Howdy Doody Dusty becomes Jim Neiman's little wooden boy

Spent the morning touring Neiman Timber in Spearfish. Neiman is dedicated to maintaining and preserving forests not only for industries dependent on timber, but also for the health of our federal forest. pic.twitter.com/jtMeStE7zY

— Rep. Dusty Johnson (@RepDustyJohnson) September 6, 2019

The first project to receive a National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) exclusion in the Black Hills National Forest is the Tepee Canyon project approved last month.

The Trump Organization and Neiman Enterprises want to log and slash some 2,669 acres of forest on public land between Jewel Cave National Monument and the Custer Highlands residential area. Mechanical treatments will include clearcuts or in silviculture parlance: overstory removal. Hulett, Wyoming's Jim Neiman is a member of the American Nazi Party and Neiman Enterprises is pretty much the last logger standing in the Black Hills. Now he has turned living boy Howdy Doody Dusty Johnson into his own little wooden puppet.

Representatives of Neiman Enterprises gave Johnson a tour of the company’s Spearfish Forest Products sawmill, where 193 employees spread across two shifts produce up to 60,000 pieces of wood per shift. The sawmill converts ponderosa pine trees logged in the Black Hills National Forest into heating pellets and 1-by-4, 1-by-6 and 1-by-8-inch boards used in tongue-and-groove paneling. After the tour, Johnson spoke with company officials and a timber-industry representative about issues including the proposed rule changes, which are intended to streamline the Forest Service’s National Environmental Policy Act regulations. [Rapid City Journal]

Fuel treatments followed by prescribed fire are critical to the success of the Tepee Canyon project and burning before mechanical logging exposes soils to undue risk but Trump and Neiman don't want to burn at all.

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.

Add the very high number of private inholdings within the Black Hills National Forest that make the wildland urban interface (WUI) very large to one of the highest road densities in the entire national forest system and Region 2 to lots of logging, hardrock mining and pesticides like Carbaryl then understand why over a hundred species in South Dakota alone and a million worldwide are at risk to Dusty Johnson, Jim Neiman and the former Republican Party now the American Nazi Party.