"Conservationists had hoped the practice would pause with the end of the Trump administration, but the war on native trees continues".
"During the last century, federal agencies have undertaken a campaign to destroy huge tracts of piñon pines and juniper trees in the arid reaches of the American West. These hardy native trees collectively cover 100 million acres across the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. In the middle of the 20th century, this deforestation campaign was undertaken overtly in the name of increasing pasturage for cattle. These days, the cutting, chaining, and burning has taken on a different cast, presented as a way to protect threatened species or to reduce fire risk.
Four years ago, I wrote a story for this magazine about this pattern of ecological destruction. It was the third year of the Trump administration’s open assault on the West’s public lands, and dozens of so-called treatment projects were underway across the West. In northeastern Nevada, near Ely, a massive tract of piñon-juniper forest on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management had been pulverized by a massive chain dragged between two bulldozers. The woody debris that remained was chewed to bits by hulking, noisy machines called bullhogs and giant masticators.
Another project, in the Owyhee Mountains in southwestern Idaho, had reduced a massive parcel of old-growth western juniper trees to charred husks. This was no small-scale, low-intensity strategic fire but a conflagration that incinerated 13,000 acres of forest. Many of the trees on the aptly named Juniper Mountain were tall and gnarled, easily hundreds of years old. In places, the fire had raged so intensely that the soil was transformed to a lifeless, blackened hardpan."
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