ARCATA, Calif. — About the time the wholesale price of pot hit $4,000 a pound, Tony Sasso bought a bulldozer and an excavator and dug a massive hole on his ranch in Mendocino County.

Then he bought four metal shipping containers and buried them in the hole. Inside the containers, Sasso installed 32 1,000-watt lights, a ventilation system and plumbing — all of it powered by a 60-kilowatt generator. His subterranean plantation produced 60 pounds of pot every 56 days, the time it took to turn a crop. They were popular strains, with names like Blueberry, White Widow and Big Red.

He’d begun growing pot as a teenager in the mid-1980s, when police helicopters forced growers to hide their plants indoors. Going underground was the next logical step, to shield the lights from the infrared sensors of law enforcement. “I grew up believing that the only way to make money was to grow marijuana, and I was good at it,” said Sasso, now 42 and serving a 14-year sentence at the federal penitentiary in Atwater.

Indoor pot flourishes …

Today, indoor-grown pot is king. A weed that grows naturally in the sun has been tamed into an industrial product that is branded like soda pop and as subject to fashion as women’s shoes. Pot raised indoors or underground commands up to $3,000 a wholesale pound, twice the price of outdoor varieties.

A Nov. 2 ballot measure to legalize limited cultivation and use of marijuana is the talk of Northern California’s “Emerald Triangle” — Mendocino, Trinity and Humbolt counties — where indoor pot is an economic mainstay. The effect legalization would have on the marijuana market is unclear. Much would depend on the policies enacted by cities and counties, which would have power to regulate and tax production and sales.

The spread of medical marijuana dispensaries has contributed to demand for indoor varieties. The dispensaries need a year-round flow of identical product that only indoor grows can produce.

In the city of Arcata in Humboldt County, several hundred houses are partly or entirely devoted to growing marijuana, said Police Chief Tom Chapman. This has led to more fires, a consequence of overburdened wiring.

In urban parts of Humboldt County, electrical use per household has leaped 50 percent since 1996, when voters approved the state’s medical-marijuana initiative, according to a study by the Schatz Energy Research Center at Humboldt State University. In Arcata and unincorporated areas of the county, average electrical use rose 60 percent during that time — while California’s overall use remained virtually flat.

In areas without electrical service, the diesel generators that power indoor grow operations foul the air, and spills of diesel fuel have polluted streams.

Home and garden stores have become grow shops whose aisles are piled high with 1,000-watt light bulbs, tubes for watering and nutrient potions with names like Bud Ignitor and Bud XL. Along Highway 101, logging trucks have been replaced by big rigs stacked with bags of potting soil.

… but at what cost to the environment?

Sasso and his three workers entered their underground operation via a trap door. Their generator burned through 7 to 9 gallons of diesel fuel per hour, 24 hours a day. Every pound of marijuana grown this way required about 180 gallons of diesel fuel — enough to take a big rig from Los Angeles to Oklahoma City.

Sasso installed a 10,000-gallon fuel tank, refilled by a diesel-fuel company whose drivers he tipped handsomely. He bought eight swamp coolers to ventilate the grow room and a large water tank, with lines running to the buried containers. The plants needed 440 gallons of water a day — about what a typical family of five uses. Sasso took it from a nearby spring.

Mendocino County “is not part of the United States in so many ways,” he said. “There are no rules.”

Years ago, hippies complained that logging companies kept their profits while foisting environmental costs on the public. Indoor marijuana growers have done much the same thing on a smaller scale.

At indoor grow sites, Humboldt County environmental officials report finding tubs of used anti-freeze, leaking fuel lines, pesticide containers and nutrient-laden potting soil that runs off into streams during rains, feeding algae blooms that suffocate fish.

In May 2008, a generator in the southern Humboldt mountains was left untended, and as much as 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel spilled into a creek that feeds the Eel River. “In the last three years, I’ve seen more diesel spills than I have in my previous 28 years” in law enforcement, said Mendocino County Sheriff Thomas Allman.

Now, a cultural backlash against indoor growing is forming. In a recent Humboldt County Craigslist personal ad, a woman seeking a man insisted on “No indoor growers. Yuck.” An unsigned ad in the North Coast Journal noted indoor’s carbon footprint and urged farmers to “Put ’Em in the Sun … as nature intended.”