Biden administration reverses course on Trump era ecocide in Wyoming

During the environmental dark ages between 2017 and 2021 preservationists pushed back on the Bighorn National Forest's plan to spray imazapic, an herbicide banned in Europe since 2002 on some 5,100 acres of native mountain big sagebrush and larkspur. The Forest Service burns about 600 acres of sagebrush in the Bighorns each year to accommodate the livestock industry but to kill invasives the Bighorn planned to apply Tebuthiuron, an indaziflam manufactured by Dow AgroSciences. 

Alternatives included no action or burning the invasives ventenata and medusahead and thinning larkspur and sagebrush without aerial spraying. Even a Wyoming Game & Fish Department habitat specialist recommends prescriptive fire instead of poisoning because the intermountain West loses over a million acres of sagebrush every year.

Following a hearing with five groups that objected to the plan, Forest Service Deputy Regional Forester Jacque Buchanan told them native plants would no longer be targeted. In exchange, the groups — Bighorn Audubon Society, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, Western Watersheds Project, Council for the Bighorn Range and Bighorn Native Plant Society, will agree to drop their objections, according to an email Buchanan sent them. Critics worried that sagebrush removal would further imperil greater sage grouse, which depend almost exclusively on that landscape. Larkspur, considered toxic to cattle, helps sustain broad-tailed hummingbirds and other wildlife, objectors said. [Bighorn Forest to drop plan to kill native sagebrush, larkspur]

On orders from Donald Trump's Ag Secretary Sonny Perdue and Governor Mark Gordon, the Forest Service, the US Department of Agriculture and the Wyoming Game & Fish Department sprayed the herbicide Rejuvra® with a helicopter on cheatgrass in a 9,200 acre area within the Mullen Fire scar near Laramie, Wyoming with the goal of reducing, maybe even eradicating its presence. People recreating on the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest were urged to avoid the kill zone so imagine the effects on native pollinators and cervid genetics. 

On a sunny, windy fall day in Grand Teton National Park, the mountains loomed over a plot of flat valley land in the park’s southern section near Mormon Row. The plot was originally covered in sagebrush, but homesteaders removed the native plants in the late 1800s and planted non-native pasture grasses in their place to create hay fields for cattle to graze in. In 2007, Grand Teton set out to restore sagebrush to 4,500 acres of valley land, and it’s nearly a third of the way there: So far, the park has either restored or is in the process of restoring nearly 1,400 acres. [Grand Teton National Park is restoring native sagebrush to create wildlife habitat]

Democracy is messy business. The feds are shooting feral goats in the Tetons and feral cattle on the Gila National Forest because domestic livestock are so destructive on public lands but bravery is a trait conspicuously absent in Congress right now. 

In a related story, the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics is suing the Forest Service for pollution caused by fire retardants dropped near streams endangering imperiled native species.