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Campaign
to buy ranchers' grazing permits is the way to save public range
By
Keith Raether
for Headwaters News
Allan Savory's leap of holistic faith in matters of range management
and livestock grazing (Headwaters News: Perspective, March 13, 2002)
belies an entire body of range science.
Some of his notions even border on an anti-Darwinian conception
of the natural world. (Savory once wrote that "After years
of working on several continents, I have been unable to find any
clear evidence of competition in nature.") His is a quasi-religious
world laced with proverbs and prophesies -- a world in which the
messiah is Savory himself.
Savory is the founder of the Allan Savory Center for Holistic Management,
which promotes, among other strategies, the Savory grazing method
to federal agencies and an unsuspecting public.
Savory’s method is predicated on the notion that rangelands
are in poor condition because they are undergrazed, not overgrazed.
He blames the wholesale degradation of watersheds in the Rocky Mountain
West on "biological decay" and "too few animals"
on the watersheds that feed rivers.
In the world according to Savory, domestic livestock are a means
to "land reclamation."
Savory ignores or rationalizes the denuded and eroding watersheds
across much of the West, where vegetative cover and production are
severely depleted by livestock grazing, and where sufficient forage
does not exist to support the large herds that Savory’s grazing
system depends on.
He also overlooks the role of livestock grazing in the replacement
of native vegetation with weeds across millions of acres of the
West.
When Savory argues that centuries of large-herd grazing in the West
maintained healthy grasslands, he reinvents history. Until domestic
livestock were introduced to the region some 150 years ago, the
Great Basin and the desert Southwest were not heavily grazed for
5,000 to 10,000 years.
Savory also fails to mention that, prior to the introduction of
livestock, 400,000 miles of barbed-wire fencing didn’t divide
migratory corridors into so many prison yards. Before rangelands
were fenced, wildlife herds were able to roam for hundreds of miles
without competition for forage.
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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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