The Issues
Contents
Natural History of the Pinyon Juniper Forest
History of Forest Destruction
- The First Wave: Mining, 1859—1945
- The Second Wave: Cattle, 1945—1990
- The Third Wave: “Restoration,” 1990—present
Hot Button Topics
Natural History of Pinyon-Juniper Forest
Pinyon Pine and Juniper trees live together in forests that occur from Idaho in the north to Mexico in the south, and from eastern California in the west to Colorado in the east. These forests cover some 55 million acres in the United States.
Juniper trees are often known as “cedars” in the southwestern U.S.
These forests include several species of both Pinyon Pine and Juniper. However, all share the same general characteristics. Both Pinyon Pine and Juniper are relatively small trees, rarely over 50 feet high, and often shrubby in appearance.
| Pinyon Pine species |
| Juniper Species |
| – Single-leaf | | – Western |
| – Colorado | | – Rocky Mountain |
| – Parry | | – Utah |
| – Potosi | | |
| – Johann’s | | |
| – Orizaba | | |
| – Mexican | | |
Juniper tends to be twisted and gnarled, and can reach great age. Trees over 1000 years old have been recorded, and no one knows exactly how old they can get. Pinyon Pines tend to be more upright and regal in their bearing. The oldest recorded Pinyon Pine in northern Utah was 973 years old.
Pinyon-Juniper forests host incredible biodiversity. More than 450 vascular plants and over 150 vertebrate animals call these regions home—including Rocky Mountain elk, Black bears, cougars, Mule deer, Desert bighorn sheep, Pinyon mice, Abert’s squirrels, and humans.
Some species have developed relationships that make them entirely dependent on Pinyon Pine and Juniper trees. Two species of birds, Pinyon Jays and Clark’s Nutcrackers, are almost wholly dependent on pine nuts. They also plant hundreds of trees each year when they cache nuts underground. Several lepidoptera species (moths and butterflies) depend on Juniper trees to feed their larvae.
According to Will Falk, “The trees also yield plentiful berries and house a high insect diversity for birds to eat. Mammals also eat the berries while seeking shelter in hollow juniper trunks, taking advantage of the trees’ shade in hot temperatures and the trees’ thermal cover in cold temperatures. Pinyon pines offer similar benefits to forest-dwellers.”
– Medicine and Food –
Pinyon Pine nuts have been an important food source for people for thousands of years. A pound of Pine Nuts contains about 3,000 calories and is dense with vitamins, minerals, protein, and healthy fats. Pine nuts continue to be highly valued around the world, and local people, especially indigenous people, still gather or “pick” pine nuts every fall.
Juniper has long been an important species for medicinal and ceremonial use. The wood was also historically used to make bows. Some “culturally modified trees” from which bow staves were taken while leaving the tree alive remain in Nevada and other locations. These trees are threatened by the destruction of forests in the region. It is likely that some have already been destroyed.
– Indigenous People –
Indigenous nations of this region have had relations with Pine Nut and Cedar trees for countless generations. Pinyon pines have long been a central food source for many cultures here. Some call Pinyon pine nuts “the buffalo of the Great Basin.”
These nations include:
| Agaiduka (Lemhi Shoshone) | Newe (Western Shoshone) |
| Aha Macav (Mohave) | Nishinam |
| Akimel O’Odham (Pima) | Numa (Paiute) |
| Chiso | Nunt’zi (Ute) |
| Comcáac (Sari) | Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute) |
| Dami (Southern Tepéhuan) | Opata nations: Tehuima, Eudeve, Jova |
| Diné (Navajo) | Piipaash (Maricopa) |
| Guaymas | Pit River Achomawi and Atsugewi |
| Halchidhoma | Pohogue (Shoshone) |
| Halykwamai | Quechan |
| Hinonoeino (Arapaho) | Rarámuri (Tarahumara) |
| Hopi | Sobaipuri |
| Kohogue (Green River Shoshone) | Suma |
| Kohuana | Tapaxcolmeh (Concho) |
| Kutsipiuti (Goshute) | The Pueblo Nations: Ohkay Owingeh, Tua-Tua, Pi’wwel, Nambe, Posuwaugeh, Testuge, P’e’aku’, Nafiat, Tue-i, Piro, Tamaiya, Katstya, Kewa, Pohwoge, Kotyit, Khapo, Walatowa, Tsi’ya, Kawaik, Haaku, and A:shiwi |
| Kwapa (Cocopah) | Timbisha |
| Kwevkepaya | Timbisha (Shoshone) |
| La Junta | Toboso |
| Macurawe | Tohono O’Odham |
| Maidu | Tolkepaya |
| Maklaks | Waashiw |
| Moadok Maklaks (Klamath) | Xumani (Jumano) |
| Monache | Yavapé (Yavapai) |
| Ndeh (Apache) | Yoeme (Taqui) |
[This list was made using information from local contacts and Tribal Nations Maps. Some of these nations were wiped out during invasion and colonization. Information about these nations is difficult to come by. Please contact us with corrections, additions, or other information. Thank you and we apologize for any errors.]
The destruction of Pinyon-Juniper forests has severe negative impacts on indigenous people in the region, both historical and contemporary. Sacred sites are threatened by these projects.
As Ronald Lanner writes in his excellent book “The Pinón Pine: A Natural and Cultural History:
“The most permanent damage caused by chaining is the large scale demolition of countless archeological sites. As the home of most of the Southwest’s early Indian cultures, the woodland is a treasure trove of prehistoric artifacts, in situ, on and just beneath the surface. A Forest Service archeologist assessing the damage done by chains and pirouetting crawler tractors has pointed out that “adverse site impacts from chaining might … accurately be estimated as nearly 100 percent.” These sites represent an unrenewable national cultural resource… It is ironic that their destruction is underway by agencies charged with their protection under the Antiquities Act of 1906. A citizen who removes an arrowhead or smashes an ancient clay pot on these lands is subject to arrest and imprisonment by a federal magistrate. But the taxpayers pay to have the job done wholesale.
Finally, chaining has been an unmitigated disaster for many Western Indians. The Northern Paiutes and Western Shoshones of Nevada have in recent years become radicalized by confrontation with the federal agencies, especially BLM, via their outrage at seeing trees they hold sacred and rely on for a traditional diet ripped from the earth for the benefit of white men’s cattle. Bad enough, in their eyes, to see out-of-state commercial nut dealers given exclusive harvesting permits in some favored areas; worse yet to be themselves charged money to harvest pine nuts in excess of twenty five pounds; but worst of all to see the trees that produce their most valued food destroyed by their own government.”
This video showcases one modern example of the destruction of Pinyon-Pine groves who are actively harvested by indigenous communities (in this case, people from the Walker River Paiute):
The First Wave of Forest Destruction: Mining, 1859—1945
The Great Basin’s mining boom began when European settlers discovered silver in the Comstock Lode near Virginia City, Nevada. Over the next twenty years, dozens of major mines were dug throughout Nevada with some of the most destructive mines located in Virginia City, Austin, Unionville, Ely, and Eureka.
Mining spelled disaster for Pinyon-Juniper forests. As Ronald Lanner explains in his foundational work “The Pinyon Pine: A Natural and Cultural History”: “Lumber in enormous quantities was needed for these operations [mining]: timbers for shoring the mine shafts, charcoal for smelting ore, cordwood for heating and cooking. The great Nevada silver boom ran on wood.” And, the wood most readily available for these mines came from pinyon pines and junipers.
Descriptions of the pace of the destruction after mining began are dizzying. Lanner cites accounts of the deforestation around Virginia City writing, “When mining began in 1859, the mountains for miles around were covered with pinyon and juniper. These local forests were rapidly depleted. By 1868…the supply of local wood was entirely exhausted and cordwood was being brought from Dayton, twelve miles distant.”
By the 1870s, silver miners had to use a process called “smelting” to access silver from rocks and minerals. To smelt an ore is to melt it down to extract the silver from the melted liquid. Smelting required furnaces that could generate huge amounts of heat and that heat was provided by charcoal produced from pinyon pines and junipers.
The impact of these smelting operations was staggering. Lanner explains, “A typical yield of pinyon pine was ten cords per acre, and a cord made about 30 bushels of charcoal. So the furnaces of Eureka, working at capacity, could in a single day devour over 530 cords of pinyon, the produce of over 50 acres. An additional 20 acres a day were being cut to provide cordwood for the mills. After one year of major activity, the hills around Eureka were bare of trees for ten miles in every direction. By 1874, the wasteland extended twenty miles from town, and by 1878 the woodland was nowhere closer than fifty miles from Eureka, every acre having been picked clean…”
However, by the late 1800’s, charcoal made from wood was overtaken by petcoke (a derivative of coal) as the preferred fuel for smelting ore. Clearcutting of Pinyon Pine and Juniper forests continued, but on a smaller scale. To this day, mining is a major industry across Nevada. A new threat, however, was on the rise.
The Second Wave: Cattle, 1945—1990
Ranchers possess a tremendous amount of power in Great Basin politics. With most native grasses wiped out by over-grazing before World War II, they looked to land occupied by forests to feed their herds. Cattle do not eat pinyon pines and junipers, and so the forests were not profitable rangelands. Thus, ranching interest led to the second major wave of pinyon-juniper deforestation.
In order to quickly clear vast tracts of forest for grazing, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the United States Forest Service developed a technique called chaining. Chaining is done by stretching a heavy anchor chain (a single link may weigh 100 pounds) taken from a US Navy battleship between two crawler tractors. The tractors drive parallel across the forest floor ripping up everything in their path. After the trees are uprooted, the cleared land is seeded with forage plants, usually crested wheat 
grass, which is a non-native, highly-flammable grass from central Asia. While the war against the forests is made most clear, perhaps, by the battleship anchor chain used in chaining, pinyon-juniper forests were also burned, sprayed with herbicides, and crushed with machines that converted living trees into mulch.
Just like the destruction caused by mining, the sheer amount of deforestation inspired by ranching interests is sickening. Lanner estimates that between 1950 and 1964 three million acres of woodland were converted to pasture. And, between 1960 and 1972, over a third of a million acres were chained by the Forest Service and BLM in Utah and Nevada alone.
This has continued to the present day. It also isn’t restricted to Pinyon Pines and Junipers. Traditionally, ranchers have tried to clear as much sagebrush from their land as possible
The Third Wave: Destruction as “Restoration,” 1990—present
As many of the Great Basin’s Indigenous Peoples and concerned environmentalists raised awareness about the devastation ranching and deforestation visits upon local communities, a new set of justifications for pinyon-juniper destruction was needed. Recognizing the building momentum of the environmental movement over recent years, the ranching industry and others who profit from the deforestation have turned to justifying the destruction with false claims that their “vegetation treatment projects” “maintain sagebrush habitat, riparian plant communities, wet meadows and springs” and “protect and enhance historic juniper woodland habitat.”
BLM and Forest Service dogma insists that pinyon-juniper forests are “encroaching” into lands (including sagebrush habitat) that they did not previously live on. They also accuse pinyon pines and junipers of somehow using too much water and they hypothesize that cutting these trees will lead to increased water yield. Both of these arguments have been soundly defeated in scientific literature.
Pinyon-juniper forests are not encroaching, they are actually recovering from close to 150 years of being clear-cut for mining and ranching interests. What we see today in many cases is pinyon-juniper simply reclaiming places where they were once dominant.
It is also insane to think that a process like chaining can improve any living being’s habitat. Mechanical treatments are extremely destructive to biological crusts and these treatments lead to the greatest degree of soil disturbance. Soil losses due to erosion following activities like chaining can take 5,000 to 10,000 years to reform in in the fragile Great Basin.
Hot Button Issues
The Greater Sage-grouse is a large, ground-dwelling bird that lives (as the same implies) in sagebrush country in the western U.S. and parts of Canada. Between 1988 and 2012, their population is estimated to have collapsed by 98%.
This is on top of previous collapses. Their population is estimated to have been about 16 million in the 1910’s, and has been declining ever since.
Sage-grouse prefer to live and breed in dense, healthy stands of sagebrush with abundant native bunchgrass. The primary cause of declining Sage-grouse numbers is habitat degradation and destruction. About half of all Sage Grouse habitat has been destroyed by oil, gas, and coal extraction, grazing, urban development and other issues.
The 2011 National Greater Sage-Grouse Planning Strategy recommended that no oil and gas leasing, no mining, and only limited energy infrastructure development should be allowed on important Sage Grouse habitat.
However, one report found that “after pressure from state governments and oil and gas officials,” BLM resource management plans allowed up to 70 percent habitat destruction in these critical areas.
Oil wells have been drilled within 0.6 miles of leks (important annual breeding areas for Sage Grouse, which are highly susceptible to disturbance within 6 miles) in some states. Industrial wind energy development is also harmful to Sage Grouse. “Nest success and brood survival [is] a lot lower in the habitats closer to turbines,” according to Chad Laboe, a biologist working with the birds in Wyoming.
As the New York Times notes in a profile of the Sage Grouse, there is enormous pressure to avoid listing this species as Endangered (a status it clearly deserves). “Now,” they write, “federal officials are weighing putting [the Sage Grouse] on the endangered species list — setting off a mad scramble among the unlikeliest of allies to save the bird and avoid disrupting the nation’s enormous growth in energy production.”
This is the truth behind the Sage Grouse rhetoric: to avoid listing Grouse, which would represent a major threat to the energy and cattle industries, Pinyon-Juniper forests are being scapegoated.
– Forest Expansion (or “Invasion”) –
Questioning industrial energy development is forbidden in government agencies. Therefore, the official position of the U.S. Departments of the Interior and Agriculture is that the most important addressable threats to Sage Grouse habitat are caused by invasive grasses (such as cheatgrass), high rates of wildfires as a result of historical fire suppression, and the spread of Pinyon Pine and Juniper trees into what has been, over the past 100 years or so, open sagebrush country.
Many field biologists, native people, and grassroots environmentalists disagree.
Pinyon-juniper forests are not encroaching, they are actually recovering from close to 150 years of being clear-cut for mining and ranching interests. What we see today in many cases is pinyon-juniper simply reclaiming places where they were once dominant.
Again, to quote Ronald Lanner:
“According to the Forest Service, chaining is a plant control program, intended to “rehabilitate” millions of acres of land that were historically grassland, or shrubland, but where the woodland has “invaded.” The Forest Service asserts that the woodland is aggressively moving in, thus devaluing good rangeland. Range managers express puzzlement over whether the woodland’s alleged advance is due to overgrazing, fire protection on lands once subject to periodic burning, or even climatic change. While the concept of a massive, regionwide invasion is offered as justification for wholesale uprooting of piñon and juniper trees, the validity of the invasion hypothesis remains undemonstrated and open to serious challenge.
To validate the invasion hypothesis two things are essential. First, it must be shown that a given tract of land was in grass or shrubs up to the time it was settled; and second, that it later became wooded. The Forest Service has published “before and after” photographs in which the earlier photograph records the vegetation during the settlement period. These photographs show extensive treeless areas in the hills around villages, with woodland present only on the distant mountains. But that is not satisfactory evidence of virgin grassland or shrubland. These old photographs may simply record deforested slopes already stripped for lumber, posts, firewood, and other necessities of early rural life.
Until the extent of early deforestation has been established, it will not be possible to determine whether young stands of piñon and juniper (up to a hundred years or so of age) constitute an invasion into new territory or simply the reestablishment of woodland on its former sites. This is especially true of Nevada, where historical evidence clearly demonstrates that clearcutting was widespread over a period of decades.
Although the Forest Service proposes an invasion hypothesis, its actual practice is curiously inconsistent with its theory. If it were simply dedicated to the restoring of invaded lands, it might be expected to chain only those areas where invasion was known to have occurred. But no inventory of such lands has ever been made, and no map exists that pinpoints invasions [instead, computer models are used to “estimate” prehistoric forest range]. Apparently, the lands that go under the chain are selected not because there is evidence that they were invaded, but because they are convenient. Thus, while the Forest Service justifies its program as a necessary measure to control an invading forest, it has routinely applied the method to old stands that were present long before settlement.”
The major cause of habitat degradation in the West is cattle (and to a lesser extent, sheep) grazing. Cattle overgraze herbaceous and woody plants, trample sensitive habitat (including Sage Grouse habitats), and decimate riparian areas around creeks and springs.
There are areas in the United States where cattle grazing can be done sustainably. However, the intermountain west is not one of these areas, with a few small exceptions.
The ranching culture of the West is deeply rooted. Being critical of the industry is taboo. George Wuerthner have taken to calling this “the Bovine Curtain.” He writes: “Like the so-called Iron Curtain that used to filter information critical of Communism in the old Soviet Block countries, the Bovine Curtain limits what we hear about the detrimental effects of livestock.”
The destruction of Pinyon-Juniper forests in order to replace them with grasslands for grazing has been going on for a long, long time. It continues today. As Basin and Range Watch recently wrote on this topic:
“Here is a new depressing detail from Trump’s new proclamation for what is left of the Bear’s Ear’s National Monument: ‘Provides that the Secretary may allow for active, science based vegetation treatment, particularly for pinyon-juniper removal, which will improve grazing management. This will allow for a responsive outcome-based grazing approach for permitees within the monument, allowing greater flexibility in livestock management decisions.’ This goes on all over the west. The excuses range everywhere from wildlife conservation to helping livestock.”
To quote fire ecologist Dominick DellaSalla’s testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives Natural Resource Committee:
“Wildfires are necessary natural disturbance processes that forests need to rejuvenate. Most wildfires in pine and mixed-conifer forests of the West burn in mixed fire intensities at the landscape scale that produce large and small patches of low to high tree mortality. This tapestry of burned patches is associated with extraordinary plant and wildlife diversity, including habitat for many big game and bird species that thrive in the newly established forests. From an ecosystem perspective, natural disturbances like wildfires are not an ecological catastrophe…
Wilderness and other protected areas are not especially prone to forest fires – proposals to remove environmental protections to increase logging for wildfire concerns based on the assumption that unmanaged – or protected areas – burn more intensely are misplaced. For instance, scientists (Bradley et al. 2016 of which I was a co-author) recently examined the intensity of 1,500 forest fires affecting over 23 million acres during the past four decades in 11 western states. We tested the common perception that forest fires burn hottest (most intensely) in wilderness and national parks while burning cooler (less intensely) or not at all in areas where logging had occurred. What we found was the opposite – fires burned most intense in previously logged areas, while they burned in natural fire mosaic patterns in wilderness, parks, and roadless areas, thereby, maintaining resilient forests (see chart 2). Consequently, there is no reason for reducing environmental protections…
Thinning is Ineffective in Extreme Fire Weather – thinning/logging is most often proposed to reduce fire risk and lower fire intensity. Thinning-from-below of small diameter trees followed by prescribed fire in certain forest types can reduce fire severity (Brown et al. 2004, Kalies and Kent 2016) but only when there is not extreme fire weather (Moritz et al. 2014, Schoennagel et al. 2017). Fires occurring during extreme fire-weather (high winds, high temperatures, low humidity, low fuel moisture) will burn over large landscapes, regardless of thinning, and in some cases can burn hundreds or thousands of acres in just a few days (Stephens et al. 2015, Schoennagel et al. 2017). Fires driven by fire weather are unstoppable and are unsafe for fire fighters to attempt putting them out, and, as discussed, are more likely under a changing climate.
Further, there is a very low probability of a thinned site actually encountering a fire during the narrow window when tree density is lowest. For example, the probability of a fire hitting an area that has been thinned is about 3-8% on average, and thinning would need to be repeated every 10-15 years (depending on site productivity) to keep fuels at a minimum (Rhodes and Baker 2008).
Thinning too much of the overstory trees in a stand, especially removal of large fire-resistant trees, can increase the rate of fire spread by opening tree canopies and letting in more wind, can damage soils, introduce invasive species that increase flammable understory fuels, and impact wildlife habitat (Brown et al. 2004). Thinning also requires an extensive and expensive roads network that can degrade water quality by altering hydrological functions, including chronic sediment loads…
– Carbon Storage / Global Warming –
Destroying forests releases large amounts of carbon. According to cutting edge research, this effect has been underestimated in previous models and analysis of global warming.
One study looked at soil under Pinyon-Juniper forest canopy in a Southern Utah study area. That study found “3 kg C/m2 and 0.12 kg N/m2 larger C and N stocks in soils under pinyon canopies compared to interspace sites.” The same study found that destruction of “pinyon-juniper [may lead to] a relatively rapid loss of soil C[arbon] and N[itrogen]”.
In the Sierra Nevada mountains, Pinyon Juniper forests average about 80 tons of biomass per acre. Another study found that if what they term “juniper encroachment” becomes total across the Sagebrush steppe, carbon storage will increase by 40 million metric tons.
When these forests are cut down, chained, or poisoned, the wood begins to break down and most of that biomass is released to the atmosphere. Or, as the last study puts it, “Prescribed burning, cutting, and mechanical shredding are common intensive treatments that specifically result in an immediate and significant decline in aboveground C[arbon].”
Soil in drylands also store significant amounts of carbon. Forest destruction, especially the use heavy equipment, disturbs fragile biological soil crusts that can take decades or centuries to repair. This is especially important given that “old growth” soil crusts store more carbon than young crusts.
From ecologist George Wuerthner:
“Increasingly, it is evident that our forests are more important for their role in carbon storage than as lumber, and are harmed by forest thinning projects. Indeed, even if the forests burn, they store more carbon in a variety of ways than if the forest is thinned. (Charcoal in the soil from forest fires is a major source for long-term carbon storage). Yet the value of carbon storage is typically ignored in any discussion about thinning/logging (See Carbon storage–BLM economic report).
Logging/thinning removes the carbon in the form of trees, as well as disturbing forest soils which also releases more carbon. Logging/thinning reduces carbon more than any fire (because you still have lots of snags and down logs after a fire, plus roots, and charcoal–all of which store carbon).
Of course, there are other issues as well, such as the relative ineffectiveness of thinning to reduce and control large fires under extreme fire weather and the low probability that any fire will actually encounter a thinning project. And some recent studies suggesting that active forest management actually increases high severity fires (see Bradley paper) and that many forest types have long rotations between fires (see Baker paper) and you have a compelling argument against thinning vs protecting forest for their carbon storage values. Put all this together, and thinning forests… is a waste of money and reduces a… carbon storage.”
Science supports forest protection
Common arguments in favor of destroying Pinyon-Juniper forests are biased and based on flawed research. See this document for a comprehensive refutation of arguments in favor of forest destruction.
The forests deserve to live
When can we say that destroying forests is simply wrong?