BLM Plan to Convert Nevada’s Pinyon Forests to Biomass Threatens Ancient Rituals
- by Lisa Gale Garrigues, Indian Country Today Media Network
[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"403","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","style":"width: 275px; height: 182px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;"}}]]For centuries the pinyon trees of Nevada have nourished the Shoshone, Paiute and other peoples, giving them pine nuts, ingredients for soup, milk and even a place to pray. Now it is about to become something else: a profitable source of biomass.
The Pinyon-Juniper Partnership, a consortium backed by Senator Harry Reid, D-Nevada, plans to remove pinyon trees in Nevada’s arid Great Basin in a project it hopes will be a model for the western United States. This spring, the partnership will begin using chainsaws, masticators and prescribed burns to thin pinyon and juniper on 300,000 acres in Lincoln and White Pine Counties.
In addition to the economic benefits of the project, the partnership (spearheaded by the Bureau of Land Management [BLM], the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and backed by groups that include Newmont Mining, the Nevada chapter of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the Nature Conservancy) also argues that replacing some pinyon in eastern Nevada’s Humboldt–Toiyabe National Forest with sagebrush and other vegetation will help prevent dangerous forest fires, allow for more wildlife viewing and hunting, and develop a biomass industry in Nevada that will convert wood chips to fuel and electricity. It already has at least one potential customer: A-Power Energy Generation Systems, a Chinese firm that is planning to build a biomass-generated electrical plant in Lincoln County. (An ironic aside: Despite the abundance of pinyon in the western United States, the pine nuts on U.S. supermarket shelves come, increasingly, from China.)
The plans to reduce pinyon could eventually result in 20 million to 60 million tons of pinyon-juniper biomass. Six million tons of biomass can result from “a really light thinning” of a million acres, says Dusty Mohler, a forester and utilities manager for the partnership.