Halfway through its congressional timeline, some think the Valles Caldera experiment has failed, while others see progress
Joan Kavanau would love to see more of the green valleys and forests in the Valles Caldera National Preserve near Los Alamos.
The Santa Fe resident has driven along the edge of the 88,900-acre preserve in the Jemez Mountains on N.M. 4, but never through the ancient collapsed volcano.
Kavanau, 75, can't hike and there's no place to park a car and take a short walk or sit and have a picnic in the preserve's interior. Two years ago she joined a line of 1,500 cars trying to drive into the preserve on the first, and only, open access day. The line was so long she gave up.
"It would be nice if they could open access more," Kavanau said. "Even to be given the opportunity to call and make an appointment to go see it. Right now it's inaccessible really except under their terms."
Public access remains one of the biggest bones of contention between the Valles Caldera Trust that manages the preserve and the people who want to experience it. Congress bought the former ranch for $101 million in 2000 and established the preserve as an experiment in land management, with a 15-year initial timeline to meet a difficult set of goals: protect the natural resources, allow public access, maintain a working ranch and be financially self-sufficient.
The Trust's board, staff and lead scientist say great strides have been made in opening the former private ranch to public activities, given the challenges of starting from scratch. A new executive director says the groundwork is almost finished to finally provide more access. Gary Bratcher, the executive director since January, thinks the Trust can come close to meeting all the congressional goals, including financial self-sufficiency.
Others say the experiment has failed and it's time to rethink who manages the preserve. They say it's taken too long and cost too much money for the public to gain access to the land. "These guys tried as hard as they could. I don't think I or any of their critics could have done better," said Dave F. Menicucci, a fishing guide and Sandia National Laboratories research engineer. "It simply is a model that doesn't work."
Conflicting uses
Everything about managing the Valles Caldera National Preserve seems to stir deep passions and disagreements.
Some people want completely open and free access. Others, like Kavanau, understand the need for some fees and limits on how many people a day use the preserve in order to protect the resources. Some, like Los Alamos hiker and historian Dorothy Hoard, say the current system of guided van tours and fishing is cumbersome and too expensive for many New Mexicans.
Local ranchers want to allow to more grazing. Some don't want any cows on the preserve. Some just don't want cows sharing the limited stream stretches in the preserve where anglers are allowed to fish. "You have to be stealthy with these fish. So you are crawling on hands and knees and stick your hand in a fresh cow pie," said Menicucci, describing the unpleasant experience of several anglers.
Elk hunting remains the biggest revenue source for the preserve. The Trust wants to auction off a limited number of bull elk tags available for the preserve. The Legislature is considering a bill to allow the move, but some hunters oppose it.
Tom Ribe, president of the nonprofit advocacy group Caldera Action, thinks the Trust board lacks experience in federal public land management and dealing openly with the public. The Trust's board members are presidential appointees serving staggered terms. He said the private sector board is too tied to politics and doesn't work. "Imagine having seven bosses who are constantly changing and are politically appointed," Ribe said.
"There is nothing they have done to make things better," Ribe said. "People are frustrated and fed up with the focus on making money. We could run this place cheaper and far better with the traditional land management model."
Ernie Atencio, who chaired an earlier preserve advocacy group called the Valles Caldera Coalition, agrees there have been many problems with the Trust. Like others, he thinks removing the financial self-sufficiency mandate would help. "But I wouldn't abandon the experiment," said Atencio, now executive director of the Taos Land Trust. "Let it run its 15 years."
Opening access
Last year, about 15,000 people hiked, biked, rode horses, hunted, fished, snowshoed, skied or went on a van tour in the Valles Caldera.
Dennis Trujillo, longtime preserve manager, thinks that's a pretty good start to public access in the six years since the Trust took over management. Especially for a place that started with no job descriptions, office, vehicles or staff. "I think we've done a great job getting the public on there although not as much as people would like," said Trujillo, who used to work for the Forest Service. "Now we're open seven days a week once the roads are manageable, usually from mid-May to November."
When Congress bought the former Baca Ranch, then owned by a Texas ranch family, no one but invited guests, cowboys and poachers had visited the interior of the Valles Caldera.
The preserve was closed for the first two years and managed by the Forest Service while the Trust hired staff and set up policies. At the time, author and first Trust chairman William deBuys said, "This is not going to be like starting the Indy 500; there won't be a certain moment when all the programs are launched. Rather we expect an incremental and progressive opening of multiple programs over a considerable period of time."
In 2003, more than 5,000 people toured portions of the Valles Caldera through various recreation programs. The number has increased every year.
But to protect the resources while allowing public access is a difficult balance. "I still feel this is a jewel of the Southwest," Trujillo said. "To really continue to have it as a jewel and public land, there is going to have to be restricted access to preserve the resource. When you look at other areas of public lands where use is unrestricted, it wouldn't take long to degrade (the preserve)."
Ribe and others who worked to support federal purchase of the preserve for the public said too little has been accomplished for public access in eight years. The preserve was purchased with money from the Land and Conservation Fund, derived from off-shore oil revenue and dedicated to buying land for public recreation. "Now it's been nine years," Hoard said. "When I go to meetings I see there's been no advancement in allowing more public access."
Ribe and Hoard say the nearby Bandelier National Monument sees more than 200,000 visitors a year on only 33,000 acres. They say the National Park Service knows how to manage a lot of people while protecting resources, and would do a better job of managing the Valles Caldera National Preserve.
But Bandelier also has been a protected public park for more than nine decades, complete with a visitor center, paved roads, bathrooms and other infrastructure the Valles Caldera lacks. "To be successful, I think we have to have good roads and year-round access," said Bratcher, a retired agri-businessman who managed large plantations for United Fruit Co. and Del Monte all over Latin America and in the Philippines.
In addition, Bandelier is protected by something else the Valles Caldera Trust lacks — federal liability insurance. Federal lawyers decided the Trust didn't qualify and needed to find its own private insurance in case a visitor sued. The insurance cost more than $80,000 last year and wouldn't cover much if someone sued. U.S. Sens. Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall are looking at how to resolve the insurance dilemma. But until then, Bratcher said, "If something happened, we would have to close the gates and not let anyone in."
Laying the groundwork
Decisions about recreation, grazing and roads on the Valles Caldera National Preserve are supposed to be based on "adaptive management" — in other words, the actual impact of any activity based on scientific data. Atencio said that means making decisions not geared toward recreation or grazing or any particular use "but toward what is best for the land."
Bob Parmenter, the lead scientist at the Valles Caldera National Preserve, is excited about the new board and Bratcher. He believes the scientific groundwork is finally ready that will help the Trust make better management decisions.
Over the past eight years researchers from all over the country have collected data on wildlife species, water quality, archeological resources, soil, grasses, forests and more. Their work also brought in $1.6 million last year alone in research funds and grants. None of that was available until the Congress bought the preserve and scientists could begin field work.
Parmenter doesn't think it would have mattered who managed the preserve from the beginning, all the scientific data had to be gathered under federal law before more public access and recreation programs could be planned. And he doesn't think it would have happened any faster. "The flexibility of the Trust allowed interim programs and gave the public some access," Parmenter said. "It was less then what the public wants, but more than what would have happened under strict (federal environment) requirements if another federal agency managed it."
A public use and access plan should be ready for comment within the year. Parmenter believes the Trust is at a turning point. "It's been a learning process. Our past boards have been extremely cautious," he said. "We finally have a group of people on the board who are taking this to heart and moving it forward. We are going as fast as we can legally move."
The trick, Parmenter said, will be how to "make the preserve accessible to all economic strata of society. We cannot become an exclusive playground of the rich."
Taking stock
Steve Henry, a retired state Department of Game and Fish biologist and the Trust board's new chairman, agreed there have been problems. He said the board hasn't been as responsive to the public as it should and shied away from a stronger focus on recreational programs. "With any experiment you will have failures, starts and stops," Henry said. "There have been a lot of mistakes."
But he believes that is changing now with Bratcher, the appointment of new board members and the hiring of the first communications person in more than three years.
Bratcher is approaching the Valles Caldera from a business perspective. He thinks there are a lot of ways to bring more visitors into the Valles Caldera, give them a quality experience and raise revenues to make the preserve self-sufficient. Moreover, he thinks if the Valles Caldera experiment in land management works it will be an important model for Congress to buy other large ranches — currently getting subdivided into small ranchettes — and protect them as public land operated by self-generated revenues.
Several people think this is a good time to seek public input on how the preserve is managed. "Congressional hearings would be good as long as they are structured to have useful outcomes and aren't just complaint fests," deBuys said.
Caldera Action has drafted a bill to change the Valles Caldera mandate and turn management over to the National Park Service. The group hopes to convince New Mexico's congressmen to introduce the bill by the end of the year.
Kavanau still hopes one day to take that drive through the Valles Caldera. A retired marketing professional, she thinks there are many, simple ways the Trust can allow "the public to share in it with dignity and discretion."
Contact Staci Matlock at 470-9843 or smatlock@sfnewmexican.com.
CHANGING RULES
House Bill 11: Allows a portion of elk licenses established by the state Game and Fish Department for the Valles Caldera National Preserve to be auctioned or sold in a manner different from other state game licenses. Elk hunting is the largest money-maker for the preserve. Passed the House in early March. Now before the Senate Conservation Committee.
Senate Memorial 32: A memorial calling for congressional hearings on creating new management of the Valles Caldera National Preserve since "it has become clear that the experimental management system for the Valles Caldera preserve will never generate adequate funding without developing and destroying the preserve" and because "the current experimental management system has failed to provide adequate access to the public for responsible use and enjoyment". Passed the Senate 32-3 on March 3.
The next Valles Caldera Trust public meeting is Thursday in Albuquerque at the Hilton Garden Inn. For more information: www.vallescaldera.gov.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Bighorn battle could doom sheep ranchers
A battle on the steep slopes of the Snake and Salmon river canyons that pits one of Idaho's most iconic wild animals against one of the state's historic industries is inching toward a conclusion.
Managers of the Payette National Forest are faced with what looks like a stark choice between preserving majestic bighorn sheep or reducing and maybe even eliminating grazing by domestic sheep on much of the forest. Years of deliberation, research and political maneuvering appear to be tilting in favor of the wild sheep and at the expense of a handful of ranching families with decades-long ties to the land.
The complex issue boils down to a simple reality in the eyes of wild sheep advocates and game and land managers. When wild bighorns and their domestic cousins mix, the bighorns die from pneumonia. Scientists don't know all the hows or whys. But game and land managers say the science is clear enough for them to proclaim the two species should be kept apart.
"When you put domestics and bighorns together, the bighorns die. We don't need to know any more than that. It is clear we have to have separation," said Keith Lawrence, director of the Nez Perce Tribe's wildlife department.
To that end, managers on the Payette National Forest are working on a plan that attempts to keep domestic sheep from commingling with bighorns. The preferred alternative of the plan draft would reduce sheep grazing on the forest by about 60 percent. Other alternatives call for steeper cuts and some allow more liberal grazing. Many environmental groups and bighorn advocates favor an alternative that ends sheep grazing or one that reduces grazing even more.
The ranchers say if the preferred alternative is selected, it will spell doom for their livelihoods.
"For Christ sakes, it puts me out of business," said Mick Carlson, a Riggins-area sheep rancher who has grazing allotments on the Nez Perce and Payette national forests. "It isn't just a little stroke of the brush, it's the whole damn deal. It puts me clean out of business. I won't have any range whatsoever."
Margaret Soulen Hinson, whose family also runs sheep on the Payette, said the plan would essentially put all of the sheep ranchers who use the Salmon River Canyon and Hells Canyon out of business.
Like most complex natural resource issues, there is some scientific debate. Researchers at the University of Idaho Caine Veterinary Teaching Center dispute that domestic sheep are to blame for spreading disease to bighorns. They say there is not definitive proof that the pathogens carried by domestic sheep are being transmitted to wild sheep. Marie Bulgin, director of the center, believes bighorns themselves are carrying the disease germs that cause the pneumonia and they likely contract it when they become stressed from environmental conditions such as drought.
"I've got to tell you, it's their own bugs that are killing them and their own bugs will continue to kill them when they take domestic sheep off of the range. But then it will be too late for the domestic sheep industry."
But Bulgin is in the minority. Other scientists cite several studies that have placed domestic and wild sheep together, and those experiments almost always result in dead bighorns. Subramaniam Srikumaran, a professor at Washington State University who goes by Dr. Shri, recently completed a study where he took a pathogen from four domestic sheep and tagged it with a genetic marker. He then reintroduced the tagged germ to the domestic sheep. Over the course of months he gradually mixed the four domestic sheep with four tame bighorns.
When the two species were kept about 50 feet apart from each other, the wild sheep remained healthy. After the sheep were separated only by a chain-link fence, two of the wild sheep picked up the tagged pathogen and one of them developed pneumonia. Next, the animals were all put in the same pen, and the bighorns started dying of pneumonia. Tests showed the disease developed from the same pathogen that he tagged and grew in the domestic sheep.
"So this study, in my opinion, it concludes or irrefutably proves the organisms can be transmitted from domestic to bighorn sheep, at least under these experimental conditions."
Dr. Shri is working on a way to allow the two species to commingle without disease transfer. He is not ready to talk about that work but is hopeful it will lead to a long-term solution.
"I'm not working against domestic sheep or supporting domestic sheep," he said. "We want to identify the problem and see, as scientists, if we can come up with a solution that is good for both sides."
But until that hope becomes a reality, the ranchers face the likelihood of having to adapt to unwanted change.
"This is their way of life and you are mandating change. The tribe is very sympathetic to that. It is the story the tribe has been living," Lawrence said.
Wildlife biologists across the West have watched for years as wild sheep died after coming into contact with domestic sheep.
Hells Canyon once had a wild sheep population estimated at 10,000. Today it is home to about 875 bighorns. Many of those are the descendants of 600 wild sheep transplanted there, from other areas over the past 30 years. In 1996, the canyon was hit with a die-off that killed about 300 animals. Since then, different herds in the canyon have struggled as lambs succumb to pneumonia.
Far less is known about the wild sheep in the Salmon River country between Riggins and the South Fork of the Salmon, where there have not been any reintroduction efforts. Biologist estimate there are about 100 native bighorns there and population trend surveys show wild sheep numbers have slid by 70 percent in the last two decades. Nearly all wildlife biologists pin the problem on the presence of domestic sheep. But the ranchers say they never see wild sheep on the grazing allotments. The tribe and others are working on a research project to better understand how wild sheep use the canyon.
The issue reached a boiling point on the Payette National Forest when a new forest plan was released in 2003. That plan left domestic sheep grazing unchanged. The Nez Perce Tribe and three environmental groups appealed the forest plan. In 2005, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service ordered the forest to rewrite the plan to protect wild sheep and their habitat by making sure domestic and wild sheep do not interact.
"The federal law says we must provide quality, well-distributed habitat across the planning unit that will provide for a viable population of desirable native and non-native wildlife species," said Pattie Soucek, a planner for the forest. "We have plenty of habitat, well distributed and it's of high quality. The chief told us as long as you have domestic sheep on the habitat it is not available."
After the remand, the forest conducted an assessment of the risk sheep grazing was causing to bighorns. That assessment was then reviewed by a panel of outside scientists. They concluded that mixture of the two species spreads disease from domestic to wild sheep -- scientists don't know how or why -- that the two species are curious about each other and want to interact, and that until science can provide more information the prudent action is to keep the species separate.
The findings were followed by a few years of inaction. Then, in 2007, Western Watersheds Project sued the agency and asked a federal judge not to allow grazing until the forest plan remand was finished. Eventually a settlement was reached based upon recommendations by the Nez Perce Tribe that forbid grazing in high-risk areas. But the lawsuit, which has many facets, continues.
Last year the forest completed a draft of its new bighorn sheep plan. Public comments on that draft are due Tuesday. Soucek said the agency will review the comments, make adjustments to the plan and issue a final decision near the end of the year. She is well aware of what is at stake.
"You have people's livelihood that depend on the domestic sheep, you have people's livelihoods that depend on the wild sheep and you have the tribe that depends on the resource," Soucek said. "It's social, it's political, it's tribal, it's economical. It is not your typical clean-cut resource analysis. It's a very complex one."
The ranchers don't believe their sheep are making the bighorns sick. But they also believe a 1997 agreement they signed with the Wallowa Whitman National Forest, Idaho, Oregon and Washington game departments, the Bureau of Land Management and the Wild Sheep Foundation protected them from any negative consequences of the bighorns transplanted from other states mixing with domestic sheep.
"My hope is these agencies and groups that signed this 1997 agreement, somewhere somebody is going to stand up and decide they ought to live up to their promises, especially our own government," said Ron Shirts, who runs sheep on the Payette. "If we had signed an agreement similar to that, you know dang well what side of the court the ball would be on. We would be made to stand by it and we would stand by it."
But people from those agencies say the agreement covered only one specific release of wild sheep, pertaining only to the Wallowa Whitman forest, and doesn't cover wild sheep introduced to the canyon prior to 1997 or sheep native to the canyon. They also say the agreement was signed without proper federal review and environmental analysis. That was stated in the Forest Service 2007 decision to reject the Payette National Forest plan that allowed grazing to continue based on the agreement.
"This thing is in violation of every federal land law you can think of, from the National Environmental Policy Act, National Forest Management Act to the Nez Perce 1855 treaty," said Neil Thagard of the Wild Sheep Foundation. "The thing basically has no legs; that is why the chief of the Forest Service threw it out."
Managers of the Payette National Forest are faced with what looks like a stark choice between preserving majestic bighorn sheep or reducing and maybe even eliminating grazing by domestic sheep on much of the forest. Years of deliberation, research and political maneuvering appear to be tilting in favor of the wild sheep and at the expense of a handful of ranching families with decades-long ties to the land.
The complex issue boils down to a simple reality in the eyes of wild sheep advocates and game and land managers. When wild bighorns and their domestic cousins mix, the bighorns die from pneumonia. Scientists don't know all the hows or whys. But game and land managers say the science is clear enough for them to proclaim the two species should be kept apart.
"When you put domestics and bighorns together, the bighorns die. We don't need to know any more than that. It is clear we have to have separation," said Keith Lawrence, director of the Nez Perce Tribe's wildlife department.
To that end, managers on the Payette National Forest are working on a plan that attempts to keep domestic sheep from commingling with bighorns. The preferred alternative of the plan draft would reduce sheep grazing on the forest by about 60 percent. Other alternatives call for steeper cuts and some allow more liberal grazing. Many environmental groups and bighorn advocates favor an alternative that ends sheep grazing or one that reduces grazing even more.
The ranchers say if the preferred alternative is selected, it will spell doom for their livelihoods.
"For Christ sakes, it puts me out of business," said Mick Carlson, a Riggins-area sheep rancher who has grazing allotments on the Nez Perce and Payette national forests. "It isn't just a little stroke of the brush, it's the whole damn deal. It puts me clean out of business. I won't have any range whatsoever."
Margaret Soulen Hinson, whose family also runs sheep on the Payette, said the plan would essentially put all of the sheep ranchers who use the Salmon River Canyon and Hells Canyon out of business.
Like most complex natural resource issues, there is some scientific debate. Researchers at the University of Idaho Caine Veterinary Teaching Center dispute that domestic sheep are to blame for spreading disease to bighorns. They say there is not definitive proof that the pathogens carried by domestic sheep are being transmitted to wild sheep. Marie Bulgin, director of the center, believes bighorns themselves are carrying the disease germs that cause the pneumonia and they likely contract it when they become stressed from environmental conditions such as drought.
"I've got to tell you, it's their own bugs that are killing them and their own bugs will continue to kill them when they take domestic sheep off of the range. But then it will be too late for the domestic sheep industry."
But Bulgin is in the minority. Other scientists cite several studies that have placed domestic and wild sheep together, and those experiments almost always result in dead bighorns. Subramaniam Srikumaran, a professor at Washington State University who goes by Dr. Shri, recently completed a study where he took a pathogen from four domestic sheep and tagged it with a genetic marker. He then reintroduced the tagged germ to the domestic sheep. Over the course of months he gradually mixed the four domestic sheep with four tame bighorns.
When the two species were kept about 50 feet apart from each other, the wild sheep remained healthy. After the sheep were separated only by a chain-link fence, two of the wild sheep picked up the tagged pathogen and one of them developed pneumonia. Next, the animals were all put in the same pen, and the bighorns started dying of pneumonia. Tests showed the disease developed from the same pathogen that he tagged and grew in the domestic sheep.
"So this study, in my opinion, it concludes or irrefutably proves the organisms can be transmitted from domestic to bighorn sheep, at least under these experimental conditions."
Dr. Shri is working on a way to allow the two species to commingle without disease transfer. He is not ready to talk about that work but is hopeful it will lead to a long-term solution.
"I'm not working against domestic sheep or supporting domestic sheep," he said. "We want to identify the problem and see, as scientists, if we can come up with a solution that is good for both sides."
But until that hope becomes a reality, the ranchers face the likelihood of having to adapt to unwanted change.
"This is their way of life and you are mandating change. The tribe is very sympathetic to that. It is the story the tribe has been living," Lawrence said.
Wildlife biologists across the West have watched for years as wild sheep died after coming into contact with domestic sheep.
Hells Canyon once had a wild sheep population estimated at 10,000. Today it is home to about 875 bighorns. Many of those are the descendants of 600 wild sheep transplanted there, from other areas over the past 30 years. In 1996, the canyon was hit with a die-off that killed about 300 animals. Since then, different herds in the canyon have struggled as lambs succumb to pneumonia.
Far less is known about the wild sheep in the Salmon River country between Riggins and the South Fork of the Salmon, where there have not been any reintroduction efforts. Biologist estimate there are about 100 native bighorns there and population trend surveys show wild sheep numbers have slid by 70 percent in the last two decades. Nearly all wildlife biologists pin the problem on the presence of domestic sheep. But the ranchers say they never see wild sheep on the grazing allotments. The tribe and others are working on a research project to better understand how wild sheep use the canyon.
The issue reached a boiling point on the Payette National Forest when a new forest plan was released in 2003. That plan left domestic sheep grazing unchanged. The Nez Perce Tribe and three environmental groups appealed the forest plan. In 2005, the chief of the U.S. Forest Service ordered the forest to rewrite the plan to protect wild sheep and their habitat by making sure domestic and wild sheep do not interact.
"The federal law says we must provide quality, well-distributed habitat across the planning unit that will provide for a viable population of desirable native and non-native wildlife species," said Pattie Soucek, a planner for the forest. "We have plenty of habitat, well distributed and it's of high quality. The chief told us as long as you have domestic sheep on the habitat it is not available."
After the remand, the forest conducted an assessment of the risk sheep grazing was causing to bighorns. That assessment was then reviewed by a panel of outside scientists. They concluded that mixture of the two species spreads disease from domestic to wild sheep -- scientists don't know how or why -- that the two species are curious about each other and want to interact, and that until science can provide more information the prudent action is to keep the species separate.
The findings were followed by a few years of inaction. Then, in 2007, Western Watersheds Project sued the agency and asked a federal judge not to allow grazing until the forest plan remand was finished. Eventually a settlement was reached based upon recommendations by the Nez Perce Tribe that forbid grazing in high-risk areas. But the lawsuit, which has many facets, continues.
Last year the forest completed a draft of its new bighorn sheep plan. Public comments on that draft are due Tuesday. Soucek said the agency will review the comments, make adjustments to the plan and issue a final decision near the end of the year. She is well aware of what is at stake.
"You have people's livelihood that depend on the domestic sheep, you have people's livelihoods that depend on the wild sheep and you have the tribe that depends on the resource," Soucek said. "It's social, it's political, it's tribal, it's economical. It is not your typical clean-cut resource analysis. It's a very complex one."
The ranchers don't believe their sheep are making the bighorns sick. But they also believe a 1997 agreement they signed with the Wallowa Whitman National Forest, Idaho, Oregon and Washington game departments, the Bureau of Land Management and the Wild Sheep Foundation protected them from any negative consequences of the bighorns transplanted from other states mixing with domestic sheep.
"My hope is these agencies and groups that signed this 1997 agreement, somewhere somebody is going to stand up and decide they ought to live up to their promises, especially our own government," said Ron Shirts, who runs sheep on the Payette. "If we had signed an agreement similar to that, you know dang well what side of the court the ball would be on. We would be made to stand by it and we would stand by it."
But people from those agencies say the agreement covered only one specific release of wild sheep, pertaining only to the Wallowa Whitman forest, and doesn't cover wild sheep introduced to the canyon prior to 1997 or sheep native to the canyon. They also say the agreement was signed without proper federal review and environmental analysis. That was stated in the Forest Service 2007 decision to reject the Payette National Forest plan that allowed grazing to continue based on the agreement.
"This thing is in violation of every federal land law you can think of, from the National Environmental Policy Act, National Forest Management Act to the Nez Perce 1855 treaty," said Neil Thagard of the Wild Sheep Foundation. "The thing basically has no legs; that is why the chief of the Forest Service threw it out."
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Path of the Jaguar
At dusk one evening, deep in a Costa Rican forest, a young male jaguar rises from his sleep, stretches, and silently but determinedly leaves forever the place where he was born.
There's shelter here, and plenty of brocket deer, peccaries, and agoutis for food. He has sensed, too, the presence of females with which he might mate. But there's also a mature male jaguar that claims the forest—and the females. The older cat will tolerate no rivals. The breeze-blown scent of the young male's mother, so comforting to him when he was a cub, no longer binds him to his home. So he goes.
But the wanderer has chosen the wrong direction. In just a few miles he reaches the edge of the forest; beyond lies a coffee plantation. Pushed by instinct and necessity, he keeps moving, staying in the trees along fences and streams. Soon, though, shelter consists only of scattered patches of shrubs and a few trees, where he can find nothing to eat. He's now in a land of cattle ranches, and one night his hunger and the smell of a newborn calf overcome his reluctance to cross open areas. Creeping close before a final rush, he instantly kills the calf with one snap of his powerful jaws.
The next day the rancher finds the remains and the telltale tracks of a jaguar. He calls some of his neighbors and gathers a pack of dogs. The hunters find the young male, but they're armed only with shotguns; anxious, they shoot from too great a distance. The jaguar's massively thick skull protects him from death, but the pellets blind him in one eye and shatter his left foreleg.
Crippled now, unable to find his normal prey in the scrubby forest, let alone stalk and kill it, he's driven by hunger to easier meals. He kills another calf on an adjacent ranch, and then a dog on the outskirts of a nearby town. This time, though, he lingers too long. Attracted by the dog's howls, a group of villagers tree him and, though it takes many blasts, kill him. Jaguars, they say, are nothing but cattle killers, dog killers. They are vermin. They should be shot on sight, anytime, anywhere.
This sad story has been played out thousands of times throughout the jaguar's homeland, stretching from Mexico (and formerly the United States) to Argentina. In recent decades it's happened with even greater frequency, as ranching, farming, and development have eaten up half the big cat's prime habitat, and as humans have decimated its natural prey in many areas of remaining forest.
Alan Rabinowitz envisions a different ending to the story. He imagines that the young jaguar, when he leaves his birthplace, will pass unseen by humans through a near-continuous corridor of sheltering vegetation. Within a couple of days he'll find a small tract of forest harboring enough prey for him to stop and rest a day or two before resuming his trek. Eventually he'll reach a national park or wildlife preserve where he'll find a home, room to roam, plenty of prey, females looking for a mate.
Rabinowitz is the world's leading jaguar expert, and he has begun to realize his dream of creating a vast network of interconnected corridors and refuges extending from the U.S.-Mexico border into South America. It is known as Paseo del Jaguar—Path of the Jaguar. Rabinowitz considers such a network the best hope for keeping this great New World cat from joining lions and tigers on the endangered species list.
Rabinowitz began his work with the Wildlife Conservation Society and now heads the Panthera Foundation, a conservation group dedicated to protecting the world's 36 species of wild cats. The foundation's current work represents a radical change in Rabinowitz's conservation philosophy from just a decade ago. In the 1990s, having censused jaguars across their range, Rabinowitz and other specialists identified dozens of what they called jaguar conservation units (JCUs): large areas with perhaps 50 jaguars, where the local population was either stable or increasing. At the heart of most of the JCUs were existing parks or other protected areas, which Rabinowitz hoped to expand and secure with surrounding buffer zones. "I felt that the best thing we could hope to do was to lock up these great populations in these fragmented areas," he said.
Within a few years, though, the new science of DNA fingerprinting—studying genetic material to determine family and species relationships—revealed an amazing fact: The jaguar is the only large, wide-ranging carnivore in the world with no subspecies. Simply put, this means that for millennia jaguars have been mingling their genes throughout their entire range, so that individuals in northern Mexico are identical to those in southern Brazil. For that to be true, some of the cats must wander regularly and widely between populations.
Rabinowitz and his colleagues went back to their data to see whether the preserves could still be linked with habitat adequate to support a traveling jaguar. "Lo and behold," Rabinowitz said, "while good jaguar habitat, where the cats can live and breed, has decreased by 50 percent since the 1900s, habitat a jaguar can use to travel through has decreased only by 16 percent. Most of it is intact and contiguous. These places are like little oases—very small patches that jaguars will come to, use a while, and then leave. We were writing these places off because they're not habitat where a permanent jaguar population can live. Now they're turning out to be crucial."
Rabinowitz hopes to convince national governments throughout the jaguar's range to maintain this web of habitat through enlightened land-use planning, such as choosing noncritical areas for major developments and road construction. "We're not going to ask them to throw people off their land or to make new national parks," he said. The habitat matrix could encompass woodlands used for a variety of human activities from timber harvest to citrus plantations. Studies have shown that areas smaller than one and a half square miles can serve as temporary, one- or two-day homes—stepping-stones—for wandering jaguars.
While the habitat making up the proposed network is mostly intact for now, prompt conservation action will be needed to protect it, especially in certain areas of Central America and Colombia, where some jaguar travel paths already are critically tenuous. By studying satellite photographs and airplane surveys, and walking sections of the proposed corridor to follow up on reports from local people, Rabinowitz and his team can identify the segments most in need of protection. He then can go to government decision-makers with hard scientific data, he said. "Our first challenge is looking at corridors where there's just a single tendril. We've got to lock up these areas."
Diana Hadley of the Arizona-based Northern Jaguar Project works to protect the northernmost jaguar population in Mexico, with the long-term goal of seeing the species return to the United States. Hadley said the project and its Mexican partners "fully support" Paseo del Jaguar. "If these magnificent animals are ever to reoccupy appropriate habitat north of the border," she said, "the stepping-stones in the jaguar corridor are essential." Paseo del Jaguar ranks with the world's most ambitious conservation programs, and realizing it will take many years. Rabinowitz is focusing first on Mexico and Central America, where officials in all eight countries have approved the project. Costa Rica has already incorporated protection of the corridor into laws regulating development.
Later he'll tackle South America, where landscapes and political situations are more diverse and challenging. Rabinowitz is encouraged, though, by his audiences' emotional response when he talks about jaguars—a response based on the animal's enduring aura of beauty, strength, and mystery. Indigenous peoples around Mexico's central plateau, and the Maya, farther south, incorporated the jaguar into their art and mythology. Today even mobile-phone-carrying government ministers sitting in urban offices feel what Rabinowitz calls "a powerful cultural thread binding them to their ancestors. Nobody can say that the jaguar is not part of their own heritage," he said. "What better unifying symbol can there be than the jaguar?"
There's shelter here, and plenty of brocket deer, peccaries, and agoutis for food. He has sensed, too, the presence of females with which he might mate. But there's also a mature male jaguar that claims the forest—and the females. The older cat will tolerate no rivals. The breeze-blown scent of the young male's mother, so comforting to him when he was a cub, no longer binds him to his home. So he goes.
But the wanderer has chosen the wrong direction. In just a few miles he reaches the edge of the forest; beyond lies a coffee plantation. Pushed by instinct and necessity, he keeps moving, staying in the trees along fences and streams. Soon, though, shelter consists only of scattered patches of shrubs and a few trees, where he can find nothing to eat. He's now in a land of cattle ranches, and one night his hunger and the smell of a newborn calf overcome his reluctance to cross open areas. Creeping close before a final rush, he instantly kills the calf with one snap of his powerful jaws.
The next day the rancher finds the remains and the telltale tracks of a jaguar. He calls some of his neighbors and gathers a pack of dogs. The hunters find the young male, but they're armed only with shotguns; anxious, they shoot from too great a distance. The jaguar's massively thick skull protects him from death, but the pellets blind him in one eye and shatter his left foreleg.
Crippled now, unable to find his normal prey in the scrubby forest, let alone stalk and kill it, he's driven by hunger to easier meals. He kills another calf on an adjacent ranch, and then a dog on the outskirts of a nearby town. This time, though, he lingers too long. Attracted by the dog's howls, a group of villagers tree him and, though it takes many blasts, kill him. Jaguars, they say, are nothing but cattle killers, dog killers. They are vermin. They should be shot on sight, anytime, anywhere.
This sad story has been played out thousands of times throughout the jaguar's homeland, stretching from Mexico (and formerly the United States) to Argentina. In recent decades it's happened with even greater frequency, as ranching, farming, and development have eaten up half the big cat's prime habitat, and as humans have decimated its natural prey in many areas of remaining forest.
Alan Rabinowitz envisions a different ending to the story. He imagines that the young jaguar, when he leaves his birthplace, will pass unseen by humans through a near-continuous corridor of sheltering vegetation. Within a couple of days he'll find a small tract of forest harboring enough prey for him to stop and rest a day or two before resuming his trek. Eventually he'll reach a national park or wildlife preserve where he'll find a home, room to roam, plenty of prey, females looking for a mate.
Rabinowitz is the world's leading jaguar expert, and he has begun to realize his dream of creating a vast network of interconnected corridors and refuges extending from the U.S.-Mexico border into South America. It is known as Paseo del Jaguar—Path of the Jaguar. Rabinowitz considers such a network the best hope for keeping this great New World cat from joining lions and tigers on the endangered species list.
Rabinowitz began his work with the Wildlife Conservation Society and now heads the Panthera Foundation, a conservation group dedicated to protecting the world's 36 species of wild cats. The foundation's current work represents a radical change in Rabinowitz's conservation philosophy from just a decade ago. In the 1990s, having censused jaguars across their range, Rabinowitz and other specialists identified dozens of what they called jaguar conservation units (JCUs): large areas with perhaps 50 jaguars, where the local population was either stable or increasing. At the heart of most of the JCUs were existing parks or other protected areas, which Rabinowitz hoped to expand and secure with surrounding buffer zones. "I felt that the best thing we could hope to do was to lock up these great populations in these fragmented areas," he said.
Within a few years, though, the new science of DNA fingerprinting—studying genetic material to determine family and species relationships—revealed an amazing fact: The jaguar is the only large, wide-ranging carnivore in the world with no subspecies. Simply put, this means that for millennia jaguars have been mingling their genes throughout their entire range, so that individuals in northern Mexico are identical to those in southern Brazil. For that to be true, some of the cats must wander regularly and widely between populations.
Rabinowitz and his colleagues went back to their data to see whether the preserves could still be linked with habitat adequate to support a traveling jaguar. "Lo and behold," Rabinowitz said, "while good jaguar habitat, where the cats can live and breed, has decreased by 50 percent since the 1900s, habitat a jaguar can use to travel through has decreased only by 16 percent. Most of it is intact and contiguous. These places are like little oases—very small patches that jaguars will come to, use a while, and then leave. We were writing these places off because they're not habitat where a permanent jaguar population can live. Now they're turning out to be crucial."
Rabinowitz hopes to convince national governments throughout the jaguar's range to maintain this web of habitat through enlightened land-use planning, such as choosing noncritical areas for major developments and road construction. "We're not going to ask them to throw people off their land or to make new national parks," he said. The habitat matrix could encompass woodlands used for a variety of human activities from timber harvest to citrus plantations. Studies have shown that areas smaller than one and a half square miles can serve as temporary, one- or two-day homes—stepping-stones—for wandering jaguars.
While the habitat making up the proposed network is mostly intact for now, prompt conservation action will be needed to protect it, especially in certain areas of Central America and Colombia, where some jaguar travel paths already are critically tenuous. By studying satellite photographs and airplane surveys, and walking sections of the proposed corridor to follow up on reports from local people, Rabinowitz and his team can identify the segments most in need of protection. He then can go to government decision-makers with hard scientific data, he said. "Our first challenge is looking at corridors where there's just a single tendril. We've got to lock up these areas."
Diana Hadley of the Arizona-based Northern Jaguar Project works to protect the northernmost jaguar population in Mexico, with the long-term goal of seeing the species return to the United States. Hadley said the project and its Mexican partners "fully support" Paseo del Jaguar. "If these magnificent animals are ever to reoccupy appropriate habitat north of the border," she said, "the stepping-stones in the jaguar corridor are essential." Paseo del Jaguar ranks with the world's most ambitious conservation programs, and realizing it will take many years. Rabinowitz is focusing first on Mexico and Central America, where officials in all eight countries have approved the project. Costa Rica has already incorporated protection of the corridor into laws regulating development.
Later he'll tackle South America, where landscapes and political situations are more diverse and challenging. Rabinowitz is encouraged, though, by his audiences' emotional response when he talks about jaguars—a response based on the animal's enduring aura of beauty, strength, and mystery. Indigenous peoples around Mexico's central plateau, and the Maya, farther south, incorporated the jaguar into their art and mythology. Today even mobile-phone-carrying government ministers sitting in urban offices feel what Rabinowitz calls "a powerful cultural thread binding them to their ancestors. Nobody can say that the jaguar is not part of their own heritage," he said. "What better unifying symbol can there be than the jaguar?"
Obama Delists Wolf In Idaho & Montana
In a blow to environmental groups and a boost for ranchers, the Obama administration announced Friday that it would take the gray wolf off the endangered species list in Montana and Idaho, though it left the predator under federal protection in Wyoming.
The delisting allows Montana and Idaho to assume complete management of the animal, which will include a hunting season in both states. The move also delists wolves in the western Great Lakes and parts of Oregon, Utah and Washington.
The new policy was announced by the Bush administration in January, but its adoption was delayed so the incoming Obama administration could assess it.
“The recovery of the gray wolf throughout significant portions of its historic range is one of the great success stories of the Endangered Species Act,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said. “Today, we have more than 5,500 wolves, including more than 1,600 in the Rockies.”
Jenny Harbine, a lawyer with Earthjustice in Bozeman, Mont., which has sued to keep the federal protections, said, “We’re disappointed.” She added, “Idaho has shown an eagerness to kill as many wolves as possible, and they are drawing up plans for killing wolves as we speak.”
In 2007, Gov. C. L. Otter of Idaho said he favored reducing the number of wolves there to 100 from more than 800. He also said he would be the first to buy a wolf hunting license.
Officially, however, Idaho has agreed in its state plan to maintain a population of 500 wolves. Montana has agreed to keep 400 wolves. If the number of animals falls below 150 total and 15 breeding pairs for three years in a row, the wolf will be relisted in that state.
Environmentalists sued last year to stop the delisting under the Bush administration. They argued that without protection, wolf numbers were not great enough to assure connectivity between animals in different regions of the northern Rockies, which is crucial to assuring long-term survival.
A federal judge agreed, issuing a temporary injunction to stop the delisting. The Fish and Wildlife Service then dropped its proposal for more study. “We now have information that wolves routinely move back and forth between recovery areas,” said Ed Bangs, the agency’s recovery coordinator in Helena, Mont. “We’ve resolved that issue.”
Environmentalists say they will take the issue back to court.
While state wolf management plans in Idaho and Montana assure protection, federal officials say, the one in Wyoming falls short, so the wolf will remain listed there. Yet in most of Wyoming, the wolf is designated as a predator and could be shot on sight if it were to be delisted. Controversy erupted last year when people chased wolves down on snowmobiles and killed them from planes.
The delisting allows Montana and Idaho to assume complete management of the animal, which will include a hunting season in both states. The move also delists wolves in the western Great Lakes and parts of Oregon, Utah and Washington.
The new policy was announced by the Bush administration in January, but its adoption was delayed so the incoming Obama administration could assess it.
“The recovery of the gray wolf throughout significant portions of its historic range is one of the great success stories of the Endangered Species Act,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said. “Today, we have more than 5,500 wolves, including more than 1,600 in the Rockies.”
Jenny Harbine, a lawyer with Earthjustice in Bozeman, Mont., which has sued to keep the federal protections, said, “We’re disappointed.” She added, “Idaho has shown an eagerness to kill as many wolves as possible, and they are drawing up plans for killing wolves as we speak.”
In 2007, Gov. C. L. Otter of Idaho said he favored reducing the number of wolves there to 100 from more than 800. He also said he would be the first to buy a wolf hunting license.
Officially, however, Idaho has agreed in its state plan to maintain a population of 500 wolves. Montana has agreed to keep 400 wolves. If the number of animals falls below 150 total and 15 breeding pairs for three years in a row, the wolf will be relisted in that state.
Environmentalists sued last year to stop the delisting under the Bush administration. They argued that without protection, wolf numbers were not great enough to assure connectivity between animals in different regions of the northern Rockies, which is crucial to assuring long-term survival.
A federal judge agreed, issuing a temporary injunction to stop the delisting. The Fish and Wildlife Service then dropped its proposal for more study. “We now have information that wolves routinely move back and forth between recovery areas,” said Ed Bangs, the agency’s recovery coordinator in Helena, Mont. “We’ve resolved that issue.”
Environmentalists say they will take the issue back to court.
While state wolf management plans in Idaho and Montana assure protection, federal officials say, the one in Wyoming falls short, so the wolf will remain listed there. Yet in most of Wyoming, the wolf is designated as a predator and could be shot on sight if it were to be delisted. Controversy erupted last year when people chased wolves down on snowmobiles and killed them from planes.
Friday, March 6, 2009
NY Times: Extensive lands protection bill could thwart new energy development
The 111th Congress is poised to usher in the largest expansion of the nation's wilderness in a generation, with 2.1 million acres of public land in line for the strictest environmental protections allowed under federal law.
An omnibus lands bill that could receive final congressional approval this month would create new wilderness areas in nine states -- from the San Gabriel Mountains of California to Michigan's Lake Superior shoreline to a portion of the Appalachian Trail in Virginia -- covering almost as much land as the 2.4 million acres designated during the entire eight years of the Bush presidency.
Meanwhile, Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), and Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) last month introduced the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, which would designate 24 million acres of mostly Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land in five states as wilderness area.
The wilderness proposals carry significant implications, particularly for BLM and the Forest Service, which must manage public lands for multiple uses, including oil and gas drilling, minerals mining, timber harvesting and a variety of recreational uses.
By contrast, wilderness areas are by their very definition sanctuaries of quiet solitude, or as the 1964 law states, areas "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." In practical terms, that means wilderness is off limits to all human activities except hiking, canoeing and some hunting and fishing.
The surge in congressional interest in wilderness designations, particularly by Democrats but also some Republicans, is a tonic to many conservation groups who are still angered by Bush administration policies that they say favored natural resource extraction priorities like mining and drilling over land preservation.
"If you've ever gone out and taken a look at areas intensively drilled for oil and gas, you're talking about lands that look like a moonscape. They're ecologically devastated," said Paul Spitler, national wilderness campaigns associate director for the Wilderness Society. "These designations are significant because people don't realize that public lands are open to a wide variety of uses that can be just as damaging as putting up a bunch of condos."
There are, however, potential drawbacks to expanding wilderness designations, especially when it comes to energy production.
Roughly a third of the country's domestic energy is produced on lands managed by the Interior Department, officials say, and those numbers are expected to grow as more wind and solar energy projects are approved on public lands.
But wind farms, solar arrays and geothermal plants are forbidden in wilderness areas, said Mike Olsen, a former Interior senior administrator now with the environmental strategies group at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani.
That is a huge concern, Olsen said, because the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes billions of dollars in incentives and tax breaks to encourage the development of renewable energy.
"You are in effect closing these lands off to domestic energy development," Olsen said. "In this world, where domestic energy production is so important, what does this mean to have additional public land taken off the table for energy development? I'm not placing value on one over the other. But we need to consider these impacts."
Spitler acknowledged the wilderness designations could affect some alternative energy development. He also is sensitive to the concerns of those who worry the wilderness designations could lessen their enjoyment of public land. Motorized vehicles such as snowmobiles are forbidden in wilderness areas.
But he and other conservationists say the increased protections are necessary.
"Between energy production and off-road vehicles we're losing land at a rapid pace," Spitler said. "We need these areas to receive permanent protection before they're lost."
A new vision
At issue is the National Wilderness Preservation System and attempts to add to the 107 million acres of public land already designated as wilderness.
The centerpiece of the latest effort to expand wilderness designations is the "Omnibus Public Land Management Act," which the Senate approved in January. The bill consolidates dozens of individual wilderness bills, from designating 37,000 acres within the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia to 700,000 acres and 105 miles of rivers and streams in California.
If Congress approves the measure, it will be the single largest wilderness designation since the 1994 California Desert Protection Act, which extended the highest federal protection to 3.5 million acres of BLM lands in the Mojave Desert.
The new push for wilderness represents a stark change from the Bush administration and 12 years of the Republican-controlled Congresses, which tended to view public lands as resources that should be tapped for their abundant fossil fuels, timber and minerals, said Myke Bybee, a public lands representative for the Sierra Club.
"The wilderness designations in the omnibus bill will add a level of protection that's far more extensive than what they are now, and I think it's necessary," said Bill Wade, executive council chairman of the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, which was critical of the Bush administration's conservation policies.
Some of the wilderness designations in the bill, such as expanding the 14,000-acre Little River Canyon National Preserve in northeast Alabama, would have tremendous environmental value. Little River, atop Lookout Mountain, is one of the nation's longest mountaintop rivers and proponents want to ensure it stays pristine.
Other designations, like the expansion of the Fort Davis National Historic Site in west Texas, are vulnerable but have cultural significance as well. The fort, built in 1854, housed the Army's all-black regiments known as the Buffalo Soldiers.
Most of the proposed wilderness areas in the bill are the result of lengthy negotiations between interest groups, and in some cases the new designations involve trade-offs between preservation and development interests.
For example, Zion National Park in southwest Utah is in the fastest-growing county in the state, and large developments have been proposed to the east and north of the park that could hamper the quality of the natural resource, said David Nimkin, director of the southwest region for the National Parks Conservation Association.
The omnibus lands bill would designate 123,743 acres -- more than 90 percent of the park -- as wilderness. In exchange, lawmakers agreed to sell 9,300 acres of public land to developers and use the money to purchase private parcels within the park boundaries, Nimkin said.
"Getting this thing done is a big deal," he said. "It codifies the protections for the national park into law. There are different administrations, different land managers, and various degrees of local pressure. This takes the administrative decisionmaking and discretion out of the hands of the public land manager."
Planning for global warming
One reason environmentalists are pushing to expand wilderness areas is to protect plants and animals from the damaging effects of climate change.
Scientists have calculated that for every increase in temperature of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the vegetation belt shifts 60 miles north or 550 feet higher in elevation. As vegetation shifts, so too will thousands of species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. Those species whose habitat is not obstructed by highways, subdivisions and other development should be able to migrate to more hospitable climates; those that cannot will die.
The Interior Department and Forest Service have worked the past several years with a conservation effort know as the Wildlands Network to develop and maintain carefully plotted corridors connecting already preserved lands to one another. The network's goal is to create a 5,000-mile-long wildlife corridor stretching from Mexico to Alaska -- an effort that would take decades.
To succeed, the program must connect protected parcels that would allow for northward migration of at-risk species, said John Kostyack, executive director of wildlife conservation and global warming for the National Wildlife Federation.
"Global warming is leading to a complete transformation of how we look at conservation," Kostyack said.
Congress acknowledged that fact last year in the failed Climate Security Act of 2008 sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Warner (R-Va.). The bill, which would have been the first to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, included a provision to allocate as much as $7.2 billion a year to BLM, the Park Service, Forest Service and other agencies to purchase conservation easements and restore degraded habitats.
President Obama pledged support for the creation of such a fund during the 2008 campaign. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has listed the creation of such a fund as a priority in any future greenhouse gas legislation.
"All the science tells us that we'll need to have connected landscapes for animals and plants to move as the climate warms, and we've already seen in some cases massive shifts of vegetative communities northward," Kostyack said. "It's certainly a key rationale for expanded wildlife designations."
OHV destruction
Another reason cited by environmental groups for expanding U.S. wilderness areas is to protect wildlife and habitat from damage caused by off-highway vehicles like dirt bikes, snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles, which have surged in popularity in recent years.
Snowmobiles in Yosemite National Park, for example, have sparked controversy and court battles, with park managers ultimately setting a daily cap on the number of snowmobiles allowed in the park because their engines scare away wildlife. And in Southern California's Mojave Desert, use of off-highway vehicles on BLM land have crushed hundreds of endangered desert tortoises.
"On the fragile ecosystem in the deserts in the West, where we don't get a lot of rain, the vegetation is already making a living in a very harsh environment," said Ileene Anderson, staff biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity in Los Angeles. "So having somebody come riding their motorcycle or [all-terrain vehicle] through a pristine desert and running over everything, it has a cascading effect on the plants, insects and animals. These fragile lands can't take this continuous assault."
While acknowledging "there are a few knuckleheads" who cause damage to natural resources, Bill Dart, director of land use for the Bakersfield, Calif.-based Off-Road Business Association, a national trade group, said such incidents do not justify a federal prohibition on OHV use by law-abiding citizens on public lands.
"The impacts of off-road vehicles on wildlife have been overblown," Dart said.
Still, Dart said he is encouraged by the fact that federal officials and some advocacy groups have been willing to work with his group when developing wilderness area proposals.
For example, Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) consulted the Off-Road Business Association when developing a proposed 27,000-acre wilderness designation in the San Gabriel Mountains in Northern California. The proposed Pleasant View Ridge Wilderness Area is one of the projects in the omnibus lands bill.
"They were willing to take out all the [off-road trails] that were of interest to us," Dart said. "Wildlife designations are appropriate as long as they don't get carried away. There is a way to do this that's a win-win situation for everyone."
A sign of things to come
While larger than anything proposed under the last several Congresses, the 2009 wilderness proposals are just a glimpse of things to come, congressional watchdogs and conservation leaders say.
Once the omnibus lands bill is approved, the floodgates will open and lawmakers will introduce dozens of wilderness proposals covering potentially millions of acres, experts say.
"There's a whole suite of bills ready to go," said Spitler of the Wilderness Society.
Many of the proposals will come as reintroduced bills from the past six years "that just never got their day in their sun," said Bybee, the Sierra Club official.
Many of the proposals will be modest and noncontroversial, such as a bill by Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) to add about 22,000 acres to the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area in Washington.
Others are huge proposals covering vast expanses of public land. They include:
* California Wild Heritage: Sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the bill seeks to designate 2.5 million acres of wilderness, and an additional 400 miles of national wild and scenic rivers across the state. Originally introduced in 2002, Boxer is expected to revive the bill this spring.
* America's Red Rock Wilderness: By far the largest proposal, this bill would designate 9 million acres across Utah as wilderness. The proposal has been introduced in every Congress since 1989 but has never won support from a majority of of Utah's congressional delegation. Nevertheless, plans are under way to reintroduce the bill this session.
* Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness: Proposed by Rep. Mike Simpson, (R-Idaho), the bill would extend wilderness protection to roughly 315,000 acres in the Sawtooth and Salmon-Challis national forests in east-central Idaho.
"Up until recently you had a Congress that wasn't very receptive to wilderness designations, particularly on the House side," Spitler said. "We're finally starting to unclog the pipeline on wilderness designations."
Scott Streater is a freelance journalist based in Colorado Springs, Colo.
An omnibus lands bill that could receive final congressional approval this month would create new wilderness areas in nine states -- from the San Gabriel Mountains of California to Michigan's Lake Superior shoreline to a portion of the Appalachian Trail in Virginia -- covering almost as much land as the 2.4 million acres designated during the entire eight years of the Bush presidency.
Meanwhile, Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), and Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) last month introduced the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act, which would designate 24 million acres of mostly Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service land in five states as wilderness area.
The wilderness proposals carry significant implications, particularly for BLM and the Forest Service, which must manage public lands for multiple uses, including oil and gas drilling, minerals mining, timber harvesting and a variety of recreational uses.
By contrast, wilderness areas are by their very definition sanctuaries of quiet solitude, or as the 1964 law states, areas "where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." In practical terms, that means wilderness is off limits to all human activities except hiking, canoeing and some hunting and fishing.
The surge in congressional interest in wilderness designations, particularly by Democrats but also some Republicans, is a tonic to many conservation groups who are still angered by Bush administration policies that they say favored natural resource extraction priorities like mining and drilling over land preservation.
"If you've ever gone out and taken a look at areas intensively drilled for oil and gas, you're talking about lands that look like a moonscape. They're ecologically devastated," said Paul Spitler, national wilderness campaigns associate director for the Wilderness Society. "These designations are significant because people don't realize that public lands are open to a wide variety of uses that can be just as damaging as putting up a bunch of condos."
There are, however, potential drawbacks to expanding wilderness designations, especially when it comes to energy production.
Roughly a third of the country's domestic energy is produced on lands managed by the Interior Department, officials say, and those numbers are expected to grow as more wind and solar energy projects are approved on public lands.
But wind farms, solar arrays and geothermal plants are forbidden in wilderness areas, said Mike Olsen, a former Interior senior administrator now with the environmental strategies group at the law firm Bracewell & Giuliani.
That is a huge concern, Olsen said, because the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes billions of dollars in incentives and tax breaks to encourage the development of renewable energy.
"You are in effect closing these lands off to domestic energy development," Olsen said. "In this world, where domestic energy production is so important, what does this mean to have additional public land taken off the table for energy development? I'm not placing value on one over the other. But we need to consider these impacts."
Spitler acknowledged the wilderness designations could affect some alternative energy development. He also is sensitive to the concerns of those who worry the wilderness designations could lessen their enjoyment of public land. Motorized vehicles such as snowmobiles are forbidden in wilderness areas.
But he and other conservationists say the increased protections are necessary.
"Between energy production and off-road vehicles we're losing land at a rapid pace," Spitler said. "We need these areas to receive permanent protection before they're lost."
A new vision
At issue is the National Wilderness Preservation System and attempts to add to the 107 million acres of public land already designated as wilderness.
The centerpiece of the latest effort to expand wilderness designations is the "Omnibus Public Land Management Act," which the Senate approved in January. The bill consolidates dozens of individual wilderness bills, from designating 37,000 acres within the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia to 700,000 acres and 105 miles of rivers and streams in California.
If Congress approves the measure, it will be the single largest wilderness designation since the 1994 California Desert Protection Act, which extended the highest federal protection to 3.5 million acres of BLM lands in the Mojave Desert.
The new push for wilderness represents a stark change from the Bush administration and 12 years of the Republican-controlled Congresses, which tended to view public lands as resources that should be tapped for their abundant fossil fuels, timber and minerals, said Myke Bybee, a public lands representative for the Sierra Club.
"The wilderness designations in the omnibus bill will add a level of protection that's far more extensive than what they are now, and I think it's necessary," said Bill Wade, executive council chairman of the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, which was critical of the Bush administration's conservation policies.
Some of the wilderness designations in the bill, such as expanding the 14,000-acre Little River Canyon National Preserve in northeast Alabama, would have tremendous environmental value. Little River, atop Lookout Mountain, is one of the nation's longest mountaintop rivers and proponents want to ensure it stays pristine.
Other designations, like the expansion of the Fort Davis National Historic Site in west Texas, are vulnerable but have cultural significance as well. The fort, built in 1854, housed the Army's all-black regiments known as the Buffalo Soldiers.
Most of the proposed wilderness areas in the bill are the result of lengthy negotiations between interest groups, and in some cases the new designations involve trade-offs between preservation and development interests.
For example, Zion National Park in southwest Utah is in the fastest-growing county in the state, and large developments have been proposed to the east and north of the park that could hamper the quality of the natural resource, said David Nimkin, director of the southwest region for the National Parks Conservation Association.
The omnibus lands bill would designate 123,743 acres -- more than 90 percent of the park -- as wilderness. In exchange, lawmakers agreed to sell 9,300 acres of public land to developers and use the money to purchase private parcels within the park boundaries, Nimkin said.
"Getting this thing done is a big deal," he said. "It codifies the protections for the national park into law. There are different administrations, different land managers, and various degrees of local pressure. This takes the administrative decisionmaking and discretion out of the hands of the public land manager."
Planning for global warming
One reason environmentalists are pushing to expand wilderness areas is to protect plants and animals from the damaging effects of climate change.
Scientists have calculated that for every increase in temperature of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, the vegetation belt shifts 60 miles north or 550 feet higher in elevation. As vegetation shifts, so too will thousands of species of mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians. Those species whose habitat is not obstructed by highways, subdivisions and other development should be able to migrate to more hospitable climates; those that cannot will die.
The Interior Department and Forest Service have worked the past several years with a conservation effort know as the Wildlands Network to develop and maintain carefully plotted corridors connecting already preserved lands to one another. The network's goal is to create a 5,000-mile-long wildlife corridor stretching from Mexico to Alaska -- an effort that would take decades.
To succeed, the program must connect protected parcels that would allow for northward migration of at-risk species, said John Kostyack, executive director of wildlife conservation and global warming for the National Wildlife Federation.
"Global warming is leading to a complete transformation of how we look at conservation," Kostyack said.
Congress acknowledged that fact last year in the failed Climate Security Act of 2008 sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), and John Warner (R-Va.). The bill, which would have been the first to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, included a provision to allocate as much as $7.2 billion a year to BLM, the Park Service, Forest Service and other agencies to purchase conservation easements and restore degraded habitats.
President Obama pledged support for the creation of such a fund during the 2008 campaign. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has listed the creation of such a fund as a priority in any future greenhouse gas legislation.
"All the science tells us that we'll need to have connected landscapes for animals and plants to move as the climate warms, and we've already seen in some cases massive shifts of vegetative communities northward," Kostyack said. "It's certainly a key rationale for expanded wildlife designations."
OHV destruction
Another reason cited by environmental groups for expanding U.S. wilderness areas is to protect wildlife and habitat from damage caused by off-highway vehicles like dirt bikes, snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles, which have surged in popularity in recent years.
Snowmobiles in Yosemite National Park, for example, have sparked controversy and court battles, with park managers ultimately setting a daily cap on the number of snowmobiles allowed in the park because their engines scare away wildlife. And in Southern California's Mojave Desert, use of off-highway vehicles on BLM land have crushed hundreds of endangered desert tortoises.
"On the fragile ecosystem in the deserts in the West, where we don't get a lot of rain, the vegetation is already making a living in a very harsh environment," said Ileene Anderson, staff biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity in Los Angeles. "So having somebody come riding their motorcycle or [all-terrain vehicle] through a pristine desert and running over everything, it has a cascading effect on the plants, insects and animals. These fragile lands can't take this continuous assault."
While acknowledging "there are a few knuckleheads" who cause damage to natural resources, Bill Dart, director of land use for the Bakersfield, Calif.-based Off-Road Business Association, a national trade group, said such incidents do not justify a federal prohibition on OHV use by law-abiding citizens on public lands.
"The impacts of off-road vehicles on wildlife have been overblown," Dart said.
Still, Dart said he is encouraged by the fact that federal officials and some advocacy groups have been willing to work with his group when developing wilderness area proposals.
For example, Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) consulted the Off-Road Business Association when developing a proposed 27,000-acre wilderness designation in the San Gabriel Mountains in Northern California. The proposed Pleasant View Ridge Wilderness Area is one of the projects in the omnibus lands bill.
"They were willing to take out all the [off-road trails] that were of interest to us," Dart said. "Wildlife designations are appropriate as long as they don't get carried away. There is a way to do this that's a win-win situation for everyone."
A sign of things to come
While larger than anything proposed under the last several Congresses, the 2009 wilderness proposals are just a glimpse of things to come, congressional watchdogs and conservation leaders say.
Once the omnibus lands bill is approved, the floodgates will open and lawmakers will introduce dozens of wilderness proposals covering potentially millions of acres, experts say.
"There's a whole suite of bills ready to go," said Spitler of the Wilderness Society.
Many of the proposals will come as reintroduced bills from the past six years "that just never got their day in their sun," said Bybee, the Sierra Club official.
Many of the proposals will be modest and noncontroversial, such as a bill by Rep. Dave Reichert (R-Wash.) to add about 22,000 acres to the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area in Washington.
Others are huge proposals covering vast expanses of public land. They include:
* California Wild Heritage: Sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the bill seeks to designate 2.5 million acres of wilderness, and an additional 400 miles of national wild and scenic rivers across the state. Originally introduced in 2002, Boxer is expected to revive the bill this spring.
* America's Red Rock Wilderness: By far the largest proposal, this bill would designate 9 million acres across Utah as wilderness. The proposal has been introduced in every Congress since 1989 but has never won support from a majority of of Utah's congressional delegation. Nevertheless, plans are under way to reintroduce the bill this session.
* Boulder-White Clouds Wilderness: Proposed by Rep. Mike Simpson, (R-Idaho), the bill would extend wilderness protection to roughly 315,000 acres in the Sawtooth and Salmon-Challis national forests in east-central Idaho.
"Up until recently you had a Congress that wasn't very receptive to wilderness designations, particularly on the House side," Spitler said. "We're finally starting to unclog the pipeline on wilderness designations."
Scott Streater is a freelance journalist based in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Judge rules in southwest Idaho grazing case
A federal judge has directed the Bureau of Land Management to rethink the way it manages grazing across thousands of acres of southern Idaho, especially the impact livestock have on sage grouse and other threatened species.
But Thursday's decision by U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill falls far short of the all-out ban on grazing sought by conservationists on 625,000 acres of the so-called Jarbidge Resource Area, which stretches across southwestern Idaho and Nevada's northeast corner.
The ruling stems from motions filed last year by the Western Watershed Project, a Hailey-based group that has battled for decades to roll back cattle grazing across Idaho and other western states.
Western Watersheds asked the court to ban grazing on 36 allotments, none of which suffered any damage during the Murphy Complex fire in 2007. Ignited by lightning, that wildfire burned for three weeks and became the largest single fire ever fought by the Idaho BLM at nearly 1,000 square miles, leaving dead wildlife and cattle and scorched prime habitat for sage grouse.
Winmill denied the outright ban and a handful of other motions sought by the group to curtail grazing.
But he concluded that grazing is a key factor in the decline of species like the sage grouse, pygmy rabbit and slickspot peppergrass, and that the agency must give more consideration in the future to the impact grazing has on those species and their habitat.
Western Watersheds attorney Laird Lucas cheered the ruling, saying it should force a wholesale shift in the way the agency manages grazing across the West.
"Science has been overlooked in the past," Lucas said. "It's true we did not get a complete halt to grazing like we had asked for in this area. But for the BLM to have to handle grazing differently and follow science, we think, is on the way to good policy."
The ruling, which followed 10 days of testimony, rejected the group's claim that the agency violated federal environmental laws by failing to consider sage grouse when it approved grazing and the repair of 490 miles of fencing in sensitive habitat areas not burned in the Murphy Complex fire. The fire is blamed for destroying 70 prime breeding grounds for sage grouse.
Winmill, who has presided over other cases involving the threatened, chicken-sized bird, also denied a motion to impose restrictions on grazing allotments litigated in a previous federal case and a separate request that the BLM do another environmental impact study on the lands charred in the 2007 fires.
"We think this was an excellent and fair decision," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Ferguson.
Sage grouse and pygmy rabbit are being reconsidered for federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. The government initially rejected that classification for sage grouse in 2005.
But Western Watersheds sued in federal court in 2007 to force the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to revisit the decision, contending political meddling by White House officials trumped the recommendations by biologists and scientific data. Experts say the bird's numbers are declining, due the loss of sagebrush habitat from wildfire, urban development, grazing, nonnative weed infestations and oil and gas production.
Winmill also presided over that case, ruling in 2007 in favor of Western Watersheds. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision, and a listing decision on the sage grouse is expected later this year.
Lucas said Winmill's latest ruling is one more that favors the bird.
"We all still have to figure out what happens next," Lucas said. "The court did not make that clear. But there is a lot in this ruling that gives the BLM guidance."
But Thursday's decision by U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill falls far short of the all-out ban on grazing sought by conservationists on 625,000 acres of the so-called Jarbidge Resource Area, which stretches across southwestern Idaho and Nevada's northeast corner.
The ruling stems from motions filed last year by the Western Watershed Project, a Hailey-based group that has battled for decades to roll back cattle grazing across Idaho and other western states.
Western Watersheds asked the court to ban grazing on 36 allotments, none of which suffered any damage during the Murphy Complex fire in 2007. Ignited by lightning, that wildfire burned for three weeks and became the largest single fire ever fought by the Idaho BLM at nearly 1,000 square miles, leaving dead wildlife and cattle and scorched prime habitat for sage grouse.
Winmill denied the outright ban and a handful of other motions sought by the group to curtail grazing.
But he concluded that grazing is a key factor in the decline of species like the sage grouse, pygmy rabbit and slickspot peppergrass, and that the agency must give more consideration in the future to the impact grazing has on those species and their habitat.
Western Watersheds attorney Laird Lucas cheered the ruling, saying it should force a wholesale shift in the way the agency manages grazing across the West.
"Science has been overlooked in the past," Lucas said. "It's true we did not get a complete halt to grazing like we had asked for in this area. But for the BLM to have to handle grazing differently and follow science, we think, is on the way to good policy."
The ruling, which followed 10 days of testimony, rejected the group's claim that the agency violated federal environmental laws by failing to consider sage grouse when it approved grazing and the repair of 490 miles of fencing in sensitive habitat areas not burned in the Murphy Complex fire. The fire is blamed for destroying 70 prime breeding grounds for sage grouse.
Winmill, who has presided over other cases involving the threatened, chicken-sized bird, also denied a motion to impose restrictions on grazing allotments litigated in a previous federal case and a separate request that the BLM do another environmental impact study on the lands charred in the 2007 fires.
"We think this was an excellent and fair decision," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Deborah Ferguson.
Sage grouse and pygmy rabbit are being reconsidered for federal protection under the Endangered Species Act. The government initially rejected that classification for sage grouse in 2005.
But Western Watersheds sued in federal court in 2007 to force the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to revisit the decision, contending political meddling by White House officials trumped the recommendations by biologists and scientific data. Experts say the bird's numbers are declining, due the loss of sagebrush habitat from wildfire, urban development, grazing, nonnative weed infestations and oil and gas production.
Winmill also presided over that case, ruling in 2007 in favor of Western Watersheds. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that decision, and a listing decision on the sage grouse is expected later this year.
Lucas said Winmill's latest ruling is one more that favors the bird.
"We all still have to figure out what happens next," Lucas said. "The court did not make that clear. But there is a lot in this ruling that gives the BLM guidance."
Monday, March 2, 2009
Attempt to move Forest Service could spark turf war
In what eventually could become a major bureaucratic turf war, there have been stirrings on Capitol Hill about moving the U.S. Forest Service from the Agriculture to the Interior Department.
For more than a century, the Forest Service, which manages the federal forests, has been part of the Agriculture Department, while the nation's three other public lands agencies - the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service - have been at Interior.
Together, the Forest Service and these other agencies manage more than 680 million acres of forests, rangelands, wetlands, pristine parks and untouched wilderness, mostly in the West.
Backers of the switch say it makes sense because the agencies face such similar problems as climate change, wildfires and the pressures of urbanization. Critics say the move wouldn't save much money, at least initially, and it could leave the Forest Service more vulnerable to political pressure.
"We believe there is a need to approach these things innovatively - to think outside the box," Robin Nazzaro, director of natural resources and environment for the Government Accountability Office, said in an interview. "This is one option. This is the beginning of the debate on how to position ourselves to meet these challenges."
Nazzaro was among those who testified last week before the House Appropriations Committee's interior subcommittee about moving the Forest Service to Interior. The committee controls the purse strings for the Forest Service, even though it is part of Agriculture, and the Interior Department.
During the hearing, subcommittee chairman Norm Dicks, D-Wash., said that "we regularly see inconsistencies" between how the Forest Service and the Interior Department handle public lands, adding that there was "room for more collaboration" to make land management more effective and efficient.
In a later interview, however, Dicks said he found the GAO report, which he had requested, inconclusive. Though not ruling the switch out entirely, Dicks said, "I came out of the hearing thinking it would be better to leave things as they are."
The issue isn't new. It has been explored five times in the past four decades, including during the Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations. In several cases, actual legislation was drafted. The proposals never got off the ground, however, blocked by interest groups or Capitol Hill politics.
Several of the proposals called for establishing a separate Department of Natural Resources, which would include the Forest Service, the Interior Department's three land agencies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is part of the Commerce Department.
The Carter administration said such a combination could save $160 million over several years. The Nixon administration made similar proposals, including one to create a Department of Environment and Natural Resources that would include many of the functions now handled by the Environmental Protection Agency, which was established in 1970.
Among other things, the Reagan administration proposed streamlining operations by transferring almost 20 million acres of BLM lands to the Forest Service and almost 14 million acres of Forest Service land to the BLM.
"All these failed because of political decisions at the time or the environment at the time just changed," Nazzaro said.
The Interior Department was established in 1849 and given authority over the public lands acquired as the nation expanded westward. Then in 1905, Congress transferred control of what were then called the forest reserves to the Agriculture Department, where they were combined with the department's forestry research program into the Forest Service. Those pushing the creation of the new agency said the nation's forest and timber supply would be better managed by Agriculture Department officials.
For more than a century, the Forest Service, which manages the federal forests, has been part of the Agriculture Department, while the nation's three other public lands agencies - the Bureau of Land Management, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service - have been at Interior.
Together, the Forest Service and these other agencies manage more than 680 million acres of forests, rangelands, wetlands, pristine parks and untouched wilderness, mostly in the West.
Backers of the switch say it makes sense because the agencies face such similar problems as climate change, wildfires and the pressures of urbanization. Critics say the move wouldn't save much money, at least initially, and it could leave the Forest Service more vulnerable to political pressure.
"We believe there is a need to approach these things innovatively - to think outside the box," Robin Nazzaro, director of natural resources and environment for the Government Accountability Office, said in an interview. "This is one option. This is the beginning of the debate on how to position ourselves to meet these challenges."
Nazzaro was among those who testified last week before the House Appropriations Committee's interior subcommittee about moving the Forest Service to Interior. The committee controls the purse strings for the Forest Service, even though it is part of Agriculture, and the Interior Department.
During the hearing, subcommittee chairman Norm Dicks, D-Wash., said that "we regularly see inconsistencies" between how the Forest Service and the Interior Department handle public lands, adding that there was "room for more collaboration" to make land management more effective and efficient.
In a later interview, however, Dicks said he found the GAO report, which he had requested, inconclusive. Though not ruling the switch out entirely, Dicks said, "I came out of the hearing thinking it would be better to leave things as they are."
The issue isn't new. It has been explored five times in the past four decades, including during the Nixon, Carter and Reagan administrations. In several cases, actual legislation was drafted. The proposals never got off the ground, however, blocked by interest groups or Capitol Hill politics.
Several of the proposals called for establishing a separate Department of Natural Resources, which would include the Forest Service, the Interior Department's three land agencies and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is part of the Commerce Department.
The Carter administration said such a combination could save $160 million over several years. The Nixon administration made similar proposals, including one to create a Department of Environment and Natural Resources that would include many of the functions now handled by the Environmental Protection Agency, which was established in 1970.
Among other things, the Reagan administration proposed streamlining operations by transferring almost 20 million acres of BLM lands to the Forest Service and almost 14 million acres of Forest Service land to the BLM.
"All these failed because of political decisions at the time or the environment at the time just changed," Nazzaro said.
The Interior Department was established in 1849 and given authority over the public lands acquired as the nation expanded westward. Then in 1905, Congress transferred control of what were then called the forest reserves to the Agriculture Department, where they were combined with the department's forestry research program into the Forest Service. Those pushing the creation of the new agency said the nation's forest and timber supply would be better managed by Agriculture Department officials.
How do we manage to manage public lands?
The business of managing public lands is messy, somewhat akin to the sausage making of legislatures. And Congress frequently makes it worse.
Take the Rec Rac, for instance. More on that unfortunate acronym in a bit.
For more than 30 years, I’ve observed and written about federal employees and citizen volunteers who struggle to make responsible decisions on the use of public lands. Most of the time, members of the public are drastically divided over what the proper management prescription should be, and each side is vehement that its idea is the only appropriate one. Always, there is a web of often-conflicting laws for the decision makers to wade through.
Although I have disagreed with the decisions made on many occasions, I have a great respect for the federal employees and citizen volunteers who try to find the best way to manage our public lands.
Sometimes, however, you just have to shake your head at the layers of rules dropped on those trying to formulate land-management policy.
A case in point is the Rec Rac — or Recreation Resource Advisory Committee — which examines fee proposals related to recreation on public lands for both Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands.
The Colorado Rec Rac was the subject of discussion last week during a joint meeting of all of the BLM Resource Advisory Councils in Colorado.
For readers not well-versed in public-lands acronyms, the resource advisory councils, or RACs (not to be confused with the Rec Rac) were created during the Clinton administration to advise the BLM. There are three resource advisory councils in Colorado, each with 15 members — the Front Range RAC, the Southwest RAC and the Northwest RAC, which includes Mesa County. Representatives from this community include Mike Perry with the Museum of Western Colorado, conservationist Charles Kerr and mountain-bike enthusiast Pat Kennedy. There are also ranchers, off-road vehicle users and oil-and-gas industry representatives on the RAC.
They examine issues and offer the BLM recommendations on topics ranging from grazing to gas drilling to recreation.
That’s right, recreation. These groups, with citizens representing a wide array of interests, already provide recommendations to the BLM regarding things like recreation fees. So why is another bureaucratic beast such as the Rec Rac necessary?
Gene King, a Denver-area resident and member of the Front Range RAC, left little doubt during the combined RAC meeting Wednesday what he thought of the issue.
“The reason we have this is that it was stuck in an omnibus bill by a congressman from Ohio, I believe, without any public input,” he said. “And now we’re stuck with this piece of crap.”
I couldn’t find evidence of who the congressman was, but King was otherwise correct about the origins of the Rec Racs. They were created through the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, which was included in the 2005 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, according to a federal Web site.
They were in response to what was then a broad grass-roots effort that included people in western Colorado who objected to a federal fee demonstration program then being implemented on federal lands. The Rec Racs were to provide another opportunity for people to offer input on recreational fees and create consistency on how and when they are implemented.
But Colorado’s has proved to be a slow-moving entity, even when there is public support for the fee proposals under consideration.
For example, Catherine Robertson, the manager of the Grand Junction Field Office for the BLM, has submitted two proposals for fees in this area. One would raise the fee at the Mud Springs Campground from $5 to $10 per camp site. The other would institute a new $10 camping fee at the camping area in the North Fruita Desert.
Not only did the BLM get support from the Northwest RAC for both fee increases, but for the North Fruita Desert fee, it obtained letters of support from the city of Fruita, the Mesa County commissioners and local mountain bikers who are the main users of the camp sites. However, the Colorado Rec Rac has so far dithered on making a recommendation regarding the fee increases.
Then there is the question of how much authority the Rec Rac has. One member of the group who was present at last week’s joint meeting said the Rec Rac’s decisions can only be overturned by the secretary of the Interior Department. Others believe that, like the regional resource advisory councils, Rec Rac decisions are only recommendations. The BLM and Forest Service can overrule them if they choose.
The bit of legislation in the omnibus appropriations bill may have been inserted with good intentions — to allow more public input on recreation fees and provide consistency on when fees should be charged and how much they can be. But Congress did public lands managers and citizens who work with them no favors by including it.
There are already many opportunities for public input, not least through the regional resource advisory committees. The Rec Rac is an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy that only adds to the analysis paralysis that infects so much public lands management.
Take the Rec Rac, for instance. More on that unfortunate acronym in a bit.
For more than 30 years, I’ve observed and written about federal employees and citizen volunteers who struggle to make responsible decisions on the use of public lands. Most of the time, members of the public are drastically divided over what the proper management prescription should be, and each side is vehement that its idea is the only appropriate one. Always, there is a web of often-conflicting laws for the decision makers to wade through.
Although I have disagreed with the decisions made on many occasions, I have a great respect for the federal employees and citizen volunteers who try to find the best way to manage our public lands.
Sometimes, however, you just have to shake your head at the layers of rules dropped on those trying to formulate land-management policy.
A case in point is the Rec Rac — or Recreation Resource Advisory Committee — which examines fee proposals related to recreation on public lands for both Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service lands.
The Colorado Rec Rac was the subject of discussion last week during a joint meeting of all of the BLM Resource Advisory Councils in Colorado.
For readers not well-versed in public-lands acronyms, the resource advisory councils, or RACs (not to be confused with the Rec Rac) were created during the Clinton administration to advise the BLM. There are three resource advisory councils in Colorado, each with 15 members — the Front Range RAC, the Southwest RAC and the Northwest RAC, which includes Mesa County. Representatives from this community include Mike Perry with the Museum of Western Colorado, conservationist Charles Kerr and mountain-bike enthusiast Pat Kennedy. There are also ranchers, off-road vehicle users and oil-and-gas industry representatives on the RAC.
They examine issues and offer the BLM recommendations on topics ranging from grazing to gas drilling to recreation.
That’s right, recreation. These groups, with citizens representing a wide array of interests, already provide recommendations to the BLM regarding things like recreation fees. So why is another bureaucratic beast such as the Rec Rac necessary?
Gene King, a Denver-area resident and member of the Front Range RAC, left little doubt during the combined RAC meeting Wednesday what he thought of the issue.
“The reason we have this is that it was stuck in an omnibus bill by a congressman from Ohio, I believe, without any public input,” he said. “And now we’re stuck with this piece of crap.”
I couldn’t find evidence of who the congressman was, but King was otherwise correct about the origins of the Rec Racs. They were created through the Federal Lands Recreation Enhancement Act, which was included in the 2005 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, according to a federal Web site.
They were in response to what was then a broad grass-roots effort that included people in western Colorado who objected to a federal fee demonstration program then being implemented on federal lands. The Rec Racs were to provide another opportunity for people to offer input on recreational fees and create consistency on how and when they are implemented.
But Colorado’s has proved to be a slow-moving entity, even when there is public support for the fee proposals under consideration.
For example, Catherine Robertson, the manager of the Grand Junction Field Office for the BLM, has submitted two proposals for fees in this area. One would raise the fee at the Mud Springs Campground from $5 to $10 per camp site. The other would institute a new $10 camping fee at the camping area in the North Fruita Desert.
Not only did the BLM get support from the Northwest RAC for both fee increases, but for the North Fruita Desert fee, it obtained letters of support from the city of Fruita, the Mesa County commissioners and local mountain bikers who are the main users of the camp sites. However, the Colorado Rec Rac has so far dithered on making a recommendation regarding the fee increases.
Then there is the question of how much authority the Rec Rac has. One member of the group who was present at last week’s joint meeting said the Rec Rac’s decisions can only be overturned by the secretary of the Interior Department. Others believe that, like the regional resource advisory councils, Rec Rac decisions are only recommendations. The BLM and Forest Service can overrule them if they choose.
The bit of legislation in the omnibus appropriations bill may have been inserted with good intentions — to allow more public input on recreation fees and provide consistency on when fees should be charged and how much they can be. But Congress did public lands managers and citizens who work with them no favors by including it.
There are already many opportunities for public input, not least through the regional resource advisory committees. The Rec Rac is an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy that only adds to the analysis paralysis that infects so much public lands management.
Saturday, February 28, 2009
NMSLO & Archeological Resources; Legislation
...But not everyone believes the State Land Office is properly overseeing the thousands of archaeological resources on state lands. As a result, archaeologists say, history is being lost.
Under New Mexico law, sites on state lands are not afforded the same protections as those on lands owned by federal agencies such as the US Bureau of Land Management, National Forest Service or National Park Service. A bill before the state Legislature, if passed, would create more stringent oversight regardless of jurisdiction.
Critics say the State Land Office is in particular need of such oversight.
While Land Commissioner Pat Lyons maintains there is no destruction of archaeological sites, of the estimated 250,000 such sites on state lands (according to the State Land Office’s Web site), fewer than 5,000 have been identified and documented.
Furthermore, the State Land Office does not require its leasees to survey for cultural resources before breaking ground on projects. As a result, New Mexico Archeological Council President Deni Seymour writes in an e-mail to SFR:
“Many important archaeological sites are damaged or destroyed, without being recorded or studied.” She adds: “It is sad and it is surprising that a state agency does not see the discovery and protection of cultural resources as part of its obligation and fiduciary responsibility.”...
...Thanks to federal laws such as the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, a company must hire archaeologists before beginning a project—whether for energy development or, say, the construction of roads, pipelines or transmission lines—that is on federal lands or funded by federal money.
Before the start of a project, these contract archaeologists check state records to learn if sites have already been documented in the area; they then conduct foot surveys to identity remains in the proposed project area.
Under the guidance of the state historic preservation officer’s staff at the Historic Preservation Division, they then determine if a site is worthy of listing on the State Register of Cultural Properties or the National Register of Historic Places.
Because the process for nominating a site to the registers is costly and time-consuming, sites on federal lands are protected—which generally means avoided—if they are deemed “eligible” for listing on either of those two registers. Sites that cannot be avoided during construction are excavated and studied—all at a cost to the company. It’s common, therefore, for developers to adjust their plans—shift the location of a well pad or re-route a road—and avoid archaeological sites whenever possible in order to save money and avoid time delays.
When it comes to state, county or private lands, however, those federal laws don’t apply unless certain things are found—such as human remains—according to Samantha Ruscavage-Barz, a former archaeologist and now a staff attorney for Advocates for the West.
And while there are three New Mexico state laws pertaining to the protection of cultural resources on state lands, these laws are not nearly as clear-cut as the federal laws. In fact, they leave much open to interpretation.
State laws direct agencies to consider only those archaeological sites already listed on the registers, Ruscavage-Barz says. Federal laws, on the other hand, protect sites considered “eligible” for the registries.
If a site hasn’t been listed—or archaeologists have not surveyed an area to determine what resources are present—a state agency can approve a project without having any idea if cultural resources are present. Of the 160,000 archeological sites documented statewide, only 2,000 are listed on the state registry.
“So, we don’t know what’s being lost because we don’t know the full universe of historic properties that are out there,” Ruscavage-Barz says. “We only know what is listed on the state or national register—and that, of course, is a very small subset of potentially eligible sites that are out there on the landscape.”...
...Aside from the political and ideological disagreements Baca may have with Republican Lyons—who defeated Baca, a Democrat, during the 2006 election—the system is indeed antiquated.
“The way the constitution [defines it], the State Land Office exists to make money for the permanent fund for schools,” Baca says. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but this is almost 2010, and we’re operating with a constitution that didn’t take into consideration environmental issues, archaeological resources and other sorts of things that you should consider. It’s not just about making money. In the past it may have worked for us, but now we know better, OK?”
Amendments to the state’s constitution are necessary for reform, Baca says. “We need to change the constitution so that conservation is [considered] a beneficial use on state land—you don’t have to make money from every square acre of land. Some land should be preserved and not used at all,” he says. “But besides making conservation a real and practical use on state trust lands, we also need to have a land board put over the land commissioner.”
An oversight board, Baca says, wouldn’t interfere in day-to-day operations such as oil and gas leasing or grazing permits, but would have veto power over permanent land sales or trades—such as those occurring with regularity along the outskirts of Las Cruces.
Lyons, however, denies sites are being destroyed. “Our laws are a lot more stringent than the federal laws so, as a result of that, nothing gets done in the state [and] we lose a lot of money for education,” he says.
When asked if lessees are expected to conduct archaeological surveys before breaking ground on state trust lands, he answers that most companies rely upon their own staff. “Well, let’s say you’re ConocoPhillips, which is our largest producer: They look at every site before they drill. They send their guys in-house that [are] trained, and they go out and look [at the sites],” he says. “Now, that may not meet [the Historic Preservation Division’s] stringent standards—where they have to have hired somebody that’s been certified by their arch union or whatever it’s called—but they do every site. And if they find something, they flag it; they let people know.”
That wouldn’t be sufficient oversight, under a bill proposed by state Rep. Gail Chasey, D-Bernalillo. If passed, the New Mexico Consolidated Environmental Review Act would ensure that every proposed project, regardless of jurisdiction issues, be subject to environmental and archaeological reviews.
HB 520 would require companies proposing projects on state lands—or using state funding—to complete environmental studies similar to those conducted under the National Environmental Policy Act.
The idea for the bill came after a company planned to build a cement plant across from an elementary school in Albuquerque’s South Valley. There were no laws that required the environmental impacts of the project be evaluated—despite its proximity to the school and potential for pollution—because it was not on federal land or being built with federal funds.
“Any number of [projects] have come up in recent years that have focused our attention on the fact that there is really no requirement whatsoever for state or local governments or state agencies to look at environmental impacts when evaluating certain projects,” she says. “[The Consolidated Environmental Review Act] would put something like this in place.”
Such a law also would mean that archaeological resources overseen by all state agencies would receive the same care they do on federal lands, according to Advocates for the West’s Ruscavage-Barz. “I think it’s a good opportunity to address some of the shortcomings in the state cultural property acts,” she says. “And this would be an opportunity to try to have some sort of requirement for survey on state trust lands, for example, because you would have to be looking for potentially eligible properties as well as making sure there are no listed properties within your project area.”...
Under New Mexico law, sites on state lands are not afforded the same protections as those on lands owned by federal agencies such as the US Bureau of Land Management, National Forest Service or National Park Service. A bill before the state Legislature, if passed, would create more stringent oversight regardless of jurisdiction.
Critics say the State Land Office is in particular need of such oversight.
While Land Commissioner Pat Lyons maintains there is no destruction of archaeological sites, of the estimated 250,000 such sites on state lands (according to the State Land Office’s Web site), fewer than 5,000 have been identified and documented.
Furthermore, the State Land Office does not require its leasees to survey for cultural resources before breaking ground on projects. As a result, New Mexico Archeological Council President Deni Seymour writes in an e-mail to SFR:
“Many important archaeological sites are damaged or destroyed, without being recorded or studied.” She adds: “It is sad and it is surprising that a state agency does not see the discovery and protection of cultural resources as part of its obligation and fiduciary responsibility.”...
...Thanks to federal laws such as the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, a company must hire archaeologists before beginning a project—whether for energy development or, say, the construction of roads, pipelines or transmission lines—that is on federal lands or funded by federal money.
Before the start of a project, these contract archaeologists check state records to learn if sites have already been documented in the area; they then conduct foot surveys to identity remains in the proposed project area.
Under the guidance of the state historic preservation officer’s staff at the Historic Preservation Division, they then determine if a site is worthy of listing on the State Register of Cultural Properties or the National Register of Historic Places.
Because the process for nominating a site to the registers is costly and time-consuming, sites on federal lands are protected—which generally means avoided—if they are deemed “eligible” for listing on either of those two registers. Sites that cannot be avoided during construction are excavated and studied—all at a cost to the company. It’s common, therefore, for developers to adjust their plans—shift the location of a well pad or re-route a road—and avoid archaeological sites whenever possible in order to save money and avoid time delays.
When it comes to state, county or private lands, however, those federal laws don’t apply unless certain things are found—such as human remains—according to Samantha Ruscavage-Barz, a former archaeologist and now a staff attorney for Advocates for the West.
And while there are three New Mexico state laws pertaining to the protection of cultural resources on state lands, these laws are not nearly as clear-cut as the federal laws. In fact, they leave much open to interpretation.
State laws direct agencies to consider only those archaeological sites already listed on the registers, Ruscavage-Barz says. Federal laws, on the other hand, protect sites considered “eligible” for the registries.
If a site hasn’t been listed—or archaeologists have not surveyed an area to determine what resources are present—a state agency can approve a project without having any idea if cultural resources are present. Of the 160,000 archeological sites documented statewide, only 2,000 are listed on the state registry.
“So, we don’t know what’s being lost because we don’t know the full universe of historic properties that are out there,” Ruscavage-Barz says. “We only know what is listed on the state or national register—and that, of course, is a very small subset of potentially eligible sites that are out there on the landscape.”...
...Aside from the political and ideological disagreements Baca may have with Republican Lyons—who defeated Baca, a Democrat, during the 2006 election—the system is indeed antiquated.
“The way the constitution [defines it], the State Land Office exists to make money for the permanent fund for schools,” Baca says. “There’s nothing wrong with that, but this is almost 2010, and we’re operating with a constitution that didn’t take into consideration environmental issues, archaeological resources and other sorts of things that you should consider. It’s not just about making money. In the past it may have worked for us, but now we know better, OK?”
Amendments to the state’s constitution are necessary for reform, Baca says. “We need to change the constitution so that conservation is [considered] a beneficial use on state land—you don’t have to make money from every square acre of land. Some land should be preserved and not used at all,” he says. “But besides making conservation a real and practical use on state trust lands, we also need to have a land board put over the land commissioner.”
An oversight board, Baca says, wouldn’t interfere in day-to-day operations such as oil and gas leasing or grazing permits, but would have veto power over permanent land sales or trades—such as those occurring with regularity along the outskirts of Las Cruces.
Lyons, however, denies sites are being destroyed. “Our laws are a lot more stringent than the federal laws so, as a result of that, nothing gets done in the state [and] we lose a lot of money for education,” he says.
When asked if lessees are expected to conduct archaeological surveys before breaking ground on state trust lands, he answers that most companies rely upon their own staff. “Well, let’s say you’re ConocoPhillips, which is our largest producer: They look at every site before they drill. They send their guys in-house that [are] trained, and they go out and look [at the sites],” he says. “Now, that may not meet [the Historic Preservation Division’s] stringent standards—where they have to have hired somebody that’s been certified by their arch union or whatever it’s called—but they do every site. And if they find something, they flag it; they let people know.”
That wouldn’t be sufficient oversight, under a bill proposed by state Rep. Gail Chasey, D-Bernalillo. If passed, the New Mexico Consolidated Environmental Review Act would ensure that every proposed project, regardless of jurisdiction issues, be subject to environmental and archaeological reviews.
HB 520 would require companies proposing projects on state lands—or using state funding—to complete environmental studies similar to those conducted under the National Environmental Policy Act.
The idea for the bill came after a company planned to build a cement plant across from an elementary school in Albuquerque’s South Valley. There were no laws that required the environmental impacts of the project be evaluated—despite its proximity to the school and potential for pollution—because it was not on federal land or being built with federal funds.
“Any number of [projects] have come up in recent years that have focused our attention on the fact that there is really no requirement whatsoever for state or local governments or state agencies to look at environmental impacts when evaluating certain projects,” she says. “[The Consolidated Environmental Review Act] would put something like this in place.”
Such a law also would mean that archaeological resources overseen by all state agencies would receive the same care they do on federal lands, according to Advocates for the West’s Ruscavage-Barz. “I think it’s a good opportunity to address some of the shortcomings in the state cultural property acts,” she says. “And this would be an opportunity to try to have some sort of requirement for survey on state trust lands, for example, because you would have to be looking for potentially eligible properties as well as making sure there are no listed properties within your project area.”...
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Idaho counties could have final say on bighorns
Idaho's county commissioners would have the final say on transplanting bighorn sheep in the state under two bills introduced Monday in the Senate.
The bills, sponsored by Sen. Monty Pearce, R-New Plymouth, come in response to a Payette National Forest plan to remove domestic sheep grazing from wild bighorn sheep habitat in Hells Canyon and elsewhere to prevent the transmission of diseases that kill the bighorn.
The plan has angered sheep ranchers and Idaho lawmakers who have no power to stop the U.S. Forest Service. So instead, the bills require the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to get certification that not only bighorn sheep but deer, elk, moose, antelope and other big game that are transplanted or relocated in the state have been tested by the Idaho Department of Agriculture.
It also would require Fish and Game to get approval from ranchers who graze in the area before they transplant bighorns.
Finally, the bills would place in state law the existing Fish and Game policy to move or kill any bighorn sheep that move into an area where domestic sheep are grazed.
"I believe there is room for both of them," said Pearce. "But if I have to make a choice I have to make it for people."
Earlier this session, one of the ranchers, Ron Shirts, told lawmakers he is frustrated that the Payette action overrules a 1997 agreement between the state, the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep and others that allowed transplanting of bighorns into Hells Canyon. The agreement said the bighorns would not be used as a pretense to force the ranchers to quit grazing on federal land.
"I think if you sign an agreement you stand by it," Pearce said.
But the Nez Perce Tribe, the Wilderness Society and other groups that were not party to that agreement - especially the Western Watersheds Project - went to court to force the Forest Service to make the ranchers remove their sheep.
No hearings are scheduled yet, but Senate Resources Chairman Sen. Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, said he wanted to make sure disease experts from both in-state and out can testify.
"I'm not inclined to support retribution," Schroeder said.
He also wanted to make sure the bills don't hurt collaborative talks led by Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo.
Idaho Department of Fish and Game officials said they would not comment until the agency's commissioners take a position later this week.
Rocky Barker: 377-6484
The bills, sponsored by Sen. Monty Pearce, R-New Plymouth, come in response to a Payette National Forest plan to remove domestic sheep grazing from wild bighorn sheep habitat in Hells Canyon and elsewhere to prevent the transmission of diseases that kill the bighorn.
The plan has angered sheep ranchers and Idaho lawmakers who have no power to stop the U.S. Forest Service. So instead, the bills require the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to get certification that not only bighorn sheep but deer, elk, moose, antelope and other big game that are transplanted or relocated in the state have been tested by the Idaho Department of Agriculture.
It also would require Fish and Game to get approval from ranchers who graze in the area before they transplant bighorns.
Finally, the bills would place in state law the existing Fish and Game policy to move or kill any bighorn sheep that move into an area where domestic sheep are grazed.
"I believe there is room for both of them," said Pearce. "But if I have to make a choice I have to make it for people."
Earlier this session, one of the ranchers, Ron Shirts, told lawmakers he is frustrated that the Payette action overrules a 1997 agreement between the state, the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep and others that allowed transplanting of bighorns into Hells Canyon. The agreement said the bighorns would not be used as a pretense to force the ranchers to quit grazing on federal land.
"I think if you sign an agreement you stand by it," Pearce said.
But the Nez Perce Tribe, the Wilderness Society and other groups that were not party to that agreement - especially the Western Watersheds Project - went to court to force the Forest Service to make the ranchers remove their sheep.
No hearings are scheduled yet, but Senate Resources Chairman Sen. Gary Schroeder, R-Moscow, said he wanted to make sure disease experts from both in-state and out can testify.
"I'm not inclined to support retribution," Schroeder said.
He also wanted to make sure the bills don't hurt collaborative talks led by Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo.
Idaho Department of Fish and Game officials said they would not comment until the agency's commissioners take a position later this week.
Rocky Barker: 377-6484
Monday, February 23, 2009
Nationalizing the cars and bikes of rock collectors — Pending Omnibus land bill’s forfeiture provision has broad reach
By John Berlau
At the same time there has been so much talk of government nationalization of troubled big banks, a bill quickly snaking through Congress would allow the feds to expropriate cars, bicycles and other “vehicles and equipment” of everyone from amateur collectors of rocks to kids going on scavenger hunts.
In the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, which passed the Senate (S. 22) in January and is up for a vote in the House as early as this Wednesday, a “forfeiture” provision would let the government confiscate “all vehicles and equipment of any person” who disturbs a rock or a bone from federal land that meets the bill’s broad definition of “paleontological resource.” The seizures could take place even before a person and even if the person didn’t know they were taking or digging up a “paleontological resource.” And the bill specifically allows the “transfer of seized resources” to “federal or non-federal” institutions, giving the government and some private actors great incentive to egg on the takings.
Groups representing those from scientists to rock collectors to other fossil enthusiasts have warned of ominous consequences that could criminalize the exploration and learning about natural history ironically in the name of protecting nature. According to Tracie Bennitt, president of the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, the bill’s language is so vague and the penalties such as forfeiture so severe that it could allow the government to “put scientists in jail and confiscate university vans.” In a letter on the bill to members of Congress, Bennitt warns, “We can visualize now a group of students unknowingly crossing over an invisible line and ending up handcuffed and prosecuted.”
The area of concern is Subtitle D of the bill called the “Paleontological Resources Preservation Act.” The provisions in this subtitle make it illegal to “excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface or attempt to excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface any paleontological resources located on Federal land” without special permission from the government.
A “paleontological resource” is broadly defined in the bill as “any fossilized remains, traces, or imprints of organisms, preserved in or on the earth’s crust, that are of paleontological interest and that provide information about the history of life on earth.” Penalities for violations include up to five years in jail, and, as previously stated, all vehicles and equipment “used in connection with the violation” are subject even before trial “to civil forfeiture, or upon conviction, to criminal forfeiture.”
Among the problems, critics explain, is that the language is so broad that merely picking up rocks under this bill could be found guilty of “excavating” or “removing” a “paleontological resource.” There are numerous rocks, stones, and other objects of nature that contain fossilized imprints and, in the bill’s language, “are of paleontological interest and that provide information about the history of life on earth.” In fact, it is likely the most rocks that people pick up would meet this definition.
So people from mining companies to amateur geologists known as “rockhounds” to children gathering stones on field trips could be at risk for unintentionally violating this bill should it become law. The law does purport to allow an exception for a “resonable amount” of “casual collecting,” but then practically negates that excepion by saying that the “reasonable amount” shall be enitirely “determined by the Secretary” of Interior or Agriculture.
In an analysis of a similar bill in previous session of Congress, the policy group Partnership for America noted this scenario, “If a person were to be out hiking and picked up a rock as a souvenir, an enforcement officer who discovers this situation, at his or her discretion, could seize the equipment and the vehicle in use by the person or family at the time of the ‘offense.’” The analysis concluded, “The legislation may sound benign on its surface, yet it could have very dire unintended consequences for mining companies, rock hounds (geology enthusiasts) and average citizens who enjoy our national forests.”
One of those consequences is the civil forfeiture provision in Section 6308, which would leave those accused without their cars or other property until the trial was completed — basically the property would be guilty until proven innocent. As described by the Partnership for America analysis: “Even if a person eventually prevails in their case should they be prosecuted under this Act, their family would be without the use of the equipment and vehicle until the case is adjudicated, which could be months or even years, creating an extreme hardship in many cases. The government would likely try to obtain a guilty plea in exchange for a reduced penalty or the return of some of the personal property, which many innocent citizens would accept to avoid the cost and inconvenience of a trial.”
In fact, civil forfeiture had been so abused in drug cases — with reports of cops driving around Porsches of suspected drug offenders –that a group of conservative and liberal congressmen drafted a bill to reform the process. The late House Judiciary Committe Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill. and then-Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., joined with Rep. (and current Judiciary Committee Chairman) John Conyers, D-Mich., and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., to sponsor the Asset Forfeiture Reform Act that was signed into law in 2000. The law increased the government’s burden of proof before it could engage in the pre-trial confiscation of the property of the accused.
Describing the situation before the law was passed, Hyde wrote in his Cato Institute book Forfeiting Our Property Rights, “Civil asset forfeiture has allowed police to view all of America as some giant national K-Mart, where prices are not just lower, but non-existent — a sort of law enforcement ‘pick-and-don’t-pay.”
But the pending Omnibus bill would unfortunatley take U.S. civil liberties a big step back to the situation before the 2000 reforms passed. And as Bennitt of the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences points out in her letter, it also creates the vaguely defined crime of “submit[ting] any false record, account, or label for, or any false identification of, any paleontological resource excavated or removed from Federal land.”
But in geology, false records can be unintentional and are often unavoidable. As Bennitt notes, honest errors in labeling fossils are almost inevitable even for the top museums. She writes: “Paleontology is a field that is not set in stone. What you find and label in the field may not be what you find as preparation is undertaken in the lab.”
She adds that “penalties for misidentification of fossils will place every museum in jeopardy,” because “there is not one museum that is free from labeling errors on specimens” in some of its exhibits or collections.
Bennitt concludes that the bill would have the perverse effect of limiting scientific inquiry and knowledge of natural history. She notes that “museums and universities collecting on public land do not have the time, money or staff to collect everything they see. These specimens end up as dust as they erode away.” Amateur and professional fossil collectors have helped scientists piece together natural history, and this bill may lock thier skill out of the process.
At a time when the federal government should be busy catching and jailing the Madoffs, Stanfords, and other alleged fraudsters who swindled Americans out of billions, it seems a particular waste of time to hunt down nature enthusiasts who may have inadvertently disturbed a “palentological resource.” And it would indeed be a tragedy if a rock hunter’s bike or car were “nationalized” before the first bad bank was even laid a finger on.
The House will like be voting this week on the bill as S. 22, the exact same “Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009″ that passed the Senate with these provisions. Some reports have the bill being scheduled for a Wednesday vote, but it may also be Thursday or Friday. If it passed the House, it will likely go straight for signature to President Obama, so this may be the last chance to get changes to the bill.
To express your views to your Representative or Senator in Congress, you can call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 or 225-3121. Ask the operator to connect you to the office of your member of Congress.
At the same time there has been so much talk of government nationalization of troubled big banks, a bill quickly snaking through Congress would allow the feds to expropriate cars, bicycles and other “vehicles and equipment” of everyone from amateur collectors of rocks to kids going on scavenger hunts.
In the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, which passed the Senate (S. 22) in January and is up for a vote in the House as early as this Wednesday, a “forfeiture” provision would let the government confiscate “all vehicles and equipment of any person” who disturbs a rock or a bone from federal land that meets the bill’s broad definition of “paleontological resource.” The seizures could take place even before a person and even if the person didn’t know they were taking or digging up a “paleontological resource.” And the bill specifically allows the “transfer of seized resources” to “federal or non-federal” institutions, giving the government and some private actors great incentive to egg on the takings.
Groups representing those from scientists to rock collectors to other fossil enthusiasts have warned of ominous consequences that could criminalize the exploration and learning about natural history ironically in the name of protecting nature. According to Tracie Bennitt, president of the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, the bill’s language is so vague and the penalties such as forfeiture so severe that it could allow the government to “put scientists in jail and confiscate university vans.” In a letter on the bill to members of Congress, Bennitt warns, “We can visualize now a group of students unknowingly crossing over an invisible line and ending up handcuffed and prosecuted.”
The area of concern is Subtitle D of the bill called the “Paleontological Resources Preservation Act.” The provisions in this subtitle make it illegal to “excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface or attempt to excavate, remove, damage, or otherwise alter or deface any paleontological resources located on Federal land” without special permission from the government.
A “paleontological resource” is broadly defined in the bill as “any fossilized remains, traces, or imprints of organisms, preserved in or on the earth’s crust, that are of paleontological interest and that provide information about the history of life on earth.” Penalities for violations include up to five years in jail, and, as previously stated, all vehicles and equipment “used in connection with the violation” are subject even before trial “to civil forfeiture, or upon conviction, to criminal forfeiture.”
Among the problems, critics explain, is that the language is so broad that merely picking up rocks under this bill could be found guilty of “excavating” or “removing” a “paleontological resource.” There are numerous rocks, stones, and other objects of nature that contain fossilized imprints and, in the bill’s language, “are of paleontological interest and that provide information about the history of life on earth.” In fact, it is likely the most rocks that people pick up would meet this definition.
So people from mining companies to amateur geologists known as “rockhounds” to children gathering stones on field trips could be at risk for unintentionally violating this bill should it become law. The law does purport to allow an exception for a “resonable amount” of “casual collecting,” but then practically negates that excepion by saying that the “reasonable amount” shall be enitirely “determined by the Secretary” of Interior or Agriculture.
In an analysis of a similar bill in previous session of Congress, the policy group Partnership for America noted this scenario, “If a person were to be out hiking and picked up a rock as a souvenir, an enforcement officer who discovers this situation, at his or her discretion, could seize the equipment and the vehicle in use by the person or family at the time of the ‘offense.’” The analysis concluded, “The legislation may sound benign on its surface, yet it could have very dire unintended consequences for mining companies, rock hounds (geology enthusiasts) and average citizens who enjoy our national forests.”
One of those consequences is the civil forfeiture provision in Section 6308, which would leave those accused without their cars or other property until the trial was completed — basically the property would be guilty until proven innocent. As described by the Partnership for America analysis: “Even if a person eventually prevails in their case should they be prosecuted under this Act, their family would be without the use of the equipment and vehicle until the case is adjudicated, which could be months or even years, creating an extreme hardship in many cases. The government would likely try to obtain a guilty plea in exchange for a reduced penalty or the return of some of the personal property, which many innocent citizens would accept to avoid the cost and inconvenience of a trial.”
In fact, civil forfeiture had been so abused in drug cases — with reports of cops driving around Porsches of suspected drug offenders –that a group of conservative and liberal congressmen drafted a bill to reform the process. The late House Judiciary Committe Chairman Henry Hyde, R-Ill. and then-Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., joined with Rep. (and current Judiciary Committee Chairman) John Conyers, D-Mich., and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., to sponsor the Asset Forfeiture Reform Act that was signed into law in 2000. The law increased the government’s burden of proof before it could engage in the pre-trial confiscation of the property of the accused.
Describing the situation before the law was passed, Hyde wrote in his Cato Institute book Forfeiting Our Property Rights, “Civil asset forfeiture has allowed police to view all of America as some giant national K-Mart, where prices are not just lower, but non-existent — a sort of law enforcement ‘pick-and-don’t-pay.”
But the pending Omnibus bill would unfortunatley take U.S. civil liberties a big step back to the situation before the 2000 reforms passed. And as Bennitt of the Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences points out in her letter, it also creates the vaguely defined crime of “submit[ting] any false record, account, or label for, or any false identification of, any paleontological resource excavated or removed from Federal land.”
But in geology, false records can be unintentional and are often unavoidable. As Bennitt notes, honest errors in labeling fossils are almost inevitable even for the top museums. She writes: “Paleontology is a field that is not set in stone. What you find and label in the field may not be what you find as preparation is undertaken in the lab.”
She adds that “penalties for misidentification of fossils will place every museum in jeopardy,” because “there is not one museum that is free from labeling errors on specimens” in some of its exhibits or collections.
Bennitt concludes that the bill would have the perverse effect of limiting scientific inquiry and knowledge of natural history. She notes that “museums and universities collecting on public land do not have the time, money or staff to collect everything they see. These specimens end up as dust as they erode away.” Amateur and professional fossil collectors have helped scientists piece together natural history, and this bill may lock thier skill out of the process.
At a time when the federal government should be busy catching and jailing the Madoffs, Stanfords, and other alleged fraudsters who swindled Americans out of billions, it seems a particular waste of time to hunt down nature enthusiasts who may have inadvertently disturbed a “palentological resource.” And it would indeed be a tragedy if a rock hunter’s bike or car were “nationalized” before the first bad bank was even laid a finger on.
The House will like be voting this week on the bill as S. 22, the exact same “Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009″ that passed the Senate with these provisions. Some reports have the bill being scheduled for a Wednesday vote, but it may also be Thursday or Friday. If it passed the House, it will likely go straight for signature to President Obama, so this may be the last chance to get changes to the bill.
To express your views to your Representative or Senator in Congress, you can call the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 or 225-3121. Ask the operator to connect you to the office of your member of Congress.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
BLM Taps Californian Mike Pool as Acting National Director
News Release
Mike Pool, California state director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), has been tapped to serve as the agency's acting national director in Washington D.C., effective March 1.
Pool, 55, a career veteran, has served more than 34 years with BLM, starting at the field office level and working his way up through a variety of assignments in Alaska, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Washington D.C., and the Department of the Interior.
He has been California state director since 2000, overseeing 15.1 million acres of public lands in California and another 1.5 million in northwestern Nevada. In the new acting position, he will oversee 256 million surface acres – more than any other federal agency. Most of this public land is located in 12 western states, including Alaska.
He replaces current BLM Acting Director Ron Wenker, who will return to his current position as BLM's Nevada state director. Pool will remain in the new assignment pending selection of a permanent director by new Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. In California, Pool's Associate State Director Jim Abbott will serve as acting California state director.
"I'm honored by the new assignment and look forward to assisting the new administration care for the public lands under BLM's jurisdiction," he said. The 55-year-old Pool, an Arizona native raised in New Mexico, holds a B.S. in wildlife science from New Mexico State University.
-BLM-
Mike Pool, California state director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), has been tapped to serve as the agency's acting national director in Washington D.C., effective March 1.
Pool, 55, a career veteran, has served more than 34 years with BLM, starting at the field office level and working his way up through a variety of assignments in Alaska, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Washington D.C., and the Department of the Interior.
He has been California state director since 2000, overseeing 15.1 million acres of public lands in California and another 1.5 million in northwestern Nevada. In the new acting position, he will oversee 256 million surface acres – more than any other federal agency. Most of this public land is located in 12 western states, including Alaska.
He replaces current BLM Acting Director Ron Wenker, who will return to his current position as BLM's Nevada state director. Pool will remain in the new assignment pending selection of a permanent director by new Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. In California, Pool's Associate State Director Jim Abbott will serve as acting California state director.
"I'm honored by the new assignment and look forward to assisting the new administration care for the public lands under BLM's jurisdiction," he said. The 55-year-old Pool, an Arizona native raised in New Mexico, holds a B.S. in wildlife science from New Mexico State University.
-BLM-
Friday, February 13, 2009
The Clean Water Act and Nonpoint Source Pollution: Implications for Western Agriculture
By Loretta Singletary
Extension Educator, University of Nevada Cooperative Extension
Introduction
Nevada is the driest state in the nation. Total average annual precipitation is approximately nine inches per year. Surface water in Nevada is limited and provides approximately 60 percent of the state's total water supply. The remaining 40 percent of water supplies are provided by ground water. Some areas in Nevada depend upon ground water supplies for 100 percent of their water.
Over the past few decades there has been a significant increase in litigation surrounding western water resources, including Nevada's watersheds. Agriculture has been named as a defendant in several cases. Those involved in agriculture need to acknowledge that water, a primary input in the production process, has become a highly valued and increasingly scarce resource. And, federal legislation prioritizes the improvement and protection of water quality involving water resources nationwide.
Farmers and ranchers must understand water issues surrounding agricultural activities and social concerns involving water bodies located near their operations.
The first step in accomplishing this level of awareness is to understand federal and state laws regulating water quality, implementation of laws and pollutants identified as harmful to water bodies. This fact sheet explains the provisions outlined in the Clean Water Act that specifically address nonpoint source pollution and implications for agriculture.
The Clean Water Act
The Clean Water Act (CWA) regulates water quality for the U.S. pertaining to surface waters such as rivers, streams and lakes as well as groundwater, wetlands, and urban runoff. Originally the CWA focused on point sources of water pollution but was amended in 1987 to provide for nonpoint source (NPS) pollution control.
Point sources of pollution are identifiable, confined means for transporting and discharging pollutants, such as channels, ditches, conduits and tunnels. Municipal treatment facilities, manufacturing industries and large animal confinement operations are examples of potential point sources of pollution. In contrast, NPS pollution is the scattered discharge of natural and manmade pollutants into the natural environment. As defined by the CWA,
NPS pollution derives from diffuse, unregulated sources that typically include agriculture, urban and construction runoff over large areas. And, a defining feature of NPS pollution is that runoff contains pollutant materials that enter surface waters or ground water at rates greater than naturally occurring levels.
Water quality experts suggest that agricultural activity is a leading contributor to NPS pollution. Types of agricultural sources include cropland, feedlots, irrigation and drainage, livestock grazing, modifications of river/stream channels, construction, and livestock waste management.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the authority appointed to implement CWA legislation. For the greater majority of Nevada, the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection (NDEP) implements provisions of the CWA focusing on the area that lies outside of its four designated wastewater management areas surrounding the urbanized areas of Carson City, Lake Tahoe Basin, Truckee Meadows and Washoe and Clark Counties.
Of particular interest to farmers and ranchers, are Sections 303 and 319 of the CWA. Section 303 requires states to establish water quality standards based on beneficial uses for a given water segment as well as existing information pertaining to that segment. Waters that do not meet established standards are placed on a list (Section 303 (d) list) of impaired, threatened waters. States must then assure that numeric limits are established for the individual pollutants impairing listed waters and that these limits are not exceeded. The established limits are referred to as Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs). Section 319 of the CWA supports planning and education efforts to control NPS at the watershed level. It requires each state to develop a NPS Management Plan to improve the quality of impaired or threatened waters. In Nevada, NPS water management activities are primarily voluntary at this time, rather than regulatory, and emphasize education to raise public awareness and voluntary participation to improve water quality.
Understanding Beneficial Use
Beneficial use refers to water use that produces gains or benefits. In Nevada, beneficial uses historically include agricultural usage, such as irrigation and livestock watering. In addition to agricultural uses, beneficial uses currently include recreation, support of aquatic life, wildlife propagation, municipal drinking supply and industrial uses.
The amount of pollutants necessary to impair beneficial use depends on the existing or designated use of the waters in question. For example, streams used for human drinking supplies require stricter standards than water used to irrigate crops. Beneficial use must be consistent with federal and state law and are based on the following factors historical use, existing use, anticipated water use, public concerns, and requirements to prevent water quality deterioration.
Water quality standards require that appropriate water uses be specified, achieved and protected. The use and value of the water body must be identified in terms of its use as public water supply, recreational, industrial and agricultural purposes as well as to protect fish and wildlife.
When beneficial usage or water quality standards are established or revised in Nevada, the Nevada Environmental Commission must review and formally accept the proposed revisions. The commission represents several state agencies including Forestry, Mining, Agriculture, Health, Wildlife, and State Water Engineer. Additionally, the Governor appoints four citizen members who further address issues concerning agriculture, economic development, mining, and the environment. Nevada Division Environmental Protection provides public hearings to inform citizens of established or revised standards that are site specific to a water body. Citizens may comment at that time, either in writing or in person. Based on federal and state requirements, available water quality monitoring data, and public comment, the commission may decide to amend, adopt, or take no action concerning changes to established standards.
At this point, if dissatisfied with the commission's proposed decision, citizens may file a petition to review the procedures used by NDEP to establish or revise standards. The review is conducted and a judge of the State Supreme Court decides the outcome.
The public has a vested interest in the quality of our Nation's surface waters. The Clean Water Act requires States and authorized Tribes to hold public hearings on their water quality standards at least once every three years. Public hearings on water quality standards provide an opportunity for the public to become involved in the water quality standards setting process. Citizens may make recommendations on improvements or modifications in the standards during the public hearing process. Public hearings are a powerful vehicle through which citizens may make their concerns known to public officials.
Monitoring Water Quality
Originally, EPA was charged to regulate only point sources of water pollution. However, in 1987, the CWA was reauthorized to include effective NPS pollution control and water quality management programs nationwide. Currently, all states, including Nevada, are directed by EPA to monitor water bodies to assess NPS pollution; develop a statewide control program for NPS pollution; and implement Best Management Practices as means for pollution control.
Due to its diffuse nature, it is difficult to measure NPS pollution. In order to identify water bodies that are not in compliance with water quality standards, NDEP maintains a program that monitors over 100 sampling points in Nevada's 14 hydrographic regions and, every two years, provides a 303(d) list of impaired or threatened waters. In addition to these monitoring stations, intensive field studies of water quality are conducted on Nevada's major water systems including the Carson River, Colorado River Tributaries, Humboldt River,Truckee River, and Walker River.
Conclusions
NPS pollution is the scattered discharge of natural and manmade pollutants into the natural environment. As defined by the CWA, NPS pollution derives from diffuse, unregulated sources that typically include agriculture, urban and construction runoff. Water quality experts suggest that agricultural activity is a leading contributor to NPS pollution. Types of agricultural NPS may include: cropland, feedlots, irrigation and drainage, livestock grazing, changes to river and stream channels, construction, and waste management.
Due to its diffuse nature, it is difficult to take precise measurements of NPS pollution. In accordance with the CWA, Nevada has established water quality standards based on beneficial uses for its water bodies. NDEP maintains a program that monitors over 100 sampling points in Nevada's 14 hydrographic regions and, every two years, provides a 303(d) list of impaired or threatened waters. Each state is required to address listed waters by establishing TMDLs to specify measurable limits for individual pollutants and plan for pollution control of NPS at the watershed level.
Farmers and ranchers must learn about federal policy affecting water resource management, NPS and maintain an awareness of agricultural activities that could potentially impact water quality.
The first step in accomplishing this is to learn about federal and state laws regulating water quality and NPS programs in place to improve water quality controlling specifically for NPS pollutants.
Next, Best management Practices must be identified and implemented to control for potential NPS associated with agricultural activity.
References
* Donaldson, S. & M. Hefner. 2004. Water Quality Challenges Facing Our Community. Available online at: http://www.unce.unr.edu/publications/FSPubs/FS0444.pdf.
* Nevada Division of Environmental Protection. 2002. Nevada's 303(d) List. Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Carson City, Nevada. Available online at: http://nevada.dis.state.nv.us/ndep/bwqp/303dlist.htm.
* Singletary, L. & J. Davison. 2003. Farm and Rangeland Water Quality Management: A Field Guide for Nevada's Agricultural Producers. Available online at: http://www.unce.unr.edu/publications/EBPubs/EB0301.pdf.
Extension Educator, University of Nevada Cooperative Extension
Introduction
Nevada is the driest state in the nation. Total average annual precipitation is approximately nine inches per year. Surface water in Nevada is limited and provides approximately 60 percent of the state's total water supply. The remaining 40 percent of water supplies are provided by ground water. Some areas in Nevada depend upon ground water supplies for 100 percent of their water.
Over the past few decades there has been a significant increase in litigation surrounding western water resources, including Nevada's watersheds. Agriculture has been named as a defendant in several cases. Those involved in agriculture need to acknowledge that water, a primary input in the production process, has become a highly valued and increasingly scarce resource. And, federal legislation prioritizes the improvement and protection of water quality involving water resources nationwide.
Farmers and ranchers must understand water issues surrounding agricultural activities and social concerns involving water bodies located near their operations.
The first step in accomplishing this level of awareness is to understand federal and state laws regulating water quality, implementation of laws and pollutants identified as harmful to water bodies. This fact sheet explains the provisions outlined in the Clean Water Act that specifically address nonpoint source pollution and implications for agriculture.
The Clean Water Act
The Clean Water Act (CWA) regulates water quality for the U.S. pertaining to surface waters such as rivers, streams and lakes as well as groundwater, wetlands, and urban runoff. Originally the CWA focused on point sources of water pollution but was amended in 1987 to provide for nonpoint source (NPS) pollution control.
Point sources of pollution are identifiable, confined means for transporting and discharging pollutants, such as channels, ditches, conduits and tunnels. Municipal treatment facilities, manufacturing industries and large animal confinement operations are examples of potential point sources of pollution. In contrast, NPS pollution is the scattered discharge of natural and manmade pollutants into the natural environment. As defined by the CWA,
NPS pollution derives from diffuse, unregulated sources that typically include agriculture, urban and construction runoff over large areas. And, a defining feature of NPS pollution is that runoff contains pollutant materials that enter surface waters or ground water at rates greater than naturally occurring levels.
Water quality experts suggest that agricultural activity is a leading contributor to NPS pollution. Types of agricultural sources include cropland, feedlots, irrigation and drainage, livestock grazing, modifications of river/stream channels, construction, and livestock waste management.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is the authority appointed to implement CWA legislation. For the greater majority of Nevada, the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection (NDEP) implements provisions of the CWA focusing on the area that lies outside of its four designated wastewater management areas surrounding the urbanized areas of Carson City, Lake Tahoe Basin, Truckee Meadows and Washoe and Clark Counties.
Of particular interest to farmers and ranchers, are Sections 303 and 319 of the CWA. Section 303 requires states to establish water quality standards based on beneficial uses for a given water segment as well as existing information pertaining to that segment. Waters that do not meet established standards are placed on a list (Section 303 (d) list) of impaired, threatened waters. States must then assure that numeric limits are established for the individual pollutants impairing listed waters and that these limits are not exceeded. The established limits are referred to as Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs). Section 319 of the CWA supports planning and education efforts to control NPS at the watershed level. It requires each state to develop a NPS Management Plan to improve the quality of impaired or threatened waters. In Nevada, NPS water management activities are primarily voluntary at this time, rather than regulatory, and emphasize education to raise public awareness and voluntary participation to improve water quality.
Understanding Beneficial Use
Beneficial use refers to water use that produces gains or benefits. In Nevada, beneficial uses historically include agricultural usage, such as irrigation and livestock watering. In addition to agricultural uses, beneficial uses currently include recreation, support of aquatic life, wildlife propagation, municipal drinking supply and industrial uses.
The amount of pollutants necessary to impair beneficial use depends on the existing or designated use of the waters in question. For example, streams used for human drinking supplies require stricter standards than water used to irrigate crops. Beneficial use must be consistent with federal and state law and are based on the following factors historical use, existing use, anticipated water use, public concerns, and requirements to prevent water quality deterioration.
Water quality standards require that appropriate water uses be specified, achieved and protected. The use and value of the water body must be identified in terms of its use as public water supply, recreational, industrial and agricultural purposes as well as to protect fish and wildlife.
When beneficial usage or water quality standards are established or revised in Nevada, the Nevada Environmental Commission must review and formally accept the proposed revisions. The commission represents several state agencies including Forestry, Mining, Agriculture, Health, Wildlife, and State Water Engineer. Additionally, the Governor appoints four citizen members who further address issues concerning agriculture, economic development, mining, and the environment. Nevada Division Environmental Protection provides public hearings to inform citizens of established or revised standards that are site specific to a water body. Citizens may comment at that time, either in writing or in person. Based on federal and state requirements, available water quality monitoring data, and public comment, the commission may decide to amend, adopt, or take no action concerning changes to established standards.
At this point, if dissatisfied with the commission's proposed decision, citizens may file a petition to review the procedures used by NDEP to establish or revise standards. The review is conducted and a judge of the State Supreme Court decides the outcome.
The public has a vested interest in the quality of our Nation's surface waters. The Clean Water Act requires States and authorized Tribes to hold public hearings on their water quality standards at least once every three years. Public hearings on water quality standards provide an opportunity for the public to become involved in the water quality standards setting process. Citizens may make recommendations on improvements or modifications in the standards during the public hearing process. Public hearings are a powerful vehicle through which citizens may make their concerns known to public officials.
Monitoring Water Quality
Originally, EPA was charged to regulate only point sources of water pollution. However, in 1987, the CWA was reauthorized to include effective NPS pollution control and water quality management programs nationwide. Currently, all states, including Nevada, are directed by EPA to monitor water bodies to assess NPS pollution; develop a statewide control program for NPS pollution; and implement Best Management Practices as means for pollution control.
Due to its diffuse nature, it is difficult to measure NPS pollution. In order to identify water bodies that are not in compliance with water quality standards, NDEP maintains a program that monitors over 100 sampling points in Nevada's 14 hydrographic regions and, every two years, provides a 303(d) list of impaired or threatened waters. In addition to these monitoring stations, intensive field studies of water quality are conducted on Nevada's major water systems including the Carson River, Colorado River Tributaries, Humboldt River,Truckee River, and Walker River.
Conclusions
NPS pollution is the scattered discharge of natural and manmade pollutants into the natural environment. As defined by the CWA, NPS pollution derives from diffuse, unregulated sources that typically include agriculture, urban and construction runoff. Water quality experts suggest that agricultural activity is a leading contributor to NPS pollution. Types of agricultural NPS may include: cropland, feedlots, irrigation and drainage, livestock grazing, changes to river and stream channels, construction, and waste management.
Due to its diffuse nature, it is difficult to take precise measurements of NPS pollution. In accordance with the CWA, Nevada has established water quality standards based on beneficial uses for its water bodies. NDEP maintains a program that monitors over 100 sampling points in Nevada's 14 hydrographic regions and, every two years, provides a 303(d) list of impaired or threatened waters. Each state is required to address listed waters by establishing TMDLs to specify measurable limits for individual pollutants and plan for pollution control of NPS at the watershed level.
Farmers and ranchers must learn about federal policy affecting water resource management, NPS and maintain an awareness of agricultural activities that could potentially impact water quality.
The first step in accomplishing this is to learn about federal and state laws regulating water quality and NPS programs in place to improve water quality controlling specifically for NPS pollutants.
Next, Best management Practices must be identified and implemented to control for potential NPS associated with agricultural activity.
References
* Donaldson, S. & M. Hefner. 2004. Water Quality Challenges Facing Our Community. Available online at: http://www.unce.unr.edu/publications/FSPubs/FS0444.pdf.
* Nevada Division of Environmental Protection. 2002. Nevada's 303(d) List. Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Carson City, Nevada. Available online at: http://nevada.dis.state.nv.us/ndep/bwqp/303dlist.htm.
* Singletary, L. & J. Davison. 2003. Farm and Rangeland Water Quality Management: A Field Guide for Nevada's Agricultural Producers. Available online at: http://www.unce.unr.edu/publications/EBPubs/EB0301.pdf.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Wild horses, elk threaten to overcrowd rangelands
Wild horses have long reigned as icons of freedom and the open West. But a federal lawsuit filed in Portland last week challenges that notion and highlights U.S. officials' increasing struggle to control exploding herds.
Thousands of more wild mustangs and burros roam Western rangelands than the land can support, a federal report has found, and if nothing is done, the problem will only get worse.
At the same time, the number of unwanted animals in federal holding facilities -- including one in Oregon -- has tripled since 2000 as adoptions plummet. The cost of caring for the animals, the October report said, threatens to overwhelm the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Wild Horse and Burro Program budget.
The issue landed in court after Loren and Piper Stout, an eastern Oregon ranching couple, were banned from grazing their cattle on land southeast of Dayville, a Grant County hamlet about 30 miles west of John Day.
The Stouts contend that their cattle were blamed for damage to rangelands that was actually caused by wild horses. Their suit against the U.S. Forest Service, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, seeks to force federal authorities to control wild horses on the 62,000-acre Murderers Creek allotment.
"They have let it get out of hand, and we are getting blamed for it," Loren Stout, 52, said of the government's management of wild mustangs. "Horses are real tough on resources, and they are out there 12 months of the year."
The couple grazed their cattle on the rugged allotment from 1996 until October 2007, when they were forced to remove the herd as the result of a complaint in federal court by the Oregon Natural Desert Association, a 1,200-member environmental group in Bend.
The association alleged that the Stouts' cattle threatened endangered steelhead in Deer Creek and Murderers Creek.
But the Stouts contend that the damage to stream banks and rangeland came from elk and wild horses. They say in their lawsuit that more than 500 wild horses may be roaming the allotment, well over the 100-mustang limit recommended in the Malheur National Forest management plan.
Not only that, the Stouts say, the Murderers Creek range and streams would be in better shape if their cattle still grazed there. Cowhands on horseback, they said, kept the mustangs and elk on the move, preventing them from overgrazing and trampling stream banks.
"The cattle are only on the range 12 weeks a year during the summer when the adult steelhead have left the stream and after steelhead fry have emerged," said Scott W. Horngren of Portland, the Stouts' attorney. "The horses and elk are on the range 24/7, all year."
The Forest Service "is trying to address this concern about steelhead by focusing on one user of the range" -- the Stouts' cattle -- Horngren said.
Instead, Loren Stout said, the government and environmentalists should look at all resource users, including mustangs and elk.
Forest Service spokesman Jeff Shinn of the Malheur National Forest in John Day acknowledged that the number of mustangs roaming the Murderers Creek range is "at least twice our appropriate management level."
"There are some definite impacts from the horses and elk," he said.
A recent government count by helicopter tallied 115 wild horses on the allotment, plus estimates of another 115 hidden by thick timber, Shinn said. A count by horseback riders three years ago found 430 wild mustangs, whose populations typically grow by 20 percent a year.
The Forest Service gathered 134 wild horses from the allotment in 2007-08 and another roundup of an undetermined number is set for this year, Shinn said.
Regardless of how many mustangs roam around Murderers Creek, few would dispute that growing herds are a problem.
The October federal report, issued by the U.S. General Accounting Office, said 33,100 mustangs and burros roam 29 million acres of BLM-managed land in 10 Western states -- 5,900 more than the land can sustain.
"There is no natural check on their populations," said Brent Fenty, spokesman for Bend's Oregon Natural Desert Association. "There are certainly too many horses on public lands throughout the West."
The report also tallied 30,088 horses and burros in 11 federal holding facilities, up from 9,807 eight years ago. The cost of running the sanctuaries climbed from $7 million in 2000 to $21 million in 2007, the report said.
Complicating matters, adoptions through the BLM's "adopt-a-horse program" fell a whopping 36 percent in 2007 compared with 1990s levels. The BLM blames, in part, rising hay and fuel costs.
In Oregon, the GAO estimated, 2,473 wild horses roam the high desert and forests. About 400 are penned at the BLM's Wild Horse Corrals near Burns, up from 175 in August, said Gary Rose, a BLM spokesman in Burns.
And the problem won't go away any time soon. If left alone, the GAO report said, U.S. mustang and burro populations will balloon to 50,000 by 2012.
The Stouts, meanwhile, hope their lawsuit helps them regain the right to graze cattle at Murderers Creek, which takes its name from an 1860s battle with Native Americans that killed eight prospectors, according to "Oregon Geographic Names."
About that time, Piper Stout's great-great-great-grandfather, John Hyde, came from Tennessee to homestead in Grant County.
"If somebody wants to come after us for something we're not doing," Loren Stout said last week, "let's get it on."
Richard Cockle; rcockle@oregonwireless.net
Thousands of more wild mustangs and burros roam Western rangelands than the land can support, a federal report has found, and if nothing is done, the problem will only get worse.
At the same time, the number of unwanted animals in federal holding facilities -- including one in Oregon -- has tripled since 2000 as adoptions plummet. The cost of caring for the animals, the October report said, threatens to overwhelm the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Wild Horse and Burro Program budget.
The issue landed in court after Loren and Piper Stout, an eastern Oregon ranching couple, were banned from grazing their cattle on land southeast of Dayville, a Grant County hamlet about 30 miles west of John Day.
The Stouts contend that their cattle were blamed for damage to rangelands that was actually caused by wild horses. Their suit against the U.S. Forest Service, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, seeks to force federal authorities to control wild horses on the 62,000-acre Murderers Creek allotment.
"They have let it get out of hand, and we are getting blamed for it," Loren Stout, 52, said of the government's management of wild mustangs. "Horses are real tough on resources, and they are out there 12 months of the year."
The couple grazed their cattle on the rugged allotment from 1996 until October 2007, when they were forced to remove the herd as the result of a complaint in federal court by the Oregon Natural Desert Association, a 1,200-member environmental group in Bend.
The association alleged that the Stouts' cattle threatened endangered steelhead in Deer Creek and Murderers Creek.
But the Stouts contend that the damage to stream banks and rangeland came from elk and wild horses. They say in their lawsuit that more than 500 wild horses may be roaming the allotment, well over the 100-mustang limit recommended in the Malheur National Forest management plan.
Not only that, the Stouts say, the Murderers Creek range and streams would be in better shape if their cattle still grazed there. Cowhands on horseback, they said, kept the mustangs and elk on the move, preventing them from overgrazing and trampling stream banks.
"The cattle are only on the range 12 weeks a year during the summer when the adult steelhead have left the stream and after steelhead fry have emerged," said Scott W. Horngren of Portland, the Stouts' attorney. "The horses and elk are on the range 24/7, all year."
The Forest Service "is trying to address this concern about steelhead by focusing on one user of the range" -- the Stouts' cattle -- Horngren said.
Instead, Loren Stout said, the government and environmentalists should look at all resource users, including mustangs and elk.
Forest Service spokesman Jeff Shinn of the Malheur National Forest in John Day acknowledged that the number of mustangs roaming the Murderers Creek range is "at least twice our appropriate management level."
"There are some definite impacts from the horses and elk," he said.
A recent government count by helicopter tallied 115 wild horses on the allotment, plus estimates of another 115 hidden by thick timber, Shinn said. A count by horseback riders three years ago found 430 wild mustangs, whose populations typically grow by 20 percent a year.
The Forest Service gathered 134 wild horses from the allotment in 2007-08 and another roundup of an undetermined number is set for this year, Shinn said.
Regardless of how many mustangs roam around Murderers Creek, few would dispute that growing herds are a problem.
The October federal report, issued by the U.S. General Accounting Office, said 33,100 mustangs and burros roam 29 million acres of BLM-managed land in 10 Western states -- 5,900 more than the land can sustain.
"There is no natural check on their populations," said Brent Fenty, spokesman for Bend's Oregon Natural Desert Association. "There are certainly too many horses on public lands throughout the West."
The report also tallied 30,088 horses and burros in 11 federal holding facilities, up from 9,807 eight years ago. The cost of running the sanctuaries climbed from $7 million in 2000 to $21 million in 2007, the report said.
Complicating matters, adoptions through the BLM's "adopt-a-horse program" fell a whopping 36 percent in 2007 compared with 1990s levels. The BLM blames, in part, rising hay and fuel costs.
In Oregon, the GAO estimated, 2,473 wild horses roam the high desert and forests. About 400 are penned at the BLM's Wild Horse Corrals near Burns, up from 175 in August, said Gary Rose, a BLM spokesman in Burns.
And the problem won't go away any time soon. If left alone, the GAO report said, U.S. mustang and burro populations will balloon to 50,000 by 2012.
The Stouts, meanwhile, hope their lawsuit helps them regain the right to graze cattle at Murderers Creek, which takes its name from an 1860s battle with Native Americans that killed eight prospectors, according to "Oregon Geographic Names."
About that time, Piper Stout's great-great-great-grandfather, John Hyde, came from Tennessee to homestead in Grant County.
"If somebody wants to come after us for something we're not doing," Loren Stout said last week, "let's get it on."
Richard Cockle; rcockle@oregonwireless.net
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Lawmakers propose land office reforms
By Heath Haussamen 2/5/09 7:11 AM
In response to a controversy involving the State Land Office and a Las Cruces developer, three Doña Ana County lawmakers are proposing reforms that would increase transparency and accountability in the land commissioner’s dealings.
The proposals follow Attorney General Gary King’s finding fault last year with Land Commissioner Pat Lyons’ leasing of land on Las Cruces’ East Mesa to Philip Philippou so it could be developed. The AG’s formal opinion on The Vistas at Presidio land deal states that the lease agreement’s (pdf) method of compensating Philippou’s company is “not comprehended by and in conflict with” a statute that allows developers who improve land for the state to be compensated only for the appraised value of the improvements.
In the lease, the land office also agrees to compensate Philippou for other project costs and 40 percent of the change in value of the land as a result of the improvements.
The first bill in the package proposed by Reps. Nate Cote and Jeff Steinborn, and Sen. Steve Fischmann, all Las Cruces Democrats, directly deals with the issue identified in the AG opinion. Cote’s House Bill 607 and Fischmann’s Senate Bill 474 would make clear that developers can be compensated for tangible improvements to the land but nothing else.
The other bills in the package are:
• Steinborn’s House Bill 606, which would require the land office to issue development leases only following public notice and a competitive bidding process.
• Cote’s House Bill 610, which would require the land office to develop uniform systems for classifying accounts, budgeting and reporting.
• Steinborn’s House Bill 605, which would require local government review before the land office’s development leases take effect.
• Fischmann’s Senate Bill 475, which would require that the AG review development leases before they take effect.
Steinborn’s bill that requires the land office to follow a competitive bidding process is significant because, in the Las Cruces situation, Lyons bypassed his own bidding process — which he’s not currently required by law to use — and leased the thousands of acres of land in question to Philippou in December 2006. Months earlier, while the Republican Lyons was running for re-election, Philippou gave $20,500 to a political action committee run by lobbyists he employs. The PAC gave most of it to Lyons’ campaign, and the lobbyists gave another $3,600. After Lyons leased the land to Philippou, the developer gave another $6,000 to Lyons.
On a conference call about the bills on Wednesday, Steinborn called the Las Cruces situation “ground zero” for “problems” in the land office that affect the entire state because Lyons entered into similar agreements for land in Albuquerque, Rio Rancho, Santa Fe and elsewhere. The AG has refused to back up his opinion with a lawsuit, and Lyons has effectively ignored it.
Cote said the legislation is an important response to the concerns of his constituents and others in the Las Cruces area, and it shouldn’t be viewed as an attempt to impede the work of the land office.
“The public, the people of my district and New Mexicans, want government accountability,” Cote said.
Fischmann said it’s now clear that the land office “was somehow operating out of sync with what the public needs were,” but Steinborn said he hopes that, in spite of that, Lyons will support the reform proposals.
A spokeswoman for Lyons did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In response to a controversy involving the State Land Office and a Las Cruces developer, three Doña Ana County lawmakers are proposing reforms that would increase transparency and accountability in the land commissioner’s dealings.
The proposals follow Attorney General Gary King’s finding fault last year with Land Commissioner Pat Lyons’ leasing of land on Las Cruces’ East Mesa to Philip Philippou so it could be developed. The AG’s formal opinion on The Vistas at Presidio land deal states that the lease agreement’s (pdf) method of compensating Philippou’s company is “not comprehended by and in conflict with” a statute that allows developers who improve land for the state to be compensated only for the appraised value of the improvements.
In the lease, the land office also agrees to compensate Philippou for other project costs and 40 percent of the change in value of the land as a result of the improvements.
The first bill in the package proposed by Reps. Nate Cote and Jeff Steinborn, and Sen. Steve Fischmann, all Las Cruces Democrats, directly deals with the issue identified in the AG opinion. Cote’s House Bill 607 and Fischmann’s Senate Bill 474 would make clear that developers can be compensated for tangible improvements to the land but nothing else.
The other bills in the package are:
• Steinborn’s House Bill 606, which would require the land office to issue development leases only following public notice and a competitive bidding process.
• Cote’s House Bill 610, which would require the land office to develop uniform systems for classifying accounts, budgeting and reporting.
• Steinborn’s House Bill 605, which would require local government review before the land office’s development leases take effect.
• Fischmann’s Senate Bill 475, which would require that the AG review development leases before they take effect.
Steinborn’s bill that requires the land office to follow a competitive bidding process is significant because, in the Las Cruces situation, Lyons bypassed his own bidding process — which he’s not currently required by law to use — and leased the thousands of acres of land in question to Philippou in December 2006. Months earlier, while the Republican Lyons was running for re-election, Philippou gave $20,500 to a political action committee run by lobbyists he employs. The PAC gave most of it to Lyons’ campaign, and the lobbyists gave another $3,600. After Lyons leased the land to Philippou, the developer gave another $6,000 to Lyons.
On a conference call about the bills on Wednesday, Steinborn called the Las Cruces situation “ground zero” for “problems” in the land office that affect the entire state because Lyons entered into similar agreements for land in Albuquerque, Rio Rancho, Santa Fe and elsewhere. The AG has refused to back up his opinion with a lawsuit, and Lyons has effectively ignored it.
Cote said the legislation is an important response to the concerns of his constituents and others in the Las Cruces area, and it shouldn’t be viewed as an attempt to impede the work of the land office.
“The public, the people of my district and New Mexicans, want government accountability,” Cote said.
Fischmann said it’s now clear that the land office “was somehow operating out of sync with what the public needs were,” but Steinborn said he hopes that, in spite of that, Lyons will support the reform proposals.
A spokeswoman for Lyons did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Monday, February 2, 2009
States fail in latest prairie dog report card
While groundhogs will get all the attention Monday, a report being issued by an environmental group says their cousins, the prairie dogs, are in dire straits across the West.
WildEarth Guardians says in its report to be released Monday that North America's five species of prairie dogs have lost more than 90 percent of their historical range because of habitat loss, shooting and poisoning.
It grades three federal land management agencies and a dozen states on their actions over the past year to protect prairie dogs and their habitat.
Not one received an A.
Most grades even dropped from the previous year, but Arizona improved to a B — the highest grade of all the states in prairie dog country. That state reintroduced 74 black-tailed prairie dogs to a small southeast parcel in October.
New Mexico, home to the Gunnison's prairie dog and black-tailed prairie dog, earned a D — the same as last year — because, the group said, state wildlife officials weren't actively conserving prairie dogs.
"It's hard to see the prairie dogs that are missing when you drive across the West because our modern society has no perception about what it was like before we started poisoning prairie dogs," said Lauren McCain, WildEarth Guardians' desert and grassland projects director.
McCain said prairie dogs are an important part of a grassland ecosystem. They are food for hawks, golden eagles, foxes and endangered black-footed ferrets, and their burrows offer shelter for a variety of other species.
McCain said all the animals need federal endangered species protections.
Of the five species, the Utah prairie dog is classified as threatened and the Mexican prairie dog as endangered. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued preliminary findings that the black- and white-tailed prairie dogs may warrant federal protection, and the Gunnison's prairie dog is a candidate for protection in part of its range.
Until Arizona's reintroduction, the animals had not been seen in that state for nearly 50 years.
"We're really pleased with the success to the point where we're getting the process ready to start another reintroduction," said James Driscoll, an Arizona Game and Fish Department biologist.
Many people in the West, especially ranchers, consider prairie dogs varmints that destroy grass and cause erosion.
McCain said misperception has resulted in wasteful government programs. She said various agencies have financed and encouraged the poisoning of prairie dogs for years while other agencies pump millions of dollars into recovery efforts aimed at other species that rely on the prairie dog.
"We're hoping that the report card will highlight some of the these inconsistencies in government management of wildlife," McCain said. "These are species that we really do need to protect instead of wasting taxpayer dollars, which is a big concern for a lot of people."
Of the federal agencies, the Bureau of Land Management received the lowest grade: D-minus, the same as last year. The report accuses the agency of exempting energy development companies from complying with rules that would protect prairie dog colonies and habitat.
Bill Merhege, deputy state BLM director for lands and resources in New Mexico, said the agency takes numerous steps, such as moving well pads and roads to avoid prairie dog colonies and prohibiting prairie dog control on land it manages.
"We do what we can on public lands," Merhege said. "Unfortunately, with interspersed landownership, what you do on one section doesn't necessarily follow through on another."
The group graded the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at C, up from D the previous year, while the U.S. Forest Service stayed at D.
The group gave an F grade to Kansas, Nebraska and North Dakota. Colorado, Montana, South Dakota and Utah got D grades, and Wyoming earned a D-plus.
WildEarth Guardians says in its report to be released Monday that North America's five species of prairie dogs have lost more than 90 percent of their historical range because of habitat loss, shooting and poisoning.
It grades three federal land management agencies and a dozen states on their actions over the past year to protect prairie dogs and their habitat.
Not one received an A.
Most grades even dropped from the previous year, but Arizona improved to a B — the highest grade of all the states in prairie dog country. That state reintroduced 74 black-tailed prairie dogs to a small southeast parcel in October.
New Mexico, home to the Gunnison's prairie dog and black-tailed prairie dog, earned a D — the same as last year — because, the group said, state wildlife officials weren't actively conserving prairie dogs.
"It's hard to see the prairie dogs that are missing when you drive across the West because our modern society has no perception about what it was like before we started poisoning prairie dogs," said Lauren McCain, WildEarth Guardians' desert and grassland projects director.
McCain said prairie dogs are an important part of a grassland ecosystem. They are food for hawks, golden eagles, foxes and endangered black-footed ferrets, and their burrows offer shelter for a variety of other species.
McCain said all the animals need federal endangered species protections.
Of the five species, the Utah prairie dog is classified as threatened and the Mexican prairie dog as endangered. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has issued preliminary findings that the black- and white-tailed prairie dogs may warrant federal protection, and the Gunnison's prairie dog is a candidate for protection in part of its range.
Until Arizona's reintroduction, the animals had not been seen in that state for nearly 50 years.
"We're really pleased with the success to the point where we're getting the process ready to start another reintroduction," said James Driscoll, an Arizona Game and Fish Department biologist.
Many people in the West, especially ranchers, consider prairie dogs varmints that destroy grass and cause erosion.
McCain said misperception has resulted in wasteful government programs. She said various agencies have financed and encouraged the poisoning of prairie dogs for years while other agencies pump millions of dollars into recovery efforts aimed at other species that rely on the prairie dog.
"We're hoping that the report card will highlight some of the these inconsistencies in government management of wildlife," McCain said. "These are species that we really do need to protect instead of wasting taxpayer dollars, which is a big concern for a lot of people."
Of the federal agencies, the Bureau of Land Management received the lowest grade: D-minus, the same as last year. The report accuses the agency of exempting energy development companies from complying with rules that would protect prairie dog colonies and habitat.
Bill Merhege, deputy state BLM director for lands and resources in New Mexico, said the agency takes numerous steps, such as moving well pads and roads to avoid prairie dog colonies and prohibiting prairie dog control on land it manages.
"We do what we can on public lands," Merhege said. "Unfortunately, with interspersed landownership, what you do on one section doesn't necessarily follow through on another."
The group graded the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at C, up from D the previous year, while the U.S. Forest Service stayed at D.
The group gave an F grade to Kansas, Nebraska and North Dakota. Colorado, Montana, South Dakota and Utah got D grades, and Wyoming earned a D-plus.
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