All images by Katie Fite.

Remember those lines during the Bush 2 Iraq War days about empire, we’re creating our own reality, and something about history, too? This strikes me as the BLM and the USFS credo, after decades of huge infusions of federal fuels and “restoration” funds. They’ve created a vast public land manipulation empire, a Treatment-Industrial Complex, based on industry-serving range myths, deranged vegetation models and denial of history.

Each new big Congressional appropriation boosted by fire fears expands this empire and more of the West is laid waste. So does each new rollback of environmental laws and policies. These combine to increase agency arrogance, perverse ecological ignorance, deceptive language, overall dishonesty, and destructiveness as Steve Kelly relates in his article on forest genocide.

The Ward Charcoal Ovens state land historical site in the Steptoe Valley south of Ely Nevada exposes the blather the public is fed in NEPA analyses, and media articles that take everything agencies say about Pinyon-Juniper forests as gospel. The Ward ovens are testament to what happened to the land and its forests during the 1800s mining boom. The ovens stand as a thumb in the eye of BLM’s eradication empire.

The photo above is looking from the ovens by the Egan Range across south Steptoe Valley to the Schell Creek Range in the east. Pale areas have suffered fresh PJ clearcuts and sage thinning – so very well thinned sensitive bird species can’t find a place to nest. Big ugly cleared swaths of forest are visible all along Highway 93, and up over the pass towards Spring Valley.

In this photo, new cleared areas in the Egan Range are visible beyond the tree patches left by the Ward site.

Egan Range Chaining, Cutting, Mastication

Bulldozer chained, bull-hogged, masticated and cut areas lie all along the foothill fans, slopes and benches of the Egan Range, extending north to Ely. Between the remaining trees lie innumerable cleared expanses. BLM has wiped out much of the forest that was recovering from the mining era.

In the early 2000s, Ely BLM unveiled a major Ely-Mount Wilson Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) project in the Steptoe landscape and a separate area 90 miles south by a summer home site near Pioche. As is common with WUI projects, BLM strayed far afield from homes. After a legal challenge, BLM backed down and agreed in a settlement to limit the project to the Mount Wilson access road and house areas, and right by Ely. But when BLM is beaten back by environmentalists, they later segment smaller projects into the same area that are harder to challenge. This also shifts the denuding more subtly, so tree loss is less noticeable to the public.

Forest ecologist Ron Lanner, author of The Pinon Pine, The Bristlecone Book and Trees of the Great Basin assisted in the legal effort. For years, he was the sole academic voice doing battle with agency forest assassins, and the deceptions of land grant school range researchers who cast themselves as tree specialists. Those folks talked out of both sides of their mouths. They claimed they really did care about the trees, as they sucked in research dollars to find ways to kill the trees better and justify more deforestation. Maybe that should be dewoodlandization, because rule number one of the range gang was to never grapple with PJ as a forest, and instead conduct a constant smear campaign about flammable, water-sucking, too dense encroachers – basically weeds.

Rule number 2 was to ignore or deny history and the impacts of white settlement and colonization, because that didn’t fit with their long-cultivated invasion and encroachment narrative that has long benefited the public lands livestock industry. Lanner was an ecologist who wrote about and spoke up for the trees and read the historical record. The others got rewarded with lots of research funds, agency contracts, and tree-bashing publications in journals.

TNC has been deeply involved in work facilitating PJ removal across the Great Basin. They’ve garnered lucrative contracts for 20 years in support of this. I remember going to Mount Wilson to meet with BLM after they settled the WUI legal challenge. There was a sole BLM staffer, and a much too-friendly TNC representative who seemed to be steering the project. In those days, I didn’t understand how deeply involved in forest destruction TNC was........

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