An Oglala Lakota elder from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota told me once:
"Mining [has] taken away the beauty of this country, the Black Hills. You know, God put it there for us to take care of, and we could eat from that place: there were a lot of wild fruits and animals and deer and buffaloes. But when you go through mining or clear-cutting, that's a lot of species' habitats. […] We like to live with the environment, like good environment. You know, we could go out and hear the birds, and clean air, that's what the people, way back, […] our ancestors, they were pretty healthy. We lived off the ground, off the land" (1998).
Much of the Black Hills today is under the supervision and 'protection' of the US Forest Service. Mandated by the Multiple Use-Sustained Yield Act (1960), the Forest Service employs a multiple-use philosophy that seeks to balance recreation, logging, grazing and mining with environmental preservation. This multiple-use concept has caused multiple conflicts, as we shall now see.
In 1899, an early settler lamented what she saw as the passing away of trees in the Black Hills: "The forest of the Black Hills are not to-day what they were twenty years ago. Those remorseless civilizers, the ax and the saw, have shorn them of much of their primitive luxuriance and beauty - denuding large areas of their most valuable timber, leaving in their places nothing but unsightly stumps". In the next breath she extolled the virtues of enterprise and industry, celebrating the natural resources the Black Hills yielded up: timber for industry; grass to feed the cows; fertile soils in which to produce cereals, potatoes and other vegetables and fruits; water to provide for irrigation and mining; and the mineral deposits that allowed a variety of mining industries to thrive.
This very contradiction has plagued management practices of the Hills to this day. Whilst the Black Hills National Forest was set up to protect diminishing wildlife and wilderness areas, each year the Black Hills Forest Service issues permits to timber industries and allows the building of roads to make access to and from logging sites easier. The Black Hills is one of the most managed forests in the US, and this is largely due to its easy accessibility on all sides.
Deforestation is not so apparent to the untutored eye. Fire losses have been reduced over the years, and the Forest Service carries out a supervised programme of reforestation of denuded areas. Theoretically, only mature, 'surplus' trees can be cut. Upon closer inspection, however, one observes how few mature, old-growth ponderosa pines there are in the Hills. When the first commercial timber sale was held in the Hills in the late 1800s, there were trees two to four feet in diameter. Today these are stumps, and the average width of a pine trunk is now in the twenty-five inch diameter base category. A member of the Black Hills Sierra Club observed:
"Of course, there's some history […] from General Custer's campaigns through the Black Hills that there are many more trees now than there were then. And that's true […] because the ponderosa pine have re-seeded themselves. But right now the trees are so much smaller in diameter and there is no old-growth component. There's no tree allowed to get to its age-ending growth period. It's harvested before that happens. […] What the [timber] industry's done to keep that working is that they have basically set up their sawmills to handle the smaller stuff" (1998).
More timber is harvested in the Black Hills National Forest than in the Colorado region of the entire Rocky Mountains. More than four billion board feet of lumber has been harvested since the late 1800s. The all-time high has been some 130 million board feet, and the last twenty years has seen an influx of large, commercial sawmills who have set up and are operating at the expense of the less environmentally-intrusive individual loggers. These national and international corporations are enticed because of the low costs involved compared with other parts of the country, and also by the fact that "there's a road to every tree". The Black Hills Sierra Club estimate there to be between two and four linear miles of passable road per square mile of land in the Hills. Though timber sales on public lands are subject to National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA documentation, local environmental groups have found the need to sue the Black Hills Forest Service for violating the rules in favour of timber companies. Until recently about thirty to forty cases were brought to court by the Sierra Club alone. Some environmentalists and concerned individuals have called the Black Hills an industrial forest. Taking the above into account, it is interesting to note that, until recently, all the ranger districts in the Hills were run by men who had direct or indirect links to the timber industry.
Although the Hills has always supported a virtual mono-culture of ponderosa pine, regular fires in the past ensured some variety of plant and wildlife species. Though the federal government requires 8,000 acres of National Forest to be burned each year, the Black Hills National Forest burned only eighty acres in 1997. The Black Hills Forest Service also forbids standing dead trees, or 'snags', which act as wildlife preservers in that they attract a variety of animals and birds. Several elders told me of the animals and birds they used to see up in the Hills which they no longer see today.
© 2002 by Bornali HalderSite, Page and Article © Copyright 2002 by Bornali Halder