The Bureau of Land Management has reached a settlement with three conservation groups that effectively douses the agency's scheme to turn 47 square miles of old-growth and mature pinon-juniper forest in Nevada into hundreds of millions of pounds of wood chips.

The BLM planned to spend more than $12 million in federal fire funds targeted for "urban interface zones" to log vast wildlands with 30-ton feller-buncher machines.

The settlement, filed Monday in federal district court in Reno, calls for tree clearing on less than 15 percent of the original project area. Most of the clearing will be carried out on lands less than a mile from home sites.

"We're very pleased to have stopped the project," said Todd Tucci of the Land and Water Fund of the Rockies, representing Western Watersheds Project, the Committee for Idaho's High Desert and the American Lands Alliance. "This was a clear case of a runaway federal agency working below radar, under the guise of fire protection, to denude our treasured public lands. The settlement is a victory for common-sense fire protection."

Removing pinon-juniper forests to stimulate grass growth for federally subsidized public lands livestock grazing is a common BLM practice in Nevada and other parts of the West. The most recent schemes in Nevada, near Ely and Mount Wilson, would have cost $3.5 million per year for four years.

The agency alleged that the Mount Wilson project, which would have covered 34 square miles of public lands, was necessary to protect a 1.2-square-mile enclave of private homes. The Ely project comprised 13 square miles of public lands.

The location of the Mount Wilson project -- 90 miles south of Ely and about 20 miles from the Utah border -- is one of the most sparsely populated areas in the United States.

Last spring WWP, CIHD and ALA filed a lawsuit to stop the BLM plan.The lawsuit charged that both logging projects lacked scientific basis and would severely damage the forest ecosystem. The conservation groups also maintained that the BLM failed to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act.

All three groups supported actions recommended by the BLM near home sites but argued that the agency's plan to cut vast areas of trees miles away from homes was a blatant misuse of federal funds.

In response to the lawsuit, the BLM sent a team of firefighters and wildland specialists to examine the project area. Based on its findings, the team submitted a radically modified plan that became the basis of the settlement.

"Efforts now being fiercely debated in Congress would strip the public of means to appeal destructive and wasteful projects like the original Ely and Mount Wilson proposals," said CIHD director Katie Fite. "Here, NEPA worked as it was intended. Everybody stepped back, took a second look and came up with a science-based fire protection plan for these homes."

The settlement protects miles of mature and old-growth pinon trees, a crucial food source for birds. Pinon nuts in the Mount Wilson and Ely areas are also harvested by Native Americans for traditional uses and by commercial pickers for sale to markets across the country.

"Each acre of mature pinon forest from this area is capable of producing 250 pounds of food per acre for birds, mammals, rodents and people every 5 years," said Montana forest advocate Penny Frazier.

Longtime Mount Wilson property owner Mike Wilkin welcomed the settlement. "As a landowner in the area, I am pleased that this project has been scaled back," he said."The original project would have severely impacted this beautiful area without meeting the original goal of home protection."

"These projects would have resulted in a massive alteration of forests that are not contiguous to private lands; that, in general, are nowhere near private lands; and that are not, by any stretch of the imagination, in an urban interface zone," said Anne Martin, ALA field director in Spokane.

Tucci added that the BLM settlement demonstrates the importance of public involvement in decisions that impact public lands management.

"Without public participation through the NEPA process, including the ability to appeal and litigate, agencies will have free rein to conduct fuels reduction projects on public lands without adequate public input or the opportunity to challenge ill-conceived agency decisions," he said.