Our mission

What we do

Cannabis for Conservation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit whose mission is to conserve persisting natural resources, restore degraded ecosystems, and educate communities to prevent further impacts from unsustainable cannabis cultivation. We create, establish, and implement environmental conservation programs for the cannabis industry and landscapes impacted by cannabis cultivation.

CFC is the first and only federally-exempt nonprofit addressing conservation issues strictly associated with cannabis. We are biologists, farmers, and devotees of nature— and we are here as a resource to the environment and cannabis communities, and are honored to be that interface.

History

California legalized recreational cannabis with Proposition 64 in 2016. For decades prior to legalization and presently, cannabis was the economic backbone for the communities of Humboldt, Mendocino, and Trinity Counties, constituting what is widely known as the Emerald Triangle, and the birthplace of the US’s cannabis industry. Traditional cultivation was significantly less expansive on the landscape, and held a culture of stewardship. As demand for cannabis and profitability grew, so did the prevalence of cultivation. The expansiveness of cultivation occurring on the landscape combined with unsustainable practices impacted the sensitive, biodiverse ecosystems of Northern California, manifesting as low water levels from stream diversion, eutrophication of watersheds from fertilizer run-off, habitat and connectivity loss, and the wide-spread poisoning of wildlife from anti-coagulant rodenticides and other pesticides. Scientists have documented these effects, and many conservation organizations now work to address them. As a nascent legal industry dependent on healthy natural systems, we saw a need to institute an industry conservation standard that expands beyond sustainable cultivation practices, and addresses stewardship from an ecosystem-level approach. The agricultural industry as a whole has a long-running, well-developed engagement with conservation work, and we’ve brought that ethic to cannabis.

These ecological issues emphasize the need for the cannabis industry to favor small, regenerative farms that manage for and conserve wildlife. Our goal is to expand the industry sustainability ethic to include biodiversity conservation, adaptive wildlife management, and ecological monitoring, and in doing so, unite the industry in a culture of stewardship. We see a great opportunity in the burgeoning industry to set an environmental standard that could be emulated by other agricultural sectors.