This illustrates the multitude of PJ killing projects one encounters when driving back roads in Nevada done under a series of CXs (mere checklists with no hard look analysis) or a skeletal EA NEPA review. It’s impossible to keep track of all the agency deforestation projects. Always be suspicious of abrupt plant community changes and straight lines between vegetation types. Once you start looking critically at the landscape, evidence of past deforestation for crested wheat seedings and livestock forage, and/or of current forest eradication projects suddenly becomes evident in place after place.
Northern White Pine Range
Slashing and clearcutting PJ forest in the northern White Pine Range. All the reddish patches in the background are cut down trees. Note the straight-line contrast between forest and treatments. BLM and USFS also at times leave islands of trees, or what they term “mosaics”, or undulating interfaces – which agencies term “feathering” of their clearcuts/chainings/etc. As they wipe out the Pinyon Jay and Black-throated Gray Warbler habitat, they term their handiwork “feathering”. But when they try to mask the scale of deforestation in this way, you can still see how unnatural it looks in comparison to how PJ forests naturally grow.
An old growth pinyon cut into pieces. So much for carbon sequestration and all the other values of forests. Hot sun-scalded deforested sites are primed for cheatgrass expansion.
A beautiful old growth White Pine Range pinyon.
Dying Pinyon adjacent to clearcut previously pictured. Cut and wounded tree sap attracts bark beetles that expand and wipe out adjacent forest sites and “leave” areas.
Think of the Pine nut values senselessly destroyed in these tree killing projects – and all the wildlife that eat pinyon pine seeds – Pinyon Jay, Clark’s Nutcrackers, small mammals, Mule Deer. Indigenous people in the Great Basin harvested pine seeds as a staple and had seasonal camps near prime pine nut collection areas XXX. Many of the areas being destroyed by BLM and USFS are indeed cultural sites. The economic value of pine nuts, if pine seeds were harvested for human food, dwarfs the value of cow meat produced on an acre of land. BLM annually auctions tracts of forest for commercial pine nut harvest. In Nevada, much of the pine nut harvest has been done by Mormon polygamists from Mexico. There is also illegal commercial harvest.
Upslope from a PJ clearcut.
Beautiful old pinyon destroyed in a clearcut. Think of the Pinyon Jay habitat loss. There is a huge clearcut in the center background. These deforestation projects in the 2020s, claimed to be saving Sage-grouse or “treating hazardous fuels” are no different from the BLM and USFS PJ “eradication” projects conducted for livestock forage in the 1950s and 60s.
Southern White Pine Range Near Currant Mountain Wilderness
A wood chip field where once there were trees. Mastication machine and bullhog contractors profit as the treatment-industrial complex chews up forests. The contracted crews that do the grueling work of clear-cutting PJ forest and stacking wood in burn piles are often Hispanic workers paid poor wages doing dangerous work – while the party who controls the contract profits.