Dear HCN,
HCN muddies the waters in
regard to “chaining” of piûon-juniper woodlands almost as much
as Sid Goodloe does (HCN, 4/15/96). Just think of it as
deforestation accompanied by profound soil disturbance, habitat
aridification and heating due to increased wind velocity and
insolation, and destruction of virtually all extant wildlife
habitat. On public lands it is a subsidy for marginal agriculture
that seldom breaks even in the short run. The long run is even
worse for the bottom line, as the trees always come back, and
additional clearing is very expensive.
Range
managers like it because they cannot abide trees. As sufferers of
an occupational hazard I call dendrophobia, they break into cold
sweats at the sight of anything that grows large enough to cast a
shadow. Because the practice is so discredited, and impossible to
justify on the basis of evidence, they resort to a word-of-mouth
and gray-literature mythology elevated to the plane of ideology. In
so doing, they have made a mockery of their supposedly
science-based profession. So have the foresters who have, for
reasons of convenience and politics, ceded management of Western
woodlands to range managers, the group least capable by training
and mindset to deal with them.
The millions of
woodland acres that have bowed to the chain and to tree-crushers
have been largely ignored by the national environmental
organizations, perhaps because small trees on the desert edge lack
the charisma that many greenfolk demand in exchange for their
expenditure of spiritual capital. The millions of acres of
drought-adapted coniferous woodland that we are fortunate to have
in the West, and in no other of the world’s arid landscapes, are a
valuable forest resource in their own right and should be managed
as such. They offer far better value than the stringy beef that is
squeezed from them, kicking and screaming, after the chains have
gone by.
Ronald M.
Lanner
Logan,
Utah
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Chaining is a sop for cows.
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