Column: SOS: Save Our Sagebrush

The smell of sagebrush, especially after a rare desert rain, is surely the essence of the West.

We tend to take sagebrush for granted. But it is disappearing from the heart of the West.

If you drive across Nevada, Utah, Idaho and eastern Oregon, in the Great Basin high desert between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, the seemingly end less native sagebrush stands are giving way to vast seas of short blond cheatgrass, an exotic Eurasian annual that slipped into the country more than 100 years ago as a contaminant in grain shipments.

Cheatgrass didn't become the dominant plant in the Great Basin on its own. It had powerful help from grazing and fire. The spiky seeds hitched a ride on cattle and sheep, which ate up the competition, native perennial bunch grasses. An annual, cheatgrass sprouts early and sends roots deep, monopolizing water and nutrient then sets seeds early in the summer and dries to fine tinder.

Then come summer lightning storms. Fire is inevitable in this dry land. The native sagebrush grasslands tend to burn in a patchy fashion in intervals ranging from 10 years, which is just long enough for sagebrush to get established, to more than 200 years. But fire spreads rapidly through areas carpeted with cheatgrass, which tend to burn every two to five years in bigger and bigger conflagrations. Cheatgrass seeds sprout quickly in the charred landscape. But sagebrush doesn't come back.

This destructive cycle is spreading by a simple devastating formula. The more cheatgrass, the more fire; the more fire, the more cheatgrass. Last summer, wildfires raced across Nevada and parts of Oregon, Idaho and Utah, blackening nearly two million acres in the Great Basin.

The replacement of sagebrush grasslands with cheatgrass spells trouble for native wildlife. Small birds like the sage thrasher, small mammals like the pygmy rabbit, and reptiles like the sagebrush lizard need sagebrush to survive. Cheatgrass dominated grasslands support less than half the number of bird species that breed in healthy sagebrush steppes. Most at risk are sagebrush dependent species, like the sage grouse, which seems headed for the endangered species list as its habitat goes up in smoke.

Since last summer, federal employees, hired contractors, state wildlife agency employees, and volunteers have been out seeding as much of last summer's burned land as possible in hopes of holding back the cheatgrass invasion and eventually returning the land to native sagebrush grasslands. The Bureau of Land Management has spent close to $40 million in the biggest single post-fire rehabilitation effort ever undertaken by the federal government.

But it hasn't been enough. The emergency effort reached only about a third of the land that burned. Of the seeds that were sown, less than a third were natives, and only 1 percent was sagebrush, which anchors much of the Great Basin ecosystem.

So the BLM has proposed spending up to $25 million a year over the next decade on a Great Basin Restoration Initiative to try to slow down the accelerating cycle of fires and preserve and restore sagebrush grasslands. "A restoration effort, on a scale never seen before in this country, needs to be undertaken to stop the downward ecological trends in the Great Basin," the agency stated in a recent report calling for "no net loss of sagebrush habitat."

The great conservationist Aldo Leopold would have approved. Fifty years ago, he was not hopeful about what he heard traveling around the West.

"I listened carefully for clues whether the West has accepted cheat(grass) as a necessary evil, to be lived with until kingdom come or whether it regards cheat as a challenge to rectify its past errors in land use," Leopold wrote. "I found the hopeless attitude almost universal. There is, as yet, no sense of pride in the husbandry of wild animals, no sense of shame in the proprietorship of a sick landscape. We tilt windmills in behalf of conservation in convention halls and editorial offices, but on the back forty we disclaim even owning a lance."

That has changed now. And anyone who loves the smell of sagebrush should appreciate the difference.

Jon Christensen is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (www.hcn.org). He lives in Washoe Valley.