by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 4, 2018 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
by Heidi Hall / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin
A group of jays is quite appropriately called a party. A group of Pinyon Jays is a big party–the kind of party the neighbors would call the cops on. I used to try and count them as they flew overhead but I would usually end up laughing and losing my place while the dog ran and hid beneath something. It rarely happens now. The Pinyon Jays are not around here much anymore.
There are still some Pinyon Pines scattered around my house and the homes of my neighbors but many of them were cut down or have succumbed to drought, insects and mistletoe. In the larger area of our watershed tens of thousands of acres of Pinyon/Juniper forest have burned in wildfires. The remaining Pinyon/Juniper forests in this region have been subjected to “thinning” supposedly to reduce the fire risk or to increase Bitterbrush (Purshia tridentata) for deer browse or to “save” the Sage Grouse. I think the reasons for cutting Pinyon Pines change according to the audience and/or whatever may be a current hot topic. I was told the trees were “encroaching.” When I mentioned the concept of plant succession my contact at the Bureau of Land Management stopped responding to my emails. I also have observed that Bitterbrush has regrown from old crowns after wildfire but does not appear to be moving into the footprints of trees which were cut down.
Pinyon Jays are omnivores, sometimes eating insects and even small vertebrates, but the bulk of their diet is made up of the seeds (nuts) from the Pinyon Pine. Pinyon nuts rarely fall to the ground so the jays have to stick their beaks into the hellishly sticky cone to retrieve the seed. Humans who collect pine nuts often have a set of clothing dedicated to that specific purpose. Pinyon Jays lack the feathers other birds have around their nostrils which would be chronically globbed with pitch. I am always in awe of how these kind of things work out. Pinyon Jays also have an expandable esophagus which can hold a few dozen pine nuts until they can be regurgitated and buried. A mated pair of birds knows of one another’s stash. Uneaten seeds often become trees.
Pinyon Jays are social and monogamous. Their parties can number up to 500 individuals and most birds remain in the party they grew up in. They breed earlier in the year than any other passerine (perching bird) perhaps because the sight of green Pinyon cones will stimulate sperm and ovum development. I imagine Pinyon Jays could have some unusual pick-up lines. They nest in parties as well. There will be one nest on the the south side of each tree over a large area and yearling birds will help feed their younger brothers and sisters. As the young become flighted they will congregate in one location. The adult birds can always pick their hungry kids out of the bunch. They all look the same to me. Pinyon Jays will return to nest in the same area year after year as long as there is food available.
As long as there is food available. As long as there are Pinyon Pines.
Pinyon Jays are considered a vulnerable species. The Pinyon Jay was placed on the 2016 State of North America’s Birds’ Watch List of bird species that are “most at risk of extinction without significant action.” According to the North American Breeding Bird Survey the Pinyon Jay populations fell 85% between 1966 and 2015. The decline is due to loss of habitat. The loss of habitat is due to deliberate decimation of the Pinyon/Juniper forests along with drought and an increase in devastating wildfires. As was mentioned above the reasons for decimating Pinyon/Juniper forests are varied.
In some areas the entire forest has been ripped from the ground by dragging a huge chain between two pieces of heavy machinery. Around my region it has been hand cut and maybe one tree on a grid of about every hundred feet or so has been allowed to live. A few clusters of trees have been tolerated. Pinyon Jays, like many creatures, thrive on edges but this is nothing but edge. There is no place to put a colony of several hundred nests. And the drought means the few remaining trees rarely produce viable seed. And even if there were seeds the Pinyon Jays are gone. The remaining trees may be the last. There is no one to disperse the seed. I can walk up the hill above my house and find groves of young trees in an area that burned 40 years ago. I have crawled through acres of cheat grass in areas that have burned within the past 20 years and not found a single infant Pinyon Pine. In one nearby location a group of people from a local and a national environmental organization spent a day removing Pinyon seedlings from an area which was clear cut in the first big push several years ago. The goal is to protect the Sage Grouse from predatory Ravens who will perch in the pines. I wish I had participated. Maybe I could have saved the trees I found. No, it would not have made much of a difference except to my heart. I don’t agree with sacrificing one species for another. The Pinyon Jay is headed for extinction too.
Last week I ran outside when I heard the jays. It had been so long since I had tried to count them. It had been so long since there had been a party of jays flying over my house. You will hear them before you see them. First there is the vanguard – a few widely spaced birds. Then small groups. Then larger groups. The cawing is becoming loud. I have lost count even before the largest portion of the party flies overhead. Then smaller groups. Then a few stragglers, often making a substantial amount of noise themselves. And I always wait a moment after I think they are gone because there is always one more. And then it is quiet. This time I cried.
Notes
Pinyon Jay, Life History, All About Birds – Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Jay and Pine Intertwined | All About Birds
Editor’s note: to learn more about Pinyon-Juniper Forests and the escalating fight to save them, see Pinyon Juniper Alliance.
Heidi Hall is a musician, artist and micro-wanderer living in the shadow of the Sierra Nevada with two Golden Retrievers and a garden full of peppers, cabbages and root vegetables.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jun 11, 2017 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
by Will Falk / Deep Green Resistance
A windmill blade knocks the head off a Cooper’s hawk interrupting the late afternoon peace in Spring Valley, just outside Ely, Nevada.
The blade tosses the hawk’s body onto yellow gravel the power company spread, over living soil, in circles around their windmills.
The ever-present Great Basin breeze, who usually whispers with a soothing tone through pinyon needles, juniper branches, and sage tops, becomes angry. Grazing cows pause their chewing and look up to consider the scene.
Heads of cheat grass poke through the gravel, only to droop with sorrow for the splayed feathers and twisted wings at their feet. Taller than cheat grass and crowding around the gravel’s edge, crested wheatgrass shakes and shutters with horror in the wind.
The collision’s suddenness and the sickening sound of the blade striking the hawk’s small skull breaks my awareness open with a pop. I seep across the valley floor. I mingle with the wounds on the land and recognize pain in places I previously overlooked. The windmills, the invasive plants, the cows, and the empty scars on the foothills marking pinyon-juniper clearcuts are all evidence of violence.
The gravel at my feet is the remains of stones and boulders that were exploded and crushed, loaded into trucks, and transported to Spring Valley as part of Pattern Energy’s Spring Valley Wind Farm project. Windmill construction means so much involves land clearances, building maintenance roads, and operation of fossil-fuel intensive heavy machinery.
Before the gravel was dumped and the construction project started, the ground I stand on was covered in a complex mosaic of lichens, mosses, microfungi, green algae, and cyanobacteria that biologists call a “biological soil crust.”
Across the Great Basin, biological soil crusts are integral to protecting soil surfaces from erosion. They are also vulnerable to disturbance by construction projects like the one that brought the windmills here. The lichen components of these disturbed crusts can take 245 years to recover. Far worse, soil losses due to erosion following mechanical disturbances can take 5,000 to 10,000 years to naturally reform in arid regions.
The windmills that tower above me fill the air with a buzzing, mechanical sound. Built only four miles from a colony of millions of Mexican free-tailed bats at the Rose Guano Cave, the windmills killed 533 bats in 2013, triple the amount allowed by federal regulations. The majority of these bats are killed by barotrauma. Rapid or excessive air pressure change, produced by windmills, causes internal hemorrhaging. In less abstract language, the bats’ lungs explode.
Both cheatgrass and crested wheatgrass are invasive species. Global shipping routes, which have long been tools of colonialism, brought cheatgrass to North America through contaminated grain seed, straw packing material, and soil used as ballast in ships. Cheatgrass outcompetes native grasses for water and nutrients. It drops seeds in early summer before native grasses and then drys out to become highly flammable.
When wildfires rip through areas cheatgrass has invaded, native grasses are destroyed without seeding. In the fall, after native grasses have burned, cheatgrass seeds germinate and cheatgrass dominance expands. This dominance has been disastrous for the Great Basin. Fire return intervals have gone from between 60-110 years in sagebrush-dominated systems to less than 5 years under cheatgrass dominance.
While cheatgrass was imported by accident, crested wheatgrass was imported from Asia in 1898. By the 1890s, Great Basin rangelands were depleted of water, soil, and economically useful vegetation. Ranchers needed cheap feed for their livestock and crested wheatgrass provided it. It outcompetes native grasses, grows in tight bunches that choke out other species, quickly forms a monoculture, and reduces the variety of plant and wildlife species in places it takes hold. Worst of all, crested wheatgrass supports a destructive ranching industry that should have collapsed decades ago.
Ranching is one of the most ecologically destructive activities in the Great Basin. Livestock grazing depletes water supplies, causes soil erosion, and eliminates the countless trillions of small plants forming the base of the complex food web supporting all life in the region. Ranchers have nearly killed off all the top carnivores on western rangelands and jealously guard their animals against the re-introduction of “unacceptable species” like grizzly bears and wolves.
Ranchers, always searching for new rangeland, encourage government agencies like the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the US Forest Service (USFS) to clear-cut forests and remove sagebrush to encourage the growth of graze for their livestock. In the hills north of the wind farm, pinyon pines and junipers lie in mangled piles where they were “chained.”
Chaining is the preferred method for destroying forests here. To chain a forest is to stretch a US Navy battleship anchor chain between two crawler tractors which are then driven parallel to each other while ripping up every living thing in their path.
Ship chain used to clear forests. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Nevada Highway 893 runs to my left along the west side of the valley. If I followed the road north a few miles, I would run into one of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s (SNWA) test wells. SNWA installed these wells in the preparation of its Clark, Lincoln, and White Pine Counties Groundwater Development Project that would drain Spring Valley of water and, then, transport the water by pipeline to support Las Vegas’ growing population.
Fortunately, the project has been successfully stalled in court by determined grassroots activists. But, if SNWA eventually prevails, Spring Valley will quickly dry up and little life, endemic or invasive, will survive here.
***
The reminders of violence I encounter in Spring Valley reflect global problems. Windmills are a symptom of the dominant culture’s addiction to energy. The roads here will carry you to highways, highways to interstates, and interstates to airports.
There is virtually nowhere left on Earth that is inaccessible to humans with the privilege, power, and desire to go wherever they will. To gain this accessibility, these humans are so thoroughly poisoning the atmosphere with greenhouse gas emissions global temperatures are rising.
Invasive species – cows, cheat grass, crested wheatgrass, European settlers – are colonizers. They each colonize in their own way. The cows replace elk, pronghorn, wolves, and bears. The grasses eliminate natives by hoarding nutrients and water. They reproduce unsustainably and establish monocultures. When that doesn’t work, they burn the natives out. And, the settlers do the same.
The violence of civilized life becomes too obvious to ignore and the land’s pain threatens to overwhelm me. Despair accompanies these moments. When all I see is violence, it is easy to conclude that violence is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be. Claims I’ve heard repeated countless times echo through my mind.
Humans are selfish. This is just what we do. We will kill ourselves, but the planet will recover…eventually. Humans have been butchering each other for centuries and we’ll butcher each other for centuries more if we don’t destroy the world first.
I stand paralyzed under a windmill, with a decapitated hawk at my feet, struggling through my thoughts for who knows how long, when the blue feathers of a pinyon jay catch my eye. At first, it’s the simple beauty of her color that attracts my attention. But, it’s the strangeness of the phenomenon that keeps my attention.
Rows of windmills form the wind farm. I stand under the northernmost row and about one hundred yards separate the rows. The jay lands on a barbed wire fence post about halfway between the row I’m standing under and the first row south of me. Her presence is strange for two reasons. First, pinyon jays prefer to live in pinyon-juniper forests and there are no trees for a mile in either direction. Second, pinyon jays are very intelligent, and she must have known that to brave the circling windmill blades is to brave the same death the Cooper’s hawk just experienced or the barotrauma so many bats experience.
The despair I felt a few moments ago is fading. As I approach the jay I see her picking through a pinyon pine cone. She picks deftly at it before she pulls a pine nut from the brown folds of the cone. It’s not until she lifts her head, with the pine nut in her beak, that I understand.
She flew down from the forests, through dangerous windmill blades, to show me a pine nut.
Pinion Jay – Photo: Wikimedia Commons
***
Pine nuts represent the friendship humans and pinyon-juniper forests have shared for thousands of years. Pinyon charcoal and seed coats have been found in the 6,000-year-old Gatecliff Shelter in central Nevada. Pinyon seed coats have been found with 3,000-year-old artifacts in Hogup Cave in northwestern Utah. Many of the Fremont culture’s ruins (circa 1000 AD) in eastern Utah also show pinyon use.
Pine nuts are symbols of true sustainability. I’ve heard many traditional, indigenous people explain that sustainability requires making decisions with the succeeding seven generations in mind. When the health of the seventh future generation guides your relationship with the land, overpopulation, drawdown, pollution, and most forms of extraction become unthinkable. European settlers arrived to find indigenous peoples in the Great Basin, like so many indigenous peoples around the world, living in cultures that existed for centuries in balance with the land.
And, the pine nut made these cultures possible.
The Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone all developed cultures centered on pine nuts. Pinyon pine expert, Ronald Lanner notes, “Just as life on the plains was fitted to the habits of the buffalo, life in the Great Basin was fitted to the homely, thin-shelled nut of the singleleaf pinyon.” Pinyons give their nuts freely and harvesting them involves no damage to the trees. In fact, pine nuts are seeds. Animals who collect and gather the seeds – like pinyon jays, rats, mice, and humans – help the trees reproduce.
It’s a beautiful relationship: pinyon pines offer animals food, and animals offer pinyon pines regeneration. At a time when the survival of life on Earth depends upon humans embracing their role as animals, the relationship the Washoe, Paiute, and Shoshone built with pinyon pines serves as a model for the world.
Relying on the research of American Museum of Natural History archaeologist David Hurst Thomas, Lanner describes the central role the annual pinyon festival played in Western Shoshone life. He writes, “…when pinyon harvest time arrived, Shoshone bands would come together at a prearranged site. There they would harvest nuts, conduct communal rabbit drives, and hold an annual festival. The pinyon festival was the social highlight of the year and was often attended by several hundred people. At night…there was dancing…There was gambling among men and courting among the young. Marriages were arranged and sexual liaisons conducted.”
Pine nut crops, like all natural processes, are subject to variation. There are good yields and bad yields. Human cultures dependent on the land are constantly confronted with a choice. Either humans can tighten their belts and reduce their populations voluntarily. Or, they can exploit the land, stealing resources from the future to meet the needs of the present.
Lanner describes how Western Shoshone sustainability was maintained, “…the pinyon festival was used as an opportunity for regulating the future size and distribution of Shoshone populations. If at the festival the intelligence from all areas foretold a failure of next year’s crop, then measures could be taken to avoid mass starvation…Births could be limited by sexual abstinence or abortion. One or more twins could be killed at birth, as could illegitimate children…The sick and the old could be abandoned. A widow might be killed and buried beside her husband.”
Some of these measures may seem harsh to us today. But, when we consider the violence necessary to sustain today’s civilized, human populations, we will realize that some of these difficult decisions are what true sustainability looks like. Killing a twin or abandoning the sick is small violence compared to the mass violence of deforestation, anthropogenic desertification, and climate change.
***
The pinyon jay in Spring Valley shows me both a pine nut and the history of human sustainability. Even though Spring Valley, with the rest of the world, currently reflects too much human violence, the vast majority of human history reflects true sustainability. Modern humans have existed for 200,000 years. For the vast majority of that time, most of us lived in cultures similar to the Western Shoshone. We must not forget where we come from.
Meanwhile, ecological collapse intensifies. Violence against the natural world is so pervasive it must be considered a war. Perceiving this war hurts. The pain offers us two choices: endurance or cure. Either the pain is inevitable, an unavoidable fact of life that must be endured. Or, the cause of the pain can be treated and healed.
The pervasiveness of violence tempts us to conclude that it is inevitable. When everywhere we look, we are met with human destruction, it is easy to believe that humans are inherently destructive. This is one reason why the dominant culture destroys the natural world so zealously. If violence is inevitable, there is no reason to stop it.
This is also why the dominant culture works to destroy those non-humans we’ve formed ancient friendships with. If the dominant culture eradicates bison, it destroys our memory of how to live sustainably on the Great Plains. If the dominant culture eradicates salmon, it destroys our memory of how to live sustainably in the Pacific Northwest. If the dominant culture eradicates pinyon-juniper forests, it destroys our memory of how to live sustainably in the Great Basin.
There is a war being waged on the natural world and wars are fought with weapons. The pinyon jay brings me a weapon against the despair I feel recognizing pervasive violence in Spring Valley. She shows me that the violence is not inevitable. She shows me the path to true sustainability, and in doing so, shows me the path to peace.
To learn more about the effort to protect pinyon-juniper forests, go to Pinyon Juniper Alliance. You can contact the Alliance here.
To repost this or other DGR original writings, please contact newsservice@deepgreenresistance.org
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 29, 2017 | Education
by Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Great Basin
As a kid, I pictured Nevada as a wasteland of sand and cacti. Today, I know better.
For the past five years, I’ve been packing up my truck every spring and taking a long day to drive to eastern Nevada to bask in the glory of one of the least densely-populated areas of the United States.
The broad valleys never fail to stun me, but most amazing are the mountains, limestone peaks arcing into the sky. Springs and creeks flowing from the hills support rich riparian zones and bring in birds and other wildlife from miles around. Antelope, deer, elk, and wild horses cross the valleys or stick to forested patches. This region is lush, biodiverse, and beautiful.
It’s also under threat. Across eastern Nevada, the Southern Nevada Water Authority seeks to build dozens of massive groundwater wells and pump almost every drop of water south to feed Las Vegas developments. The project has been a battle between locals and developers from Vegas for decades, and still drags on.
Another major threat is felling pinyon pine and juniper forests across not just this region, but the entire intermountain west. Ranchers have been doing this for decades to remove pesky trees getting in the way of their grass—and more importantly, their profit. As overgrazing continues to desertify Nevada—it’ll look like Iraq in another 100 years—removing trees allows ranchers to maintain the illusion that overstocking can continue indefinitely.
Countless people, including myself, are mobilizing to fight like hell for this land, this water, and these forests. We aim to stop these destructive projects by exposing their true nature and—if necessary—standing in their way.
There is a lot more to these stories, but I don’t have time to share it all here. Instead, I’d like to invite you to join myself and other community members, indigenous people, activists, ecologists, photographers, and families for the fifth annual Sacred Water, Sacred Forests Camp.
The camp takes place over Memorial Day weekend, May 27 to 29, near the town of Ely and Great Basin National Park. If you’re interested in attending, you can RSVP on the Facebook event page or by emailing greatbasin@deepgreenresistance.org.
I hope to be able to introduce you to this important, imperiled area in a few weeks.
—
Max Wilbert is a community organizer based in western Oregon who considers Nevada a second home.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 7, 2016 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
This article originally appeared on Counterpunch
By Katie Fite / Wildlands Defense
BLM is escalating herbicide use on public lands in the wake of the September 2015 Sage-grouse Plan Amendments and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Not Warranted Finding for ESA listing. A primary agency excuse for forsaking sage-grouse ESA protection is the pipe dream that new habitat will be created through radical deforestation, and that fuelbreaks will stop fires. The Finding lays it out:
Cumulatively, the FIAT assessments of the five priority areas identify more than 16,000 km (10,000 mi) of potential linear fuel treatments, approximately 2.99 million ha (7.4 million ac) of potential conifer treatments, more than 2 million ha (5 million ac) of potential invasive plant treatments, and more than 7.7 million ha (19 million ac) of post-fire rehabilitation (i.e., should a fire occur, the post-fire rehabilitation identifies which areas BLM would prioritize for management) within the Great Basin region…
The deforestation acreage is larger than Vermont. Native pinyon and juniper trees are treated as weeds, rather than a forest community vital for biodiversity and buffering climate change effects. Real weeds will have a field day in the wake of the bulldozers, bull hogs, masticators, chain saws, mowers, roller-choppers, brush beaters and “prescribed” fire unleashed for subduing woody vegetation. Lands will be doused with herbicides to try to keep cheatgrass, rapidly advancing medusahead, and others from thriving in the wasted, bared soils and hotter, drier, grazed sites. The fuelbreaks will raze sage and trees across a distance greater than that between Patagonia and the North Pole. These cleared zones will parallel many roads on public lands, further fragmenting wildlife habitats and providing fertile grounds for flammable annual grass in the chronically grazed arid landscape, and for human-caused catalytic converter, target shooting and other fire ignitions.
BLM is further reverting to a 1960s worldview of farming-style manipulation of wild lands, mainlining chemicals in support of its treatment habit. This distracts attention from the fact that the new BLM Sage-grouse Plan Amendments allow livestock grazing and many other threats to the bird to continue with little real change, despite a torrent of litigation claiming otherwise. In support of the folly, NRCS and BLM have concocted elaborate models deeming native forest and sage expanses unhealthy or “at risk.” After clearing, the land may be seeded, often with a mix of exotic forage grass and “cultivars,” not the local native plant ecotypes, but plants bred to be big and tough and a livestock forage boon. Places purged of woody plants will be embedded in a landscape “compartmentalized” (BLM’s term) by fuelbreaks.
Livestock grazing is a primary cause of weed infestation and dominance across public lands. But BLM refuses to deal with livestock as a cause of weeds. PEER very recently filed a complaint with CEQ and rancher sycophant Interior Secretary “what’s good for the bird is good for the herd” Sally Jewell over BLM’s denial of the climate effects of cattle and sheep grazing.
That’s only part of it. BLM is a weed denier of the worst sort, and willfully blind to the adverse climate effects of its land clearing. Instead of addressing cattle causes of weeds, BLM’s time honored method is to spray and walk away, leaving livestock free to graze and trample sprayed land in short order, churning soils and copiously defecating, ensuring a fresh batch of weeds takes hold.
2007 Weed EIS and PER Set the Stage
In 2007, BLM completed a Westwide 17 State Weed EIS and risk assessments for expanded herbicide use tripling sprayed acres, along with a Programmatic Environmental Report PER bedfellow laying out burning, chaining, mastication, bull hogging, mowing, brush beating, harrowing, “biological thinning” (dustbowl style grazing) and other severe weed-causing disturbance assaults on native vegetation communities. Environmentalists implored the BLM to address weed causes, employ passive restoration and minimize spraying. BLM ignored this, saying weed causes were dealt with in “allocations” of Land Use Plans. The many Plans issued since then do not address causes of weeds in divvying up “forage” and other allocations, like this and this. Risk assessments based on minimal info, predictably found the chemicals were safe for public land. The PER’s ecological impacts were never analyzed. The fore-shadowed radical treatment disturbance, now funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of sage-grouse and fuels funds, is laying waste to the West. BLM’s project rationales are a constantly moving target.
The Oust Debacle
As BLM was preparing the Weed EIS, it became embroiled in litigation with southern Idaho farmers over a crop catastrophe. BLM had ballyhooed DuPont’s Oust herbicide as a panacea for cheatgrass. Prominent range staff that had long pushed exotic forage plants as desirable on “rangelands” worked closely with DuPont to fine-tune the chemical.
“Oust is the best tool we’ve ever had, yes sir,” says Scott Anderson, a supervisor in the BLM’s Shoshone, Idaho, office. “There’s nothing like it.”… “In the mid-1990s, BLM officials began using it experimentally against cheatgrass, which the agency had been fighting a losing battle to control. They discovered that when sprayed immediately after a fire, Oust was nearly 100% effective in suppressing the growth of cheatgrass for at least a year. “That gave us an opportunity to come in and reseed the sagebrush and other desirable vegetation,” explains Mike Pellant, a BLM rangeland ecologist in Boise.
Oust kills plants by preventing roots from taking in water and nutrients from the soil.
It did this splendidly when the wind blew herbicide-infested soil onto crop fields and poisoned the earth. After the farmers finally figured out what had happened, BLM declared an Oust moratorium. Prolonged litigation ensued, with over 66 days of testimony in federal court. A jury trial and verdict found BLM bore 40% responsible, and Dupont 60%. Damages of 17 million dollars were awarded to the farmers. But the District Court ruling was appealed, and reversed by the Ninth Circuit in 2011. Courthouse News described the long ago initial filing “a day late and 17 million dollars short.”
“Idaho farmers filed their complaint a day too late to collect damages from the government after their crops were caught in the crossfire of a federal agency’s herbicidal battle against non-native grass, the 9th Circuit ruled Thursday … The farmers’ claims against the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) are “forever barred.”
Oust affected so much ag land that damage was detected. Most of the spraying takes place in remoter wild places where drift effects could escape detection.
Meanwhile, BLM kept on spraying, purposefully blind to weed causes. The 2007 Weed EIS blessed Plateau (Imazapic) as the new cheat panacea. Mowed and roller-chopped sage, prescribed burned forests and sage, and wildfire areas were doused with Plateau. It was applied over untold 100,000s of acres following fires. But there is still a hitch. Similar to Oust, Plateau kills “desirable” seedlings. So at the same time BLM has been spending tens of millions of dollars on seeding burned lands ostensibly for sage-grouse, it applied a potent lingering seedling killer. A scientist letter responding to BLM’s unprecedented 67 million dollar rehab boondoggle for the Soda Wildfire pointed out:
First, spraying a pre-emergent herbicide (imazapic/Plateau) may not have much effect on cheatgrass in 2015 because it germinated prior to application. Second, and much more importantly, imazapic will kill any seedling forbs that emerge from the seed bank. This will decrease abundance and diversity of forbs which are necessary for sage grouse…
Plateau also kills sage seedlings and the native seeds in the soil seedbank. Without sage, the sage-grouse, pygmy rabbits and other wildlife are doomed.
Oregon: A Special Case, and Sacrificing the Eastside
Oregon citizens and activists have often been alert, vocal and litigious in opposition to public and private lands herbicide campaigns that take place in the big dollar timber country on the west side of the Cascades. So BLM deals with ecosystems and people there a bit more lightly. In 1984, an injunction in Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides et al. v. Block prohibited herbicide use by BLM and the Forest Service in Oregon. BLM prepared a new EIS for four herbicides in 1987, and the injunction was modified, allowing 2,4-D, dicamba, glyphosate, and picloram. In 2010 a new EIS expanded herbicides. It has fewer protections for lands, waters, fish, frogs, wildlife and people on the east side of the Cascades. BLM added 10 more herbicides west of the Cascades, but did not allow aerial spraying, vs. 13 more herbicides east of the Cascades and allowed aerial spraying.
In synch with its 2007 EIS, BLM went far beyond treating “noxious” weeds in Oregon. “Management objectives” ballooned: the control of all invasive plants; the control of plants as necessary to control pests and diseases …; the control of vegetation to meet safety and maintenance objectives …; and, the treatment of vegetation to achieve specific habitat goals for Federally Listed and other Special Status species …
East of the Cascades, 2,4-D, Dicamba, Fluroidone, Imazapic, Imazapir, Picloram could be sprayed aerially (note this is fewer chemicals than inflicted on the rest of the states aerially in the 2007 EIS). There is so-called “restricted” use of Chlorsulfuron, glyphosate, hexaninone, metsulfuron metyl, tebuthiuron “only where no other means available” … “where practical, limit glyphosate and hexaninone to spot applications.” Weasel word language is pervasive, providing leeway to wiggle out of promised protections. If livestock might eat the plants, BLM is to apply “at the typical rather than the maximum rate,” but no word on what to do about native ruminants “don’t apply some chemicals where wild horses are present, or herd them out of the area.” There is minimal protection for recreation – a campground might be fleetingly signed. Protections recommended for reptiles and amphibians were not adopted, even provisions leaving bits of untreated habitat as refugia were scuttled. BLM is increasingly outsources spraying, through agreements with Counties and “cooperators.” Protections that appear to have survived could readily fall by the wayside in practice.
The Spray and Walk Away Path Forward
Now BLM has just released a Final EIS adding three more bizarrely named chemicals (rimsulfuron, fluroxypyr, aminopyralid) for use across the West in its War on cheatgrass, medusahead, prickly pear (which with along with the saguaro are a keystone desert species), pigweed and others.
BLM claims these chemicals are safer for the environment and human health than those already in use. Safe, like aminopyralid that can be spread through manure? Or safe like post-emergence burndown rimsulfuron that is touted as great for mixing with others of its ilk, and for which even BLM’s assessment admits a drift risk for non-target vegetation? Just like Oust and Plateau, rimsulfuron kills seedlings of the very plants that wildlife must have to survive. There are only a few days left to weigh in on this latest EIS (blm_wo_vegeis@blm.gov). Meanwhile, step-down EA analyses expanding aerial spraying and broadening herbicide use are proliferating at the BLM District level.
BLM insisted their were minimal downsides to the banished Oust, the fallen from favor Plateau and the rest of the toxic lot, including woody plant killers like Tebuthiuron, which caused a profusion of cheatgrass in Nevada sage purging reminiscent of the 1960s. The current chemicals and all their associated carriers, adjuvants, breakdown products and other associated toxins, including unknowns from mixes of multiple active chemical ingredients that BLM allows, had been deemed safe in the 2007 EIS. Now that BLM has had a revelation that they are less safe, it is not dropping a single chemical.
What will the 7 million acres of new treatments, 10,000 linear miles of permanent bleak fuelbreaks, and rehabbing of failed fire rehabs (often using many of the same old techniques) do to the land? And how much spraying will accompany forest clearing for porkbarrel biomass? Beyond the butchered landscape, desertification and destroyed habitat, it may often be impossible for people to avoid unwanted exposure to herbicides on visits to public lands. Access roads will be bordered by FIAT-ordained fuelbreaks for long stretches. Cleared of “brush” and seeded with exotic forage grass, they will be favored cattle loafing areas. Aerial herbicide use in wild land settings with fickle weather ensures drift onto the road and dust, onto camping sites, killing non-target vegetation, polluting water in springs and streams, and contaminating sage-grouse, antelope and pygmy rabbit foods. New irreversible native species habitat loss and expanded habitat fragmentation will take place. Public lands will bear an even greater resemblance to an intensive cattle ranch operation under this desolate paradigm. How long will agency grazing climate and weed denial go on? Or denial of the climate consequences of deforestation right here at home? But look everybody, over there, a bright shiny new million dollar treatment saving sage-grouse.
