Buy-Outs

Section I. Title

Public Lands Grazing Buy-outs:

The ‘Win-Win’ Needed to Break an Environmental Impasse

Section II. Problem Statement

Public lands ranching accounts for more ESA listed species in the West than any other single use of our public lands. Conservationists have been extremely successful at combating abusive grazing in the courtroom. However, if the problem is to be significantly resolved in a way that all stakeholders can reasonably swallow, a legislative solution must be adopted. Voluntary permit buy-outs have struggled to gain legislative support as congressional and administrating agencies have been under dominant control by politicians whose unabashed support for the public lands grazing industry has in large part been one-sided.

Section III. Key Steakholders

The stakeholders involved include regional conservation organizations throughout the West. Western Watersheds Project, Center for Biological Diversity, Forest Guardians, Oregon Natural Desert Association, and the Committee for Idaho’s High Desert have joined with the American Lands Alliance in Washington, D.C. These groups have joined to form the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign which seeks to promote buy-outs of allotments on public lands by promoting legislation. Other stakeholders include individual public lands ranchers, corporate public lands ranchers, the trade-associations they have formed such as national and regional Farm Bureaus. Land use agencies that administer the allotments, including the BLM and Forest Service, would also benefit from buy-outs as the agencies frequently find themselves sued by both sides over grazing disputes. The agencies would administer the buy-outs.

Section IV. Analysis

The fact that grazing significantly contributes to environmental degradation is not contested. Public lands ranching takes place on 300 million acres of public land in America (Wuerthner & Matteson 2002: xiv). While individual conservation organizations have been very successful at challenging agencies’ management under NEPA and ESA (Rothenberg 2002: 181) the limited resources and vast amount of land involved has necessitated that the organizations choose the most imperiled lands and egregiously abusive ranchers to target and surgically litigate.

Land use agencies are put in a particular crunch when it comes to remedy. Laws placed on the books as far back as the 1800s dictate public lands be made available for use. But environmental laws passed in the 1970s, and more recently, mandate environmental stewardship of the land (Rothenberg 2002: 151-3). These conflicting legislative laws ensure land use agencies get sandwiched between two competing and mutually exclusive interests.

Given the political environment of the past six years, the agencies have been particularly sympathetic to industry and grazing interests. The National Fish and Wildlife Service has spent much of its time purging and denying species protections from the Endangered Species Act as evidenced by the delisting of the wolf and the grizzly. FWS has similarly rejected species protections for petitioned species which its own scientists have scientifically demonstrated need protection given the best science as to the condition of their habitat and numbers. A few species in this conundrum include slickspot peppergrass, the sage grouse, and the arctic fluvial grayling. The rejection of these protections has undercut conservationist stakeholders’ legal apparatus for demanding better regulatory management.

Grazing similarly implicates the land in general. Sensitive lands including riparian lands (Rothenberg 2002: 152), which are supposed to be under the watchful eye of the agencies, have degraded. This has resulted in the warming of waters and the increased sediment in streams and rivers that provide habitat for innumerable species.

The list could go on and on about the negative effects of abusive public lands grazing. However, it becomes necessary to understand the stakeholders whose use of our public lands implicates the environmental integrity and land use agencies’ conduct.

Public lands ranchers have developed a particularly notorious attitude about land use in the West. The ‘lifestyle’ that they see themselves participating in, and the pro-local control that they endorse is demonstrative of the movement that they have been able to ride straight into policy success (Rothenberg 2002: 126). This small group of people has been able to project a ‘cowboy’ image, which has evoked sympathetic imagery about the origin of the ‘Old West.’ Claims of the