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. European settlement in the New World and the Industrial Revolution took hardwoods for charcoal then humans allowed fast-growing conifers to replace lost forests.
After Case #1, the first Forest Service timber sale in US history near Nemo, the Black Hills National Forest ceased being a wild thing. 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 and after a century of destructive agricultural practices invasive grasses infest most of western South Dakota.
Today in the Mountain West aspen and other hardwoods have been choked out by fire suppression and the timber industry exacerbating climate change. Aspen leaves reflect sunlight in the summer and aspen communities hold snow pack into the Spring while pine needles absorb heat and accelerate snow melt warming the planet.
Restoring and rewilding American ecosystems are parts of the Green New Deal so with some coaxing from the incoming Biden Administration public land managers within the BHNF might come to their senses and just leave it to Wakan Tanka and Mother Earth to heal.
The absence of prescribed burns, the persistence of cheatgrass on the BHNF 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 the BHNF.
Spurred by the Neimans the Forest Service is still planting pine in the Jasper Fire area. Much of the 2002 Grizzly Gulch Fire outside Deadwood occurred on ground owned by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) but because of Senator John Thune (NAZI-SD) costs of conducting prescribed burns are now thousands of dollars per acre instead of hundreds.
Add the very high number of private inholdings within the BHNF 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 glyphosate 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.
Vigilance gets lit at 4pm. Check it out! Gather at the Custer High School at 4pm to get organized and get your torch. March at 5pm. Burn at about 5:15pm. Or so. This isn’t a science people. It’s a party. Outdoors. Wear your mask. Everybody is coming out.
Photo: Paul Horsted.
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