.

The study, and the training, include best practices for handling and disposing of hazardous waste, Gabriel said. More teams means more competition for the pot of state-allocated money, but he wants more allies in the fight.

“Until someone cleans it up, it stays out here,” Gabriel said from his perch in the waterfall, surrounded by a tangle of black irrigation pipes. He expected it could take years.

Wengert and Gabriel follow an irrigation pipe that leads to the water source growers used to water their cannabis crop.

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But that’s not what happened.

Two weeks later, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife choppered away nearly 1,500 pounds of trash, 4,000 feet of irrigation pipe and 7 pesticide containers — restoring the rugged, remote forest.

The department had offered to help out the U.S. Forest Service and take the lead on the clean up, with its own helicopter, on its own budget, according to spokesperson Sarah Sol.

Months later, when Gabriel learned about it, he was shocked — and concerned. Sol said that Fish and Wildlife staff did not encounter any banned or restricted pesticides, and all had masks and nitrile gloves available to them.

But Gabriel’s team found residue in the pesticide sprayers on the hillside from a class of chemicals that includes banned and dangerous carbofuran. He worried that the cleanup team could have unknowingly put themselves and others at risk.

“There is a proper way to do it, and there is a cowboy way to do it,” Gabriel said.

It’s one site down — one patch of forest cleared. But thousands like it remain, littering California’s landscape.