1/22/22

Black Hills clearcut a concern for veteran foresters


ip photo from 2015: the Jasper Fire in 2000 created landscapes that more closely resemble the pre-settlement southern Black Hills.

Blaine Cook and Dave Mertz are just two former Forest Service employees concerned about the 13,000 acre Bull Springs Timber Sale in Custer County.
Lori Walsh: We have reached out to Neiman Industries for further insight into timber harvests, overstory removal, and sustainable sales. We have not heard a response yet. 
Dave Mertz: The Bull Springs Timber Sale, I think it sold back in early fall. It involves, as far as timber harvesting, about 4,300 acres. Of that 4,300 acres, almost 3,000 acres of it is overstory removal. That involves, they go in and cut every tree larger than nine inches in diameter, and occasionally they leave a few large trees out there. They call those reserve trees. And the overstory removal is, obviously from a visual standpoint, pretty dramatic. [Bill Janklow's idea of public radio]
Hulett, Wyoming Republican Jim Neiman waited until Donald Trump was forced from the White House then shuttered his sawmill in Hill City, South Dakota and blamed the Forest Service but a Black Hills town named for a war criminal just burned a native insect in effigy to honor the Neimans. 



Dendroctonus ponderosae or mountain pine beetle predates by millions of years Pinus ponderosa in the Black Hills which only reached that region less than four thousand years ago. Native Douglas fir, limber and lodgepole pine have been mostly extirpated from He Sapa, The Heart of Everything That Is and after a century of destructive agricultural practices invasive grasses infest most of western South Dakota. The Island in the Plains has been broken for decades but the collapse of select Black Hills ecosystems has been evident since at least 2002.
 
As many readers are aware the first US Forest Service timber sale took place near Nemo but only after nearly all the old growth of every native tree species had already been cleared for mine timbers, railroad ties and construction. So, Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is correct when she said the Black Hills National Forest has been poorly managed. I maintain that has been happening since 1899 and Forest Service Case Number One.
I am Dave Mertz and I was the Natural Resource Staff Officer on the Black Hills National Forest (BHNF) from 2011 to 2017 when I retired. Prior to 2000, the BHNF was sitting fat, dumb and happy. There were plenty of trees, you could argue too many trees. There was certainly lots of sawmill capacity. The 1997 Forest Plan had set an Allowable Sale Quantity (ASQ) of 202,000 ccf. This was an achievable goal and would be met or exceeded many times over the next 20 years. Then the mountain pine beetle (MPB) came to the Forest with a vengeance. Along with that, a series of large fires including the Jasper Fire in 2000. Meanwhile, significant pushback from the timber industry and politicians continues. I took a look at the Jasper Fire from 2000 using Google Earth to see how much logging had occurred in the fire’s footprint prior to the fire. I was able to go back to 1986 and look year by year to see what logging had occurred there. Much of fire area had been thinned prior to the fire. This thinning did little to mitigate the fire’s impact. [Mertz: A Cautionary Tale – Too Much Sawmill Capacity, Too Little Trees]
The Black Hills hasn’t been a natural forest since 1863 when a nearly Hills-wide fire probably set by a band of Lakota hoping to clear pine opened grazing for distinct historic ungulates.

Since then the absence of prescribed burns and the persistence of cheatgrass on the Black Hills National Forest and on other federal and state ground are just more examples of the intense lobbying efforts of Neiman Enterprises and from welfare ranchers addicted to cheap grazing fees. Instead of allowing native aspen to be restored, stands of doghair ponderosa pine, ladder fuels that feed wildfires, cover much of upper Castle Creek. 

Overstory removal can work because conscientious land managers have learned that where fire is introduced after mechanical harvest emerging aspen and other hardwoods add biodiversity necessary to healthy ecosystems while sequestering carbon.
I worked on nine other Forests and I never saw where the timber industry had as much power over a Forest as the Black Hills. I think you listed some of the factors – low population State where the politicians can really focus on something, one Forest with a timber program, the timber industry highly dependent on Forest Service timber. [Mertz]
David Treuer was born of a Holocaust survivor and Ojibwe mother. He believes that most land held in America's national parks should be remanded to Indigenous peoples but it's my view that much of the land held in the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service should also be part of that trust.

It should have happened a long time ago but the merger of the US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management could be named the Forest and Land Management Service in the Department of the Interior.
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