Amid Government Shutdown, Trump’s Interior Department Rolls Back Transparency

January 5, 2019

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via Amid Government Shutdown, Trump’s Interior Department Rolls Back Transparency

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Louie C
Jan 06, 2019 @ 13:14:28

From COUNTERPUNCH

The Terrible Destruction of Pinyon-Juniper Forests (continued)
by KATIE FITE
DECEMBER 28, 2018

Projects Brewing

In the million acre Wilson Creek grazing allotment near Pioche, Ely BLM’s recent rangeland land health assessment blames the usual suspects for land degradation – trees, “historical” grazing, and wild horses. BLM seeks to denude 117,000 more acres of forest, and mow or smash sage with a tractor or grass seeder across 40,000 acres (including purging sage “invading” crested wheat seedings), while stocking cows and sheep above numbers that have been able to be grazed in recent years.

Now Congress just enacted a Farm Bill that folded in previously introduced legislation stripping environmental review of pinyon-juniper projects – the “Sage-grouse and Mule Deer Habitat Conservation and Restoration Act”, a bipartisan attack on the trees. The Farm Bill amends the Healthy Forests Restoration Act to enable BLM and the Forest Service use of Categorical Exclusions (a minimal NEPA checklist) to destroy up to 4500 acres (over 7 square miles) of pinyon-juniper trees in one fell swoop. It specifically targets trees, putting them in the same category as weeds. So much for some environmental group claims that the bad things had been removed from the Farm Bill.

It’s really a matter of just how fast sage-grouse extinction will happen with either version (Jewell’s or Zinke’s) of the BLM grouse plans under the current public land management paradigm. This tragedy is made worse because the pinyon-juniper biome across much of the West is being purposefully destroyed as the bird’s downward trajectory plays out. Desolation.

All photos by Katie Fite.

Katie Fite is a biologist and Public Lands Director with WildLands Defense.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/28/the-terrible-destruction-of-pinyon-juniper-forests/

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Louie C
Jan 06, 2019 @ 13:13:58

From COUNTERPUNCH

The Terrible Destruction of Pinyon-Juniper Forests (continued)
by KATIE FITE
DECEMBER 28, 2018

Why – Beyond Grouse?

Projects Detonate Across the Landscape

Typical BLM NEPA documents parcel out incremental forest destruction over vast areas. They are like a series of ticking time bombs going off – with projects eating away unit by unit for a decade until the forest is almost gone. The devastation that remains following a chaining upheaval or a bullhog’s rampage really does look like a bomb has gone off. In the past 2 years Ely BLM spent $788,000 in Cave and Lake Valleys, $2,000,000 for just one portion of the South Steptoe project in the Egan Range, and millions more on other projects.

Native Americans in the Great Basin relied heavily on pine nuts for survival) or other expenses.

If you don’t think the wonderful resinous scent, the beauty of the dark green forest in these stunning landscapes, the tenacity of highly adapted drought tolerant trees, the calls of Pinyon Jays floating through the forest and biodiversity in general are sufficient to warrant forest protection, here’s an example of BLM actually providing a monetary value for the trees being wasted. Elko BLM aggressively (an anomaly for this office) pursued Madeleine Pickens ranch hand for bulldozing 689 trees at Spruce Mountain while re-building a cow water pipeline. Local ranchers like Sagebrush Rebel Demar Dahl were intent on driving Pickens out after she purchased a large ranch hoping to run wild horses salvaged from BLM round ups instead of cattle. BLM issued Pickens a proposed trespass notice valuing the bulldozed trees at $39,402. I watched a bullhog devour that many trees in an hour this spring. BLM, by its own accounting, is wantonly wasting billions of dollars of trees annually. Ironically, Elko BLM was at the very same time in the midst of destroying tens of thousands of acres of pinyon-juniper at Spruce Mountain. Who knows if BLM even included the value of the trees for pine nut production in their tally.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/28/the-terrible-destruction-of-pinyon-juniper-forests/

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Louie C
Jan 06, 2019 @ 13:13:25

From COUNTERPUNCH

The Terrible Destruction of Pinyon-Juniper Forests (continued)
by KATIE FITE
DECEMBER 28, 2018

Why – Beyond Grouse?

Public lands ranchers have always hated the trees. Just like native predators are killed as rancher enemies, native trees (and sage) take up space where grass might grow so they must be destroyed. In all of these projects, BLM ballyhoos wildfire suppression benefits, ignoring that deforestation creates hotter, drier, windier, weedier sites with longer fire seasons.

The trees are vilified as water sucking weeds, begrudged the water they transpire. No surprise in country where the Southern Nevada Water Authority floated destruction of greasewood communities on the valley floors because the thorny shrub needed a little water to survive. SNWA purchased ranch property for water rights, in pursuit of a still stymied giant aquifer mining and pipeline scheme to export water to Las Vegas. With the ranches came BLM and Forest Service grazing permits across a million acres.

Trophy hunting predator hating organizations like Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and Sportsmen for Fish and Wildlife who have the ear of gun-crazed politicians and operatives clamor for tree death and stump fields – prodding agencies to farm public lands for elk and mule deer. Deforestation makes it easier to see, hunt and poach animals. In Nevada, they are closely allied with the mining industry.

BLM funding in Districts like Ely Nevada or Burns Oregon is driven by treatments endlessly laying waste to the land. Staff have been thoroughly indoctrinated in the most heavy-handed forms of land domination. The tree massacres also provide an opportunity for foreign gold mines or other developers to “mitigate” while their pits chew up occupied sage-grouse habitat, draw down aquifers and dry up springs.

Plus the uglier and more unpleasant (hot, dry, weedy, lifeless) the country becomes, the less the public cares about it – facilitating trouble-free grazing, mining and energy development.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/28/the-terrible-destruction-of-pinyon-juniper-forests/

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Louie C
Jan 06, 2019 @ 13:12:54

From COUNTERPUNCH

The Terrible Destruction of Pinyon-Juniper Forests (continued)
by KATIE FITE
DECEMBER 28, 2018

BLM’s Fuelbreak and Tree Massacre Smokescreen

Instead of taking better care of the existing sagebrush habitats and protecting them from grazing, development and flammable cheatgrass expansion, or admitting that forested areas are the least likely to burn, the BLM plans focused on radical deforestation.

The Fish and Wildlife Service hid behind the BLM smokescreen, never questioning what such colossal manipulation of native vegetation communities would do to the land.

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 …

Herbicide-drenched Fuelbreaks give the illusion of BLM being able to control climate-driven wildfires. An EIS is now underway. The radical deforestation allows BLM to claim it is creating new habitat at higher elevations (while cheatgrass sweeps the chronically cow-beat sage below).\

By 2015, Ely BLM, Burns BLM offices across Utah, western Colorado, Idaho Burley BLM and Oregon BLM in western juniper country already had stacks of documents aimed at killing trees, with more generated since. The projects typically target sites where there are few sage-grouse and the potential for robust populations is slim – places where no matter how many trees are killed or dollars spent, the land is unlikely to ever be bountiful grouse habitat – too steep, rugged, very arid, or the surrounding sage is already too fragmented and weedy or otherwise lacking the particular combination of features sage-grouse need.

Pockets of old growth forest that survived the previous waves of deforestation are now being destroyed. Even individual old trees are hunted down and killed.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/28/the-terrible-destruction-of-pinyon-juniper-forests/

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Louie C
Jan 06, 2019 @ 13:12:27

From COUNTERPUNCH

The Terrible Destruction of Pinyon-Juniper Forests
by KATIE FITE
DECEMBER 28, 2018

Two previous waves of pinyon-juniper deforestation have swept the Great Basin. A third wave is underway.

Now sage-grouse are being used as cover for the third big wave of deforestation, as federal agencies try to distract the public from the urgent need to list sage-grouse under the ESA. Grouse have been weaponized, and pitted against the pinyon jay, Clark’s nutcracker, mountain bluebird, black-throated gray warbler, ferruginous hawk, pinon mouse and other forest denizens. Pinyon jay populations have already precipitously declined by an alarming 85%, primarily due to deforestation.

Fearmongering that grouse would destroy the West’s economy and “way of life”, or cheerleading for the huge sums of tax dollars politicians were throwing at vegetation projects and private ranch lands to “conserve” the birds. Agencies like NRCS were begging ranchers to sign up for expensive grouse projects or conservation easements in the middle of nowhere.

An echo chamber of Land Grant college, USGS and BLM range personnel and state Game Department scientists (none of them forest ecologists) ginned up elaborate vegetation models based on “range science” lies.

Western Governors and Game agencies rabidly opposed to ESA listing assembled “working groups” dominated by ranchers and miners to develop grouse plans promoting state and local control. The plans were used to weaken federal efforts. Grazing got a pass. Trees were public enemy #1, along with wild horses present in even the smallest numbers.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/12/28/the-terrible-destruction-of-pinyon-juniper-forests/

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Louie C
Jan 06, 2019 @ 13:11:16

View Interior’s proposed FOIA rewrite
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2018-12-28/pdf/2018-27561.pdf

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Louie C
Jan 06, 2019 @ 12:59:56

While federal workers go without pay, senior Trump administration officials are poised to get $10,000 raises

While hundreds of thousands of federal workers go without pay and the government is partially shut down, scores of senior Trump political appointees are poised to receive annual raises of about $10,000 a year.
The pay increases for Cabinet secretaries, deputy secretaries, top administrators and even Vice President Pence are scheduled to go into effect Saturday without legislation to stop them, according to documents issued by the Office of Personnel Management and experts in federal pay.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/01/04/while-federal-workers-go-without-pay-senior-trump-administration-officials-are-poised-get-raises/?wpisrc=nl_mustreads&wpmm=1

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