The senseless destruction of the Pinyon-Juniper forests as “native invasives”

This is an excerpt from a zine, “The Troubles of ‘Invasive’ Plants.” Check out the whole project here.

By Nicole Patrice Hill & Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

A pointless, brutal tragedy is currently taking place in the Great Basin of the US American west: the destruction of native Pinyon-Juniper forests. Old growth trees are being clear-cut, shredded and mulched. Collateral damage is being suffered by the vibrant community of flora and fauna these forests host.

As noted by biologist Katie Fite, this campaign against Pinyon-Juniper forests is the third wave in a series of massive assaults in US history. The first happened in the second half of the 19th Century when “trees were clearcut over vast areas—even their roots dug out—to produce charcoal to process gold and silver ore.” The purpose of the second wave, after WWII, was to clear land for ranchers. Trees were cut, chained, sprayed and burned on a large-scale basis until the 90’s. Three million acres were converted to pasture between 1950 and 1964, and more than a third of a million acres between 1960 and 1972, in Utah and Nevada alone. [3]

The current wave is being spearheaded by the BLM and the Forest Service and once again for the benefit of ranchers, though that’s not how it’s being presented. Instead, the ostensible reasons are to improve Sage- G rouse habitat, control wildfires, and halt the spread of so-called “native invasive” specie s, a new label being pinned on the Pinyon and Juniper trees.

We hasten to note that the “native invasive” concept does not enjoy consensus in the invasion biology community, at least not yet. But for the Pinyon-Juniper forests being decimated right now under that rubric, that’s no consolation.

Not that the word, “invasive,” has to be spoken for its damning specter to be invoked. In project descriptions, the BLM talks about the need to “restore natural site conditions” and remove “encroaching pinyon-juniper trees.” This isn’t the letter, but it’s the spirit. These are fighting words and they spur on the eradication of an enemy without any further justification. The language paves the way. Not for the first time in history , the popularity of an inciting ideology is giving cover to a criminal act.

How can the Pinyon tree be “encroaching” when it has lived in the area for so long? The Single-Needled Pinyon (Pinus monophylla), which is the dominant Pinyon species in Nevada and to the west, originated around 20 million years ago as a mutation of the Colorado Pinyon (Pinus edulis).[4] That makes P. monophylla 100 times older than Homo sapiens, which only goes back 200,000 years. Considering the age difference, do we have any right at all to question the wisdom of this elder? We’re serious. Maybe we ought to get off of their lawn.

P. edulis, which is even older, is currently found in Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, but the ranges of both species have experienced expansions and contractions as climatic conditions have changed. For example, since the end of the last glaciation period, 11,700 years ago, they have been moving steadily northwards. ”Historic range” has been fluid over time but aren’t the locals just allowed to amble where they wish?

The BLM “treatments” in the Great Basin, both proposed and ongoing, include “lop and drop,” mastication, herbicides and chaining. Chaining involves attaching a huge anchor chain from a battleship between two tractors and dragging it along the desert floor, ripping trees and bushes from the ground, wrecking delicate soil crusts, and killing or injuring countless other creatures in their dens, nests and hideouts. The extent of the damage is unknown, as it is not being adequately tracked.

These “treatments” are presented as a viable option for creating Sage- G rouse habitat, rather than, say, removing cattle from degraded habitat so it can recover or not opening up current, more intact habitat for fracking. Other bogus reasons for “treatment” include decreasing erosion (whatever that means), and increasing stream flow for water users (who are already taking more than can be sustained).

Will Falk, an eloquently spoken friend of Pinyon-Juniper forests, summed it up well:

“The Pinyon-Juniper encroachment theory is a product of settler colonialism’s historical amnesia. One of the products of the white supremacy brought to the Great Basin by European settlers is a selective memory that ignores guilt-inducing facts of ecological destruction wrought on the Great Basin by European mining activities.”

Amnesia is right. The proponents of “encroachment” projects repeatedly refer to historical ranges of Pinyon-Juniper woodlands from the early 20^th Century, a reference date conveniently placed after the massive clear-cutting of the late 19^th Century, which significantly impacted these ancient forests and reduced their ranges locally.

A visit to the old Ward charcoal kilns on state park land outside Ely, Nevada, provide a great opportunity to confirm evidence of the former clear-cutting, as Nicole saw for herself on a 2017 visit. This is only one of many operations where thriving forests were converted into fuel for smelting ore. Tourist signs boast of how during their three years of operation (1876-1879), all the trees were cleared for thirty miles in every direction. As the trees of forest have returned to their recently vacated home, with the help of birds and other creatures, they have been falsely described as “encroaching.” The foothills in that valley have been subjected to removal treatment well within thirty miles of the ovens.

The Ward charcoal kilns that Nicole visited, Spring 2017

About fifty miles west of Ely is the town of Eureka, where “by 1878 the woodland was nowhere closer than fifty miles.”[5] This history repeats itself, about every 50 miles, all across the state along Highway 50, west to Virginia City. Throughout the entire area, Pinyon-Juniper forests have been recovering their native range, but certain invasive humans can’t leave them alone.

Such humans who argue for this “restoration” cite research that lacks real data, but no matter; they rely heavily on anxiety inducing language, and that’ll do the trick. This is a recurring theme that echoes through invasive biology. A fearful claim of invasion is the beginning bias of research, so results are reported as such, that bias is fed to the public and the restoration industry is fueled by public tax dollars and grants to answer the destructive cry. Take this sentence: “Most ecologists and resource managers agree that juniper has become a deleterious native invasive plant that threatens other vegetation ecosystems, such as grasslands, through a steady encroachment and ultimate domination” [our emphasis]. “Deleterious,” “threatens,” “encroachment,” “domination”: Those words describe someone, for sure, but it’s not Juniper.

We must point out that an indispensable party is left out of nearly all discussions of the Pinyon-Juniper forests and that’s the Native Americans. Pinyons were central to the lifeways of many tribes including the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, Cahuilla, Havasupai, Hopi and Kawaiisu, among others, who enjoyed the nuts as a staple food in a variety of delicious and healthy preparations; availed of the pitch and resin medicinally for a multitude of ailments; and utilized the needles, bark and wood for crafts and tools. Juniper berries also provided a source of sustenance for different tribes, though they were more sparingly employed.[6] The campaign to remove these trees in the 19^th Century didn’t just provide fuel for industry. Like the annihilation of the buffalo in the Midwest at the same time, it served to sever the Native Americans from their land by slaughtering their sources of sustenance.[7]

In this way, the current assault on Pinyon-Juniper forests is just the latest chapter of the Indian Wars, which never ended.

So yes, let’s take this word—“invasive”—and let’s stick it where it belongs. But that’s not on plants who have lived here for tens of millions of years—or on any plant at all, for that matter, who are all merely acting in their own nature, regardless of where they end up, no fault of their own. No, there’s one place and one place only where that word belongs and that’s on the savage culture of death that arrived here from the “Old World” in 1492 and is still viciously occupying this land.

We who benefit from this reality need to own up to it and stop dishing out the blame where it doesn’t belong. As a start.

Notes:

[3] Lanner, Ronald M. The Pinyon Pine: A Natural and Cultural History. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1981), p. 144.
[4] Lanner, from “Chapter 3—Origin of a Species: How the Singleleaf Piñon Was Born.”
[5] Lanner, p. 136.
[6] Sonnenblume, Kollibri terre. “Singleleaf Pinyon Pine (Pinus monophylla)” and “California Juniper (Juniperus californica)” entries in Wildflowers of Joshua Tree Country (Portland, Oregon: Macska Moksha Press), 2015.
[7] Lanner, from “Chapter 15—Fuel for a Silver Empire.”