From commercial-scale cultivation to unpermitted farms, there are environmental implications to cannabis cultivation from water demands in the billions of liters related to indoor grows to farming on public and tribal lands endangering aquatic and wildlife with ozone implications.
Does the rapidly expanding industry have to go up in smoke? No. But is there a better way? Yes.
Climate Scientist Eloisa Lewis, founder of New Climate Culture has climate-smart, low cost, high yield alternatives for cannabis cultivation from sourcing to processing. It is about creating regenerative economies that stabilize ecosystems instead of destroying them.
Their approach to climate science is focused specifically on boosting biodiversity, the built environment, disaster resilience, and permaculture design technology in living spaces for living systems.
- Grow outdoors instead of indoors for more resilient genetics, increase local biodiversity, and higher quality yields.
- Harvest rainwater for cultivation and extraction, to reduce the impact on groundwater supply, decrease costs and dependence on external suppliers. Decentralized resource management is also disaster resilient.
- Polyculture the garden and local soils with allies such as fungi, radish, strawberry, chickens, rabbits, fruit trees as just a few examples. Farming sustainably, the ecosystem around these industries thrive with renewable resources, a detoxed environment, and food forest abundance for biodiversity.
- Use JADAM and KNF for organic, indigenous fertilizer and organic nontoxic pest management.
- Incorporate circular energy sources like Biogas which relies on local compost to replace propane and propane adjacent fuels.
- Use glass packaging, fungi-based, or plant-based compostable packaging to replace plastic packaging.
Farming regeneratively is the future. No pesticides, non toxic methods and circular economies create microclimates that protect each bioregion and in turn, our planet.
