The federal government is overseeing a program of massive deforestation on Western public lands. Some 7.4 million acres of pinyon-juniper forest in the care of the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada, Utah and southern Idaho are targeted for destruction over the next several years — an area larger than the state of Vermont.
Why wipe out millions of acres of thriving pinyon-juniper, trees that are superbly adapted to the heat and drought that climate change will throw at the West? To satisfy the demands of the cattle industry for grazing forage on public lands.
The BLM couches the deforestation as environmentally friendly.