![]() ![]() “We are replacing natural disturbance in the West by fire with mechanical disturbance and introducing diversity at the same time,” says Tyler Thompson, watershed program director for Utah’s Department of Natural Resources. The order allows federal agencies to accelerate such projects by limiting environmental review and public input. forests and vegetation management on public rangelands to curb deadly wildfires. The debate over whether the trees are “invading” the ailing sagebrush steppe escalated after President Trump issued an executive order in December for increased logging in U.S. Pinyon-juniper is the most common-and least understood-forest in the Southwest, where about 100 million acres of it carpets 10 states. Research funded in part by the federal government determined such treatments imperil the pinyon jay, whose population has plummeted 85 percent since 1970.īy Tyler Thompson, watershed program director for Utah’s Department of Natural Resources Official reasoning The BLM also plans to use chaining-a controversial practice in which two bulldozers drag an anchor chain that upends everything in its path-to fell trees in Grand Staircase, even though its own management plans found the method irreparably harms the landscape. In Utah, such projects endanger irreplaceable cultural artifacts and fossils that remain buried and unmapped. ![]() Archeologists found the earliest evidence of wild potato use in North America near Grand Staircase, where less than 10 percent of the ground has been surveyed. Heavy equipment use on fragile desert landscapes threatens to escalate erosion, encourage flammable invasive species, and destroy biomes already compromised by climate change, scientists say. Sometimes it takes up to a decade for precipitation to be just right so that seed germinates and that bee hatches and is present so it can pollinate that flower,” adds Shelton, who retired in 2016 after 30 years with the BLM. “The eggs of those wild bees are in the soil, and seeds from a rare plant or flower are in the soil. “Species are present in these desert ecosystems that we didn’t know existed,” says Carolyn Shelton, a former assistant manager at the monument, home to the second highest diversity of bee species in North America, including 49 species previously unknown to science discovered in the last five years. Just decades ago, underneath the soaring ruddy-red, chalky-white, and milky-caramel cliffs of the monument, botanists discovered an 800-year-old pinyon pine and several plants known to exist only in this area cradled by 250 million years of geologic time. The BLM is proposing three projects spanning 1,021 square miles of Grand Staircase. ( See incredible pictures of national monuments under threat.) Removing more forest portends far-reaching consequences for the ecological diversity of America’s public lands. 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. 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. What is deforestation? Find out the causes, effects, and solutions to deforestation. Big consequencesįorests cover about 30% of the planet, but deforestation is clearing these essential habitats on a massive scale. If approved, the effort could define how the nation’s most sensitive public lands are managed for a generation. 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. 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.Īnd it plans to do it fast. Machine tracks in the sand frame the site near Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a harbinger of its vanishing solitude. It spares a twisted gambel oak, the cicadas’ honey-colored exoskeletons hanging from the tree’s branches. 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. ![]()
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