Who am I, and why did I start this blog?

My name is Laura Ellen, I'm a blogger and environmentalist who has written about Health, Gardening, and Water Contamination, among other things. 

I am the furthest thing from a stoner, but started this blog because I was one of the many people who bought into the too-common narrative that cannabis is a dangerous plant that may as well have been created by Satan. I was so completely uneducated about Hemp, I actually voted against the Farm Bill to legalize cannabis in 2018!

I made the prejudiced assumption (as I think many people do), that hemp was just something that was just pushed by stoners who wanted to get high. I had no idea that hemp and cannabis really are two of the most beneficial plants (if not THE most beneficial plants) on our planet. 

I'm so grateful to have seen the documentary The Sacred Plant, because it really opened my eyes to the fact that Hemp and Cannabis were banned for political reasons, more than them being some great danger to society. 

The fact that hemp - a cousin to cannabis - contains trace amounts of THC (the psychoactive component) gives this plant a stigma that causes way too many people to completely overlook all the other, greater benefits of the plant... and there are SO MANY!

One thing I CANNOT stand is waste. If Our Creator / God gave you an incredible gift, it should be used to its fullest potential. Imagine someone telling Simone Biles, Michael Phelps, Tom Brady or Novak Djokovic they can't play sports. Or someone telling Whitney Houston, Barbara Streisand Mariah Carey or Luciano Pavarotti they can't sing. What an injustice that would be!

And yet, that's exactly what we've been doing with hemp. Once I learned all the benefits of hemp and cannabis, it became crystal clear to me that the criminalization of these plants is one of the greatest forms of waste in human history. A plant with this many benefits for health and the environment should be put to use as much as possible. 

These plants perform like world class athletes, and yet they've been wrongfully "put in jail" because they're a threat to Big Pharma (I would have thought this just sounds like a conspiracy theory, until I watched The Sacred Plant). Despite the fact that Hemp has very little THC, it got put in jail along with it's cousin, Cannabis, simply because they are in the same family. And this needs to stop!

Although I watched The Sacred Plant back in 2018, I only started this blog after doing research on sustainable, beneficial crops that farmers could grow instead of typical food crops. 

When I started my Gardening blog (largely dedicated to showing people some of the best and most efficient ways to grow food), I began to feel guilty about it. We're taught that Farmers are the Heart of America, and if they relied on farming to survive, wouldn't it be a bad thing for farmers, to tell people to grow their own food? If everyone started growing their own food, wouldn't that put farmers out of business? 

So I had to ask the question: What else could farmers grow, to maintain a decent living?

I decided to look up different types of Non-Food crops that farmers might be able to produce instead of produce. For whatever reason, the first thing that came to mind was hemp. I'd learned, after watching The Sacred Plant, that it had a lot of benefits. But I had no idea just how many benefits it had to slow global warming and prevent carbon emissions! 

As I did my hemp and cannabis research on YouTube, I soon discovered there are thousands of videos related to Industrial hemp production, because it has SO many uses I'd never even heard of! Yeah, I'd heard of hemp hearts, and I've heard of hemp fibers being used for clothing. 

But I had NO idea those hemp fibers are SO strong, you can use it to make rebar that's stronger than steel! Nor did I know that you can use hemp fibers to make homes that are Fire-resistant, mold-resistant, vermin and termite resistant, long lasting, carbon-sequestering. It almost seems like it should be a crime that hemp isn't a required building material in California!

I started this hemp blog in the fall of 2024, but soon after, the devastating fires broke out in Los Angeles and I felt like I needed to do whatever I could, to spread the word about one of Hemp's most beneficial properties: FIRE RESISTANT BUILDING!

I felt a particular calling to this topic, because since I was a kid, I wanted to build homes. I lived on a street in Hawaii that had a lot of empty lots on a hillside. As I got older, I saw more and more lots getting bought up, and I was always in awe of the shape and structure of the different houses that were being built. 

I worked in a real estate office for a while, and found that I actually enjoyed helping the other agents to sell and market homes. The brokers I worked for encouraged me to get my real estate license to sell homes, but I never wanted to go that route. I was much more interested in building homes, or rehabbing homes to make them more environmentally friendly. 

I took some real estate investing courses, but a lot of them involved approaching homeowners in distress, and offering to buy their houses. That was nearly impossible for me, I think because I get really attached to places where I live.  So I was a lot more interested in helping people to stay IN their homes, than to leave. 

Still wanting to work in real estate and construction somehow, I went through Project Build, a Carpentry Program at Jobtrain, to learn more about building. I'd noticed that my peers in the various investing courses I'd taken, seemed to have at least some basic knowledge of carpentry and I knew nothing. And that really bothered me. I didn't even know that "sheet rock" was another name for drywall!

I've always wanted to build beautiful homes, and I've wanted to make them with solar rooftops and eco-friendly materials. I learned a lot about solar technology while in the Carpentry program and Jobtrain. 

But I'd never seen ANYTHING as beneficial for the construction industry as HEMP! 

I want to do what I can, to promote hemp farming in areas that desperately need soil remediation, and then using that same hemp to build beautiful, eco-friendly homes. There is a program called NewEarth Development that I will be working with to make this happen. 

Will be posting more on this blog as it unfolds.