Opinion: Great Basin Desert residents, advocates and researchers face a 'terrible dilemma' about its future

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Peaks, valleys, salty dry lakes and rolling stretches of sagebrush have long-defined Great Basin Desert habitats that used to brim with biodiversity. "Sagebrush now covers only half the territory it did before European settlers arrived with their livestock in the 1800s. Exotic annual grasses, including cheatgrass, have increased eight-fold here since 1990, accelerating the fire cycle, outcompeting native plants and decreasing the available forage for grazers, wild and domestic," writes Stephen Tremble in his opinion essay for Writers of the Range.

Great Basin residents and researchers face an impossible choice. "The dilemma is this: Saving sagebrush puts the aromatic shrublands at odds with piñon-juniper woodland — a landscape just as beloved, just as vital," Trimble explains. "Range ecologists believe that growing the sagebrush core means that half of the Great Basin woodlands need 'treatment' —removing younger stands of trees while retaining old growth forest."

Pygmy rabbits thrive in sagebrush.
(Wash. Fish & Wildlife photo)

Before 1860, "two-thirds of Great Basin landscapes in woodland habitat were treeless. Today, less than one-third is treeless, as trees decrease the acreage and vitality of sagebrush," Trimble adds. "But it's unclear if sagebrush animals will soon repopulate cleared habitat. No more than half of tree treatments result in the regrowth of native grasses. Meanwhile, flocks of Pinyon Jays that depend on the trees suffer steep declines."

Trimble asks: "Which matters most? To sage grouse, pygmy rabbits and piñon mice? To backcountry recreationists, to cattlemen? To Indigenous Great Basin Washoe, Paiute and Shoshone people — citizens of what ethnobotanist Gary Nabhan calls 'Piñon Nut Nation?'"

This Pinyon Jay snags a nut from a Pinyon pine.
(Photo by Marie Read via ABC)

As human choices and climate change fundamentally alter the Great Basin, "federal managers need to address causes, not symptoms. Their challenge is huge: to confront invading cheatgrass and junipers and reverse the decline of sagebrush, nut harvests, native grass and birds. All this, while ensuring that mule deer and cows flourish," Trimble adds. "If we want to heal the land and restore the balance between sagebrush and woodland, we need to treat these landscapes as we would with those we love — using every bit of wisdom from both Western and Indigenous traditions for the benefit of our collective future."