BLM Plan to Convert Nevada’s Pinyon Forests to Biomass Threatens Ancient Rituals

- by Lisa Gale Gar­rigues, Indi­an Coun­try Today Media Network

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.

Though some Native lead­ers wel­come piny­on bio­mass as a poten­tial source of income for tribes, many are wary of what the partnership’s plan will mean for land rights, tra­di­tion­al piny­on cer­e­monies and the envi­ron­ment. “This is our land,” says John­nie Bobb, the 60-year-old chief of the West­ern Shoshone Nation­al Coun­cil. “This is our sacred food.”

It takes 150 years for a piny­on tree to pro­duce healthy seeds.

The West­ern Shoshone ter­ri­to­ry over­laps much of Neva­da, which con­tains almost 10 mil­lion acres of piny­on pine. Despite a Unit­ed Nations deci­sion that the U.S. gov­ern­ment has vio­lat­ed West­ern Shoshone sov­er­eign­ty, the BLM con­sid­ers the ter­ri­to­ry pub­lic land and has opened it up to nuclear test­ing, min­ing and the extrac­tion of oth­er nat­ur­al resources. The BLM has gen­er­al­ly fol­lowed a pol­i­cy of deal­ing with the indi­vid­ual trib­al gov­ern­ments of reser­va­tions set up by the U.S. gov­ern­ment and not with the West­ern Shoshone Nation­al Coun­cil, which includes rep­re­sen­ta­tives from all of the West­ern Shoshone tribes.

No one on the Nation­al Coun­cil was informed about the project, though part­ner­ship rep­re­sen­ta­tives have met with the Ely Shoshone Tribe to dis­cuss thin­ning inva­sive juniper on their land. “I would like to see the BLM and the For­est Ser­vice lis­ten more to our elders, and not take advan­tage of our tribes,” says Bobb. “Thin the piny­on trees, but don’t burn them—you can’t go back­ward if you burn the piny­on trees up.” (It takes 150 years for a piny­on pine to start cre­at­ing healthy seeds, which it then does on about a five-year cycle, with the seeds only being viable for a short time.)

“What they call pub­lic land—which is real­ly treaty land—will be open to pri­va­ti­za­tion, just like the gold mines, with­out any ben­e­fit to the Indi­an peo­ple,” claims Bobb’s wife, cul­tur­al psy­chol­o­gist Bon­nie Eber­hardt Bobb. In addi­tion to the pos­si­bil­i­ty of deser­ti­fi­ca­tion and encroach­ment on sacred sites, she and West­ern Shoshone Nation­al Coun­cil sub-chief Allen Moss are con­cerned about soil radi­a­tion from the Neva­da Test Site in adja­cent Nye Coun­ty. “Lots of areas where they are plan­ning on cut­ting trees are part of the ‘down­winders,’?” says Moss, refer­ring to areas down-wind of nuclear blasts. “Back in 1955, when they were doing nuclear test­ing, a lot of the radi­a­tion fell through that coun­try. Once they remove the trees, there’s noth­ing to hold back that contamination.”

The West­ern Shoshone will not be the only tribe affect­ed by piny­on con­ver­sion to bio­mass. Ron John­ny, an attor­ney and the envi­ron­men­tal direc­tor for the Sum­mit Lake Paiutes, said the BLM should do more to con­tact tribes and fam­i­lies that trav­el to east­ern Neva­da for har­vest­ing and cer­e­monies. By law, he said, all fed­er­al­ly rec­og­nized tribes who may be affect­ed need to be contacted.

Shoshone har­vest­ing piny­on tree nuts for cer­e­monies must com­pete with deer, elk, ruffed grouse, cot­ton­tail rab­bits, jackrab­bits and blue jays, and are fur­ther hand­i­capped by fed­er­al reg­u­la­tions that allow them to col­lect only 25 pounds of piny­on nuts per per­son, per year, Bobb says. “Most of the mem­bers of our tribe who pick pine nuts have to sneak around. We feel bad that we have to do this on our own Shoshone land.”

Sarah Adler, a co-chair of the part­ner­ship and the USDA Neva­da state direc­tor of rur­al devel­op­ment, believes the partnership’s plan will be good for the land and for rur­al devel­op­ment in Neva­da. “What hap­pens on that land,” she says, “has to be to the ben­e­fit of the land. It won’t be dri­ven by an industry’s need for biomass.

“The idea of the part­ner­ship,” Addler adds, “is to have a wide num­ber of experts engaged; peo­ple who are range sci­en­tists, wildlife biol­o­gists, veg­e­ta­tion experts; peo­ple who are inside and out­side of the BLM and For­est Ser­vice…. The engage­ment would include the tribes.”

The part­ner­ship spon­sored at least one large out­reach pro­gram: its Las Vegas Sum­mit in Decem­ber 2010, which brought togeth­er rep­re­sen­ta­tives from 175 orga­ni­za­tions, but still left out many of the tribes that should be par­tic­i­pat­ing in this process. Tansey Smith, the trib­al state envi­ron­men­tal liai­son at the Inter-Trib­al Coun­cil of Neva­da was one of the few Native rep­re­sen­ta­tives who attend­ed. “The sum­mit was a place we had to trav­el to,” she explains. “Not a lot of tribes have fund­ing to make that trip. “There are a lot of peo­ple who weren’t able to make it.”

Not every­one believes the part­ner­ship is inten­tion­al­ly exclud­ing the tribes, nor that they are going to harm their inter­ests. “One of the things that’s going to hap­pen,” says Ger­ry Emm, fish­eries direc­tor for the Walk­er Riv­er Paiute tribe and a pre­sen­ter at the Las Vegas con­fer­ence, “is that there’s going to be a huge push to do an edu­ca­tion out­reach to the tribes. I think once that process starts it’ll set­tle a lot of people’s fears.”

Adler says two reser­va­tions will ini­tial­ly be affect­ed: the Goshutes near the Utah bor­der and the Ely Shoshone. Chair­man Alvin Mar­ques of the Ely Shoshone did not return phone calls for this arti­cle, but the Goshutes were sur­prised to get the news that they’re being tar­get­ed. “I have not heard any­thing about it,” said Ed Naran­jo, the trib­al admin­is­tra­tor for the Con­fed­er­at­ed Tribes of the Goshute Indi­an Reser­va­tion, when asked for com­ment. “The BLM came through here a cou­ple of years ago and asked where our sacred sites were, and that was the last I heard of it. I’m a lit­tle con­cerned because a lot of tribes come here for cer­e­mo­ni­al pur­pos­es, and I don’t have a lot of con­fi­dence in the BLM.”