Category Archives: One Good Year in the media

KQED Forum on environmental costs of pot growing

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Hi everyone, I’m on the road at the moment, but wanted to give a brief update. I got a few on-air comments on KQED’s Forum discussion a few days ago. The subject was the environmental costs of pot growing, spurred by the L.A. Times piece I critiqued in recent posts. Luckily, all of us, other than the guy from Fish and Game, were what you might call pro-pot environmentalists. That is to say, we understand the community, culture and economics of pot production and know it can be grown in a manner that is organic, fish-friendly, land-friendly and community-friendly. (And as shameless self-promotion, that is part of what my film shows.) We are also long-time environmental activists who are very concerned about the negative impacts that some growers are having.

This is an important distinction to make. Most people who rail against the negative impacts of pot growing are also anti-growing and anti-marijuana, which makes it hard to bridge the divide between enviros and growers. Those of us who can have one foot in each world are in the best position to find solutions.

The KQED podcast can be heard here:
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201212270900

Happy new years!

ONE GOOD YEAR covered by local weekly

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The southern Humboldt Independent weekly newspaper has a great cover story on the film and my fundraising campaign today, with some nice photos. The author, Keith Easthouse, did a great job on it and even included a link at the end to this site. Unfortunately, since they’re not online, I can’t post a link so you can read the story. The best I can do is this snapshot of the pages.

IndyFrontPage

IndyPage2

“Truce On Drugs”

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An insightful article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine, titled The Truce On Drugs. He did an extensive phone interview with me, after we were connected by Kristin from Emerald Growers Association, whom he’d contacted looking for sources.

I’m busy putting the finishing touches on my Kickstarter campaign. Once things slow down a bit, I’ll reread the story and see if I can add anything to the Humboldt perspective.

Google me silly. Funny search keywords that led to this film blog.

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A key element of a social media outreach strategy for an independent documentary is knowing who your readers, fans and supporters are and how they’re finding your blog. To that end, I usually monitor my Google Analytics data for this site pretty closely. That way, for example, if I see a spike in views after another blog mentions the film, I can go there and participate in any conversations going on and make some new friends. Or new enemies as the case may be.

With the busy summer, I’ve been neglecting my Analytics data, but decided on a whim to check in there this evening. Nothing exciting, really, till I took a look at the keywords that people had typed into Google that had led them to my site. Some are pretty funny and were good for a giggle after a very long day. I’ve posted a screenshot of the top sixteen, but there are pages-worth of keywords/keyphrases that eventually led people here.

Each of the keywords in the screenshot sent between two and nine visitors to the site. Below that, the list contains hundreds of keywords that each sent one visitor. Many of these visits were “bounces,” where someone clicked a link in a search result, opened the page and then closed it without spending time on it, most likely because it obviously wasn’t what they were looking for.

Below are the most amusing search terms that led at least one person here. The numbers in parentheses indicate how OneGoodYear.com ranked in the Google search results for that term. Some are rather surprising.

* how to buy weed from a stranger (#8)

* turkey bag drug dog (#5)

* the biggest weed plant in the world (an image I borrowed from the article I quoted)

* smoking botrytis on marijuana (#6)

* prices for west coast cannabis (#3)

* sequoia living off grid (#8)

* powdery mildew marijuana plant (original image)

* postage due return to sender (original image)

* oldest marijuana found (#4)

* moldy bud brown (original image)

* marijuana stash found (#3)

* life as a pot grower (#3)

* i have my marijuana seeds five days and they don’t crack (#2)

* how much is a pound of weed in humboldt (#4)

* helicopter shot down in humboldt county (UTL)*

* cannabis peace (UTL)*

* biggest cannabis plants glow in humboldt (sic)(UTL)*

(UTL = emergency responder language for “unable to locate.”)

The award goes to:

* what is humboldt (#4, #5)

When Google can answer that, I want to be the first to know.