Change the Paradigm
Proactive Rehabilitation
It’s the middle of winter in the Great Basin of Northern Nevada and if you drive from Wendover to Reno along the I-80 corridor you will likely see a sea of white, from state line to state line. Winter has been good to us and when the thermometer on the truck is showing 5 below zero the last thing on most of our minds is fire. But we have all seen what will happen next, the snow melts, the grass greens; spring in the Great Basin is simply beautiful. Unfortunately, the green grass caused by the winter precipitation will soon give way to millions of acres of red and drying cheatgrass and then all of us will wait with bated breath for the lightning, the fireworks, the heat from a bad trailer axle, and inevitably the fires.
By: By Chris Jasmine I truly fear that my grandchildren may never see a sagebrush plant unless they go to the highest elevations of this state. Habitat losses from mega wildfires, small capacity to seed after wildfires and low rehabilitation success rates like we have seen in the last decade are the norm. If you are like me, you find this unacceptable. The real question is what to do about it?
The Great Basin Desert of Nevada is in a desperate situation and it has been for a long time now. Past and present land management and the inadvertent introduction of annual grasses (now more than a century ago) has changed the landscape of even my youth and definitely that of my families when they first laid eyes on Nevada in the 1860’s. Mix that with what seems like increased ignitions from anthropogenic sources and we have a recipe for disaster. More and more acres of annual grasses mixed with more ignitions leads to larger and more frequent wildfires. Larger and more frequent wildfires cause us to lose much of the last remaining islands of sagebrush at the lower and mid elevations. A great example of this is that of the past two years and three separate wildfires, whose boundaries all touch one another (Snowstorm, Martin, South Sugarloaf ) and burned a combined 846,000 acres. Many of which were large tracts of intact sagebrush which had not burned in 100+ years (Figure 1). If you draw a straight line from the western to eastern edge of these wildfires it is almost 100 miles, through some of the most remote land left in the Lower 48 (Figure 2). It is truly heartbreaking.
We need a paradigm shift, and I don’t mean a little one. We need to completely change how we look at rangeland rehabilitation; notice I do not say restoration (more on that later). If we continue to only focus on seeding after wildfires we will lose this war. Seeding after wildfires is what I call Reactive Rehabilitation. We react to the devastation of wildfires, but only after they have burnt 1,000,000 acres. Although it is necessary, it is unfortunately difficult to do well. Agency funding cycles and the pure scale of reseeding efforts after wildfires makes it impossible to seed large percentages of what has burned. We end up only having funding for small portions of what is needed and the timeframes are too short to source enough seed and contractors to drill seed all those acres. We end up snowed out, mudded out, rushing to beat the frozen ground, rushing to beat the spring rains and rarely get the prescribed seeding done as designed. Don’t get me wrong, our BLM offices have done an amazing amount of work with wildfire rehabilitation in the last few decades. It’s a tireless and thankless task that they have put their hearts and souls into, but the bureaucratic system they must work within does not allow for full scale rehabilitation. Combine that with many of the constraints put on Reactive Rehabilitation of federal land and the pre-conceived notion that native plant materials are somehow better and we end up with large areas of Reactive Rehabilitation that simply fail to establish. It is truly a sad state of affairs.
Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac about cheatgrass. He said “while the sportsman and stockmen wrangle over who should move first in easing the burden on the winter range, cheat grass is leaving less and less range to wrangle about.” Sound familiar? As a profession, rangeland practitioners want numbers and data. We like to debate and study, analyze and argue. In my opinion these are the easy things, because there is no risk in arguing and studying. No risk of failure, but without risk there is no reward. Why should rangeland rehabilitation be any different? Our current paradigm in Nevada is to pray something does not burn and then rush to secure funding to seed a small portion of what did burn after we’ve lost 846,000 acres of prime habitat and valuable grazing land (Figure 3). If we keep this up, we will continue to fall further and further behind. Our perennial rangelands will slowly (if not quickly) turn to annual grass dominated rangelands, and the values we all cherish about Nevada’s rangelands will be lost for future generations.
To change our paradigm, we do not need to abandon the Reactive Rehabilitation. It is still an important part of what needs to be done, and always will be. Instead we need to refine that approach overtime and add a second approach, Proactive Rehabilitation. Proactive Rehabilitation is what we were good at in the 1950’s, 1960’s and 1970’s. During this time frame it’s what helped us beat the large infestations of halogeton across many areas of the Great Basin. It’s what gave us the fabled Lincoln Seeding, among others. Most importantly and contrary to popular belief, the majority of these old seedings are today strongholds for native sagebrush species. Take a drive to any of the mega seedings from this time frame and tell me I’m wrong? Proactive Rehabilitation consists of seeding large acreages, every year, in areas that are already at some level of degradation. It is work that occurs regardless of the severity of the wildfire season. It is standalone from the Reactive Rehabilitation that must occur post-fire. This approach takes large tracts of land that
40 FEBRUARY 2019
The Progressive Rancher
www.progressiverancher.com