Federal grazing permits are hot items ... and hot buttons

By Greg Lakes, editor
Headwaters News
April 24, 2002

Eight years ago, activist Jon Marvel bid $30 for a grazing lease in Idaho on which he had no intention of running cattle. It took a few years for the state Supreme Court to rule in his favor, but the concept has grown steadily since. So has the opposition, at least among Sagebrush rebels.

Marvel's group, the Western Watersheds Project, and the Grand Canyon Trust, among others, have taken over state and federal grazing leases to restore the range without cattle. Some figures say 25,000 acres of BLM and national forest land in the West have conservation groups as lessees.

The number is likely to blossom in the wake of a landmark Arizona Supreme Court decision last year that said agencies can't disqualify a bidder for a state grazing lease simply because he doesn't intend to run livestock on the land.

The latest effort to remove cattle from overgrazed public land, the National Public Lands Grazing Campaign, is a less-contentious attempt to find common ground. Instead of outbidding leaseholders and fighting them in court, the project offers ranchers a profitable way out, as described above.

But judging by recent headlines, conservation groups are up against bureaucratic mindsets, outright agency bias, conflicting mandates and open hostility.

In one instance that critics say illustrates official tunnel vision, the Western Watersheds Project bought a ranch in central Idaho with a 40,000-acre grazing allotment, but Forest Service officials so far have refused to re-validate the permit unless the group grazes the land. It will if it must, with plans to truck in a few cattle for a matter of minutes, according to a March 7 editorial in the Economist.

In Nevada, two rebel ranchers are the focus of what some say is a rekindling of anti-government sentiment in the state, where 87 percent of the land is owned by the government. Both men have refused to get permits, pay fees or heed federal officials' demands. One had his herd confiscated and sold; the other is in a halfway house, serving a 30-day sentence for grazing without a permit.

Both the auction of the confiscated cattle and the more recent sentencing hearing drew dozens of protesters. Advocates say because so much land is federal, they can't ranch without it, but they complain that agency officials and regulations make their efforts inefficient and unprofitable.

Critics note that 270 million acres of public rangeland in the West produce only 3 percent of the nation's beef and lamb. They argue that ranchers pay an average $1.43 per animal unit month, but fees on private land are more like $11.

In a case critics say illustrates BLM officials' bias, agency officials re-issued a permit in central Idaho, despite their own study that found the land was overgrazed and that a 19 percent reduction in cattle numbers was required to prevent further damage. Western Watersheds and the Idaho Conservation League filed suit to make the agency heed its own recommendations, and last month, BLM officials agreed to settle, to reduce the number of cattle and to enact other measures to lessen impacts on streams.

The permit generates about $10,000 in fees each year. The agency has spent $500,000 on improvements on the tract in the past 25 years, and plans $400,000 more.

In a different twist, two sisters and members of Nevada's Western Shoshone Tribe received a BLM notice that their cattle were subject to impoundment because they had failed to pay fees and comply with their permit regulations. The conflict is that the land is the tribe's, according to the sisters and other tribal members.

A bill in Congress would pay the tribe for ancestral land they've lost, but most of the tribe would rather keep claim to the land.

And in a move that conservationists said shows ranchers' political clout, the head of Idaho's BLM office was forced to resign last month, in a coup blamed on Idaho's Sen. Larry Craig. Martha Hahn had been state director for seven years, and although Craig's office denied any role, Craig and Rep. Butch Otter sent a letter to the head of the BLM in January complaining about Hahn's decision to restrict grazing in the Owyhee basin.

Hahn was a Clinton-administration appointee, and conservationists said they expect the Bush administration to replace more resource officials with people of its own choosing.

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