Forests on Utah's public lands may soon be torn out. Here's why.
In among the quietest places in the continental United States, where the discordant whine of newly hatched cicadas is usually the loudest sound, the metallic growl of a 28-ton masticator overpowers all as it shreds towering pinyon pine and gnarled juniper into fragrant bark piles. It spares a twisted gambel oak, the cicadas’ honey-colored exoskeletons hanging from the tree’s branches.
Machine tracks in the sand frame the site near Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a harbinger of its vanishing solitude. The federal government plans to remove an unprecedented number of trees here, it says to reduce fire risk, improve habitat for greater sage grouse, and increase forage for cattle and a world-renowned trophy-hunting deer herd.
And it plans to do it fast. The Bureau of Land Management failed to conduct a thorough environmental analysis of the project that considered the impacts of cutting trees on the climate, said scientists who appealed to a federal review board to stop it. If approved, the effort could define how the nation’s most sensitive public lands are managed for a generation.
Grand Staircase was set aside in 1996 in part for scientists to study “perhaps the richest floristic region in the Intermountain West,” according to the presidential proclamation that created it. The little-known BLM tree-removal proposal is part of an effort by the agency to cut tens of thousands of acres of pinyon-juniper woodland across the Colorado Plateau, Great Basin, and into the Pacific Northwest. Removing more forest portends far-reaching consequences for the ecological diversity of America’s public lands.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/09/pinyon-pine-juniper-forests-utah-torn-out-why/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=Science_20190911&rid=FB26C926963C5C9490D08EC70E179424
I'm sure welfare cowboys like the Bundys will be happy.
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