The Pinyon-Juniper Ecocide

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A core goal of modern civilization, as proven by its actions, always is to wipe out all uncontrolled natural life* and replace it with its own domesticated creations, social and technical/biological/genetic.**

 

[*Including human life: 1. All traditional peoples must be genocided, either culturally or physically. For example the Bolsonaro regime in Brazil is determined to complete this process in Brazil, while it remains ongoing at a more gradual pace in the US and Canada.

 

2. Among the civilized as well, anyone not fully regimented socially and biologically is targeted for eradication, one way or another.]

 

[**Thus the genetic engineering campaign, the goals of which are: 1. Replace all conventionally bred crops with GM crops. 2. Escalate the omnicidal assault of poison-based agriculture. 3. Use GM crops as PR stalking horse for GM-based livestock and pet eugenics. All existing domestic animals are to be replaced by GM animals while all wild animals are to be eradicated. Already over 90% of the world’s mammal biomass is hominids and their livestock. 4. Use this GM regime as stalking horse for GM-based human eugenics. Eventually all hominids are to be engineered and physically coupled with machinery.

 

Throughout the campaign, the goal always is total control and domination. Natural and wild is anathema and must be exterminated. Socially and conventionally domesticated is good. Technologically domesticated is much better.

 

This is a big part of the reason why the genetic engineers and their cult fanboys never care about the fact that GMOs, crop or animal, don’t work and that every claim made for them is a lie: These claims really are nothing but propaganda and have nothing to do with the real domination goals.]

 

This extends even to the most marginal habitat. The orcs’ fondest desire always is to destroy the desert community and replace it with agriculture (or, more recently, solar electricity factories). No one really thinks the pinyon-juniper forest habitat can be suitable for these, but it can be made the target of expanded industrial grazing. Thus after the government uses public money to physically destroy the forest it salts the earth with herbicides and plants forage grass. All pure corporate welfare to accompany the ecocide. Yet this too is a scam. In reality the most common successor in a pinyon-juniper destruction zone is invasive, inedible, highly flammable cheatgrass. So even grazing is a bogus rationale for the pinyon-juniper massacre.

 

 

The pinyon-juniper forest has been the primary natural community of the Great Basin for millions of years. It flourished long before invasive Western hominids with their invasive cattle came along. Yet twice in modern times – in the latter 19th century and again in the decades following World War II – it has been subject to extreme logging and burning. In recent years the US government has undertaken a third exterminationist campaign, dedicated to the complete eradication of the forest and all its inhabitants right down to the last individual trees.

 

This is the destruction of a vibrant natural community which supports a wide range of wildlife as well as being a great fount of food, medicine and craft materials for such traditional peoples as the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, Cahuilla, Havasupai, Hopi and Kawaiisu.

 

The pinyon-juniper forest is critically important for maintaining the physical cohesion of the soil and retaining the scarce moisture of the arid region. It is superbly adapted to its environment and its loss always brings on ecological havoc.

 

Today as in the past this havoc is being wrought by the assaults of the government’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and various economic interests, especially cattle grazers.

 

“The BLM “treatments” in the Great Basin, both proposed and ongoing, include “lop and drop,” mastication, herbicides and chaining. Chaining involves attaching a huge anchor chain from a battleship between two tractors and dragging it along the desert floor, ripping trees and bushes from the ground, wrecking delicate soil crusts, and killing or injuring countless other creatures in their dens, nests and hideouts. The extent of the damage is unknown, as it is not being adequately tracked.”

 

This massacre goes on for zero rationally explicable benefit to anyone. The government gives such bogus justifications as reducing erosion (but ripping up the roots and soil greatly increases erosion) and reducing wildfires (but the natural fire cycle of the forest is as much as hundreds of years, while the cheatgrass which colonizes the destruction zone is extremely flammable; the ecocide greatly increases the fires).

 

In tandem with corporate “environmental” front groups the government has touted the destruction as part of a program to build habitat for the beleaguered sage grouse. This came after the Obama administration denied the science and refused to list the grouse under the Endangered Species Act. The government’s claim to be building new sage habitat by destroying the forest is meant to make it look like there’s no need to list the grouse under the Act.

 

Nothing could be more fraudulent than this. The government also is waging a war of extermination against the sagebrush habitat of the grouse, which is why the bird is endangered. Free-ranging cattle regularly trample the nesting grounds of the bird and wipe out the chicks. Large numbers of grouse also are killed by collisions with the fences the ranchers strew all over the plain.

 

So the alleged program to assist the sage grouse by destroying the pinyon-juniper forest and having good sage habitat somehow succeed it is nothing but obfuscation***, trying to cover for the fact that the government and the ranchers are dead set on wiping the bird out. Meanwhile the forest grows mostly in steep, rugged, arid regions which would be unsuitable for the grouse even if the program was sincere. And in reality the government has never attempted to create a single acre of grouse-appropriate habitat. On the contrary, wherever the government destroys the forest it tries to replace it with yet more cattle-grazing territory.

 

[***Probably a standard “offset” scam as well. The climate-industrial movement always has been very accommodating of ecocide in this way.]

 

The most demented and Orwellian part of the propaganda links the extermination campaign with the fake version of the “invasive” ideology. The government tells a tower of lies in order to deny the historical range of the pinyon-juniper forest so that it can represent the trees as “native-invasive”. In reality the forest has only been resuming its natural range since the second, mid-century eradication campaign abated. Far from being any kind of destructive invasive, the forest has again stabilized the destabilized soil and restored critical wildlife habitat for a whole natural community. This is hateful in the eyes of the destroyers of the Earth, which is the real reason they’ve mobilized for a third campaign of exterminating the forest.

 

The “anti-invasive” ideology, where it’s unanchored from any reality-based measure of whether a non-native actually is acting ecologically or harmfully, is anti-science and always masks the most rapacious ecocide. This is doubly true in the absurd case of referring to native species as “native-invasive”, as the government is doing with the pinyon-juniper forest. While in theory it might be possible for a native to run rampant among disrupted or destroyed natural communities, in reality this almost never happens. On the contrary, the epithet “invasive” is bestowed only upon species, non-native or not, which are inconvenient for some powerful interest.

 

Meanwhile the most incontrovertibly destructive invasives – ecocidal hominids, their industrial livestock, their commodity agricultural crops – are never called invasive. But if an honest person were to talk about destructive invasives, they’d have to start, continue, and finish with these.

 

And so we have the record, as clear-cut as the bulldozer-chained war zones: The war on the pinyon-juniper forest wrecks the ecology, is devastating to wildlife, is propagandistically part of the campaign to wipe out the endangered sage grouse, destroys the soil, spews carbon into the air, greatly increases the incidence of wildfire, wipes out a rich source of food and medicine for people, and doesn’t even attain its proximate goal of generating more rangeland, wherever the inedible invasive cheatgrass monopolizes the succession. All this is being done at a massive financial loss to the public.

 

As climate chaos inflicts drought over ever greater expanses, drought-tolerant forest like the pinyon-juniper will become ever more critical. The fact that the US government, including bipartisan executive and legislative consensus, is determined to completely eradicate this forest type is proof that the government and both parties are intrinsic climate deniers, and that they’re determined to drive the climate crisis to its absolute worst. Of course all their actions prove this, but the eradication of the pinyon-juniper forest is so pointless, so egregious as to be one of the purely stark events laying bare the absolute insanity and biophobia of this economic and political system.

 

 

What does it mean to engage in such relentless murderous destruction, for no reason, systematically lying every step of the way? This is a most clear case of destruction for the sake of destruction, ecocide for the sake of ecocide. When we contemplate the scale of the aggression, the Nazi mindset against the trees, we see the lust for pure destruction. To destroy arid-zone natural communities and replace them with herbicide-policed invasive grasses to be grazed only by livestock while all other animal and plant life perishes always is a value in itself, without reference to any actual efficiency or profit, to use the capitalists’ own shibboleths; this also is why the US Forest Service always is willing to auction off logging licence at a huge financial loss to the public, let alone the physical, biological, genetic loss – they’re ideologically committed to the total destruction of all natural forest and to keeping all land with trees in a constant state of sterile monoculture plantation enslavement, domination, control, and artificial destruction.

 

As we see in the case of the pinyon-juniper, they also retain reactionary notions of wiping out the food sources and culture of the First Nations and forestalling any foragers. And as a gnarly forest growing in remote arid regions, not like the charismatic Amazon or Tongass (not that their charisma does any practical much to protect them either), here the orc vermin can indulge their eco-hatred and violence to the ultimate extreme without having to endure even political criticism.

 

 

The obvious solution for a sane, decent society would be to abolish industrial grazing. This would simultaneously save the sage grouse and the greater natural communities of the sagebrush and the pinyon-juniper forest. It would conserve an important carbon sink. It would let the ecology control erosion, water flow and fire. It would be a great boon to wildlife. It would offer us a potentially abundant food and medicine source which will be crucial for the collapsing future. The same would be true for every natural habitat being destroyed across the entire rangeland.

 

And it is precisely hatred of all this goodness, of all these benefits, hatred of life itself which motivates the orcs of the US government.