Category Archives: Grazing permit buyouts

Grazing permit buyouts, Point Reyes, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, Yellowstone everywhere

Public Participation Problems With Point Reyes National Seashore Ranching Plan

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Tule elk at Point Reyes National Seashore. Photo by Matthew Polvorosa Kline, used with permission.

POINT REYES, California— The National Park Service closed its public comment period on a proposed planto shoot native tule elk in Point Reyes National Seashore to make room not only for beef and dairy cattle, but for new expanded uses that will include sheep, goats, pigs, and chickens, and row crops in the Seashore.  This is a very bad precedent for all of our national parks and monuments.

Numerous conservation groups, including Western Watersheds Project, Resource Renewal Institute, For Elk, Conservation Congress, Wilderness Watch, Sequoia ForestKeeper, White Shark Video/Shame of Point Reyes, John Muir Project, and Ban Single Use Plastics, as well as many concerned former National Park Service employees and individuals, are opposing the Park’s current preferred alternative, which would extend Ranchers’ lease-permits for decades. Extensive comments on the draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) were sent in by the groups asking for Alternative F—the No Ranching alternative that would restore native tule elk to more of the Seashore.

Yet questions of how many members of the public are actually being heard has arisen.

Continue reading Public Participation Problems With Point Reyes National Seashore Ranching Plan →

Cliven Bundy, Grazing permit buyouts, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, Yellowstone everywhere

Always Cows in the Campground

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To escape the heat of late July my wife Kirsten and I hopped in the camper and headed for the Swift Creek Campground on the Yellowstone River which flows down the south slope of the Uinta Mountains directly south of Kings Peak. We drove from our home in Salt Lake City up I-80 over Parley’s Summit, past Park City to Highway 40 then over to Kamas and Francis and over the shoulder of the Uintas on UT-35, the road rising up to nearly 10,000 feet elevation.

The dirt road into Swift Creek Campground ends where Swift Creek flows into the Yellowstone River at the border of the High Uintas Wilderness in the Ashley National Forest at just over 8,000 feet altitude.

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Kirsten at edge of High Uintas Wilderness

Except for some background Forest Service Rangers and Conservation Corps crew passing through to work on the hiking trails, we had the camp to ourselves. I had been here over 30 years ago to backpack with my brother up the Yellowstone drainage and back down the Swift Creek side. The place had not changed much and I was surprised and grateful to see it was not much busier.

Not much busier that is, except for the damned cows. Continue reading Always Cows in the Campground →

chaining, Economics, Grazing permit buyouts, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, veg treatment

Cows, not Trees, are the Problem

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We are bulldozing our public lands for a few very privileged private ranchers.

Utah’s state symbol might as well be the cowpie. We turn ourselves inside out making sure they are everywhere, all the time. In campgrounds, in national parks and monuments, in the forests, on the steppes, in our streams, all down the roads, and right there, next to your favorite picnic table. Cowpies. One might wonder why.

cowpie- Utah state symbol
Utah’s state symbol

Continue reading Cows, not Trees, are the Problem →

Economics, Grazing permit buyouts, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, Yellowstone everywhere

We are way upside down

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Upside down

Our public lands could be so much better. So easily. But we manage them in an upside down fashion.

Instead of managing the land for its intrinsic value as a natural landscape for the benefit of the vast majority of the public whom owns the land, we manage them for a noisy, tiny, belligerent, special interest group. The majority of us end up financing the degradation of our own lands. It is dumb of us. We don’t need to continue.

The main threat to the health of the land in the West, hard to see although it is everywhere, is public lands ranching. Nothing does more damage to public lands than public lands ranching. Continue reading We are way upside down →

Allotments, Economics, Grazing permit buyouts, Private Livestock Grazing

Cancelling Edward Abbey’s Grazing Permit

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aerial confluence price
Confluence of the Green and Price Rivers, taken one handed by the author/pilot from his airplane.  Not a good place for cows.

Yes, that Edward Abbey and yes, he did hold a Bureau of Land Management grazing permit.

In the fall of 1979, I moved to Price, Utah, taking the job of Assistant Area Manager for BLM’s Price River Resource Area. One of my duties was supervising the range management program on 1.8 million acres of public land in Carbon and Emery counties, and an early task was examining case files of the 87 ranchers holding grazing permits on 113 grazing allotments in the area. Permittee files were arranged alphabetically by name, and the first one in the top drawer was Edward Abbey. I immediately asked the range conservationist, Michele Abbey (no relation), if the file was for the Edward Abbey. She assured me it was and I took the file back to my desk for perusal. Continue reading Cancelling Edward Abbey’s Grazing Permit →

Cliven Bundy, Economics, Grazing permit buyouts, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, Yellowstone everywhere

The Single Best Idea for America’s Best Idea

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Put an end to public land livestock grazing

Utah is 90 percent urban. Much of the West is the same. Yet it is run politically as though it is mostly rural and agricultural. Most Utahns live along the urban Wasatch Front from Ogden to Provo. The Wasatch Mountains bordering the Front are in the U.S. Wasatch National Forest. Even though the Wasatch forests receive traffic like a major national park with millions of visitors per year, these forests are in the best shape of any of the national forests in the state. The reason? No cows. No sheep. No barbed wire. The public would never stand for it.

The rest of the state is a different matter. A majority of the land in Utah is public and most public land is run for and by ranchers, used up and abused by their private livestock. As a result these open lands are in sorry shape, continually overgrazed, constantly mismanaged. The land could be so much more beautiful. Instead, it is hammered, more than we know. And there is no good reason for it. Certainly not an economic one. Only a lack of public awareness allows this travesty to persist. Continue reading The Single Best Idea for America’s Best Idea →