WORKERS SEARCH FOR NEW FUTURES AS EMERALD TRIANGLE ECONOMY WITHERS
GARBERVILLE >> Leann Greene's rose-colored glasses are scratched, cracked, sitting askew, but still firmly planted on her face during her latest monthly open house for the Humboldt Workforce Coalition.
For three hours this Wednesday afternoon in a sunny conference room at the public library, apprehensive cannabis workers, lured by a segment on the community radio station KMUD, trickle through, seeking a potential refuge from their collapsing industry. Greene is their counselor and confidante, a relentless cheerleader promoting new career opportunities.
“So dream big. It's your life, right?” she tells one young man looking for help connecting to job possibilities in a place where there don't seem to be many right now.
It's a mantra for Greene. “You're kind of reinventing your life here, so dream big,” she tells Daniel Rivero, who fears he could lose his job at any moment after his hours were cut back at the small warehouse where he manufactures cannabis products for $17 an hour.
A crash in the price of weed over the past two years has sent California's cannabis market reeling — and with it, the communities that relied economically on the crop for decades, even before the “green rush” of commercial legalization.
In the Emerald Triangle — the renowned Northern California region of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties that historically served as the hub of cannabis cultivation for the state and the country — growers who can no longer sell their product for enough to turn a profit are laying off employees and shuttering their farms. The cascading financial impacts have left local residents with broken dreams and a daunting question: If not cannabis, then what?
“We just need to reassess this whole situation as a community of what we can do to evolve with it instead of trying to go against it,” Rivero said.
Daniel Rivero, right, listens as Leann Greene talks to him about finding job opportunities outside of the cannabis industry through a program with the Humboldt Workforce Coalition at the
The 39-year-old, who has lived in Garberville for more than a decade, earned his solar installation certification a few years back, but never bothered to pursue it because the pay would have been lower than what he could make in cannabis. Now he's trying to put other options back on the table, even as he hopes that he can just hold on until the market stabilizes.
“I'm more the school of thought you go for what your heart tells you,” said Rivero, who like so many others around here, believes that cannabis is more than a profession, it's a culture that provides medicine for people. “So I think if I can hold out as long as I can, I would, where it's not affecting my health or my well-being because of my financial situation.”
“Do you keep on struggling or do you go for something that's more secure?”
That's the increasingly urgent dilemma for residents of the Emerald Triangle, in the cannabis industry and beyond.
Weed has flourished here for more than half a century, from its seeds as a countercultural back-to-the-land movement in the 1960s to the predominant economic engine of today.
Prime weather and remote locations made it a great place to grow cannabis, while the illegal nature of the business made it highly lucrative. A whole other world — independent but insular, secluded but self-sustaining — developed in communities such as Garberville, a hippie town of about 800 people along the Eel River and Highway 101 near the southern edge of Humboldt County.
“Out here, we're like an island,” said Anson Wait, a server who estimates that he has lost three-quarters of his income in recent months as the local restaurant industry has been wiped out.
It's hard to quantify just how central cannabis is to local life, but one academic study more than a decade ago projected that the industry was responsi
ble for at least a quarter of all economic activity in the county. The figure is assuredly far higher in southern Humboldt, where the majority of growers are based.
That reliance on cannabis was once a windfall to a rural expanse without many major commercial sectors, supporting main street boutiques and the sports program at the local high school. But it has also made the region particularly vulnerable to the downturn since California voters legalized recreational use and sales in 2016 with Proposition 64.
With the nascent licensed cannabis market unable to absorb a surplus of product, prices have tumbled over the past few years to a fraction of their former highs — a few hundred dollars for a pound of weed that would have sold for more than $1,000 a couple of years ago. Disappearing profits for growers means there's simply less money moving through the community.
“It's like a perfect storm that came through,” said Humboldt County Supervisor Michelle Bushnell, who represents Garberville and the southern county.
Bushnell owns a downtown clothing store that has lost more than half its revenue. Things got so bad last year that she reduced the hours and cut back from six to just two employees. In September, her worst sales month, she gave herself an ultimatum: one more year to pull out of the slump or close the store.
“It's gut-wrenching. I know I have to make the choice if it comes to that,” she said.
No longer able to make ends meet with cannabis, cultivators and workers are contemplating, perhaps for the first time, what else they might do.
Brandon Wheeler, 39, a third-generation farmer from Mendocino County whose grandparents moved to the area in the 1960s as homesteaders, is preparing for his first cannabis season without growing since 2002.
After starting simple with six plants in his mother's vegetable garden when he was 18, Wheeler eventually expanded to a quarteracre farm in Hopland and cultivated under the medical marijuana system that existed in California for two decades before recreational legalization.
But trying to become a licensed operator under Proposition 64 was an endless cycle of frustration, crashing into a local bureaucracy that made it nearly impossible to get certified. As prices dropped, leaving ever smaller profits after his farming expenses and county fees and state taxes, Wheeler spent two years debating whether he could afford to keep going.
“I'm working my ass off making $2 an hour and the state is taking $1.90,” Wheeler said. “I could make more money flipping burgers at McDonald's, literally, and not have to deal with the bulls—t.”
Finally last summer, Wheeler took a job as a horticulturist for the city of Ukiah. The transition has not been as rough as he expected.
It pays only about $50,000 per year, less than he made from the farm at its peak, which has required some cutbacks at home. He's also commuting now, so he gets less time with his family. But he's freed of the financial and emotional burdens that he worried might kill him. He started taking martial arts classes with his daughter, and he's back in better shape than he's been in more than a decade.