Category Archives: Private Livestock Grazing

Cliven Bundy, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands

Enough of Bundy Already

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This open letter from Richard Spotts has also been published in CounterPoint and The Wildlife News among other places.

Richard Spotts worked for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for 15 years as Planning and Environmental Coordinator. Prior to his retirement in 2017, Richard had other professional jobs including environmental attorney, registered lobbyist, watershed project director, and county zoning administrator. He lives in Saint George, Utah where he is an active volunteer on public lands and environmental issues.

An Open Letter to Interior Secretary Haaland: Cliven Bundy’s Chronic Trespass Grazing Must End and How to Do It

Dear Secretary Haaland and other DOI officials:

Cliven Bundy’s more than a quarter century of blatant and destructive trespass livestock grazing on federal lands must come to an end. Enough is enough. Since about 1995, this illegal grazing has continued up to the present in the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) Gold Butte National Monument, the National Park Service’s (NPS) Lake Mead National Recreation Area, and within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s (FWS) designated critical habitat for the threatened Mojave desert tortoises in southern Nevada. This prolonged grazing and the associated ongoing construction of unauthorized “range improvements” violates the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, National Historic Preservation Act, Endangered Species Act, and many other laws and associated regulations. It also violates at least two previous federal court orders.

Continue reading Enough of Bundy Already →
Cliven Bundy, Cowboy Myth, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands

The Myth of the cowboy

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In spite of hurting both economy and ecology, private livestock grazing on public lands in the U.S. continues unabated for the last century right up to today. Much of the reason can be attributed to the myth of the cowboy.

All the way back in December 1946 in Harper’s magazine, Bernard DeVoto presciently wrote, “. . . the West has chosen to base its myth on the business that was of all Western businesses, most unregardful of public rights and decencies, most exploitive, and most destructive. The Cattle Kingdom did more damage to the West than anything else in all its economy of liquidation. As a mythology, it will do even worse damage hereafter.”

How The Bundy Standoff Could Screw Over Ranchers - ThinkProgress
Cultural Capture

“It’s cultural capture,” says Debra Donahue, a professor of law at the University of Wyoming and author of The Western Range Revisited. “The ranching industry has captured the American imagination. And they have been given a special deal at great cost to the American public.”

Continue reading The Myth of the cowboy →
Conservation, Cowboy Myth, Economics, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands

Cow Crud

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Journalist and Torrey House Press author Jonathan Thompson publishes The Land Desk, a superb commentary on the West. You should subscribe. Even though I am familiar with the ongoing, nonsensical destruction of our public lands by private cow, I am still dismayed when I see the facts and the magnitude of this existential farce as Jonathan presents below.

Read on:

Data Dump: Cows, cows, cows…
… on the aridifying public lands

“The vast San Juan ranges, with a plentiful supply of choice feed, were not to remain such for many years. Like everything else that goes uncontrolled or without supervision these ranges were used selfishly with the present only in mind [leaving them] in an almost irreparable condition.”

—Franklin D. Day, “The Cattle Industry of San Juan County, Utah, 1875-1900”

Subscribe now

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Conservation, Cowboy Myth, Economics, Escrow Waiver, Grazing Allotment, Koch brothers, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands

Flummoxed by the dark

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From a recent letter to a conservationist friend:

Our recent time with you in the cow trashed wilds has me thinking. All the time. I have tied myself into a knot.

I am working on writing some short pieces on economics and on the cowboy myth for a grazing coalition’s new website. I piled up and reread many of my sources on the subjects, particularly economics, going all the way back to Bernard DeVoto in Harper’s from the 30’s. I have discovered nothing new, but I am feeling paralyzed by the absurdities. Economically, nobody directly involved wins on public lands livestock grazing. Not even the rancher. And economically public lands livestock grazing is utterly unnecessary to the nation. But reading all the material has vividly brought home that despite the absurdity, nothing has changed in 25 years, not even in 75 years. In fact, it is getting worse. The extractors have gained power.

Look what the cowboy has done to our land. Makes me wonder appreciatively what people are doing to the cows.
Continue reading Flummoxed by the dark →
Point Reyes, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands

The Impacts of Livestock Grazing on Biological Soil Crusts (and Climate Change)

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Degradation of the original coastal prairies in California. Pen and ink illustration of the impacts of cattle grazing and trampling on Biological Soil Crust. Copyright Laura Cunningham 2020.

The former lush bunchgrass prairies along the Pacific coastal mountains in central California, once home to herds of tule elk, wide-roaming grizzlies, and salmon-filled streams, carefully managed for thousands of years by Miwok and many other tribes, are now mostly grazed instead by herds of cattle. Mediterranean weeds cover the grazed pastures where coastal prairies once grew. Most of the central Coast Range mountains are in private hands and inaccessible to the public. Point Reyes National Seashore is a rare public park established to restore and protect these California plant and animal species and habitats. Continue reading The Impacts of Livestock Grazing on Biological Soil Crusts (and Climate Change) →

Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, Water pollution

Up Shit Creek

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biohazard 2

In every state in America, it is illegal to deposit human feces in a surface water.  Poop in a creek, empty your RV sewage tank or outfall the sewage line from your cabin into a water body and hopefully you will be facing criminal charges.  The reason for these laws is simple, feces of warm blooded animals harbor disease causing organisms, lots of them.  Norovirus of cruise ship fame, Giardia, the beaver fever, the scourge of backpackers are among the more notorious examples.  Rather than test for each and every one of these nasties, the standard test is for the fecal coliform bacteria Escherichia coli, commonly called E. coli.  E. coli is used as an indicator, if it is present, the other germs are likely present as well.  The lab test for fecal coliform is fairly simple and does not require a large sample size.  Basically the test involves infecting a petri dish with water in question.  The petri dish is incubated at human body temperature for 24 hours.  Once out of the incubator the number of bacteria colonies growing in the dish are counted.  The number of colonies allowed in drinking water is zero.   The limit for water used for swimming or wading is 200 colonies. Continue reading Up Shit Creek →

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 →

Conservation, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands

Growing up with cowboys

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Contributed by Chip Ward, author of Stony Mesa Sagas, Torrey House Press (2017). This essay was originally published on Chip’s personal Facebook page.

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Chip Ward

Like most American kids in the fifties I grew up with cowboys, not the real ones who limp and spit but the heroes on television. Hopalong Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, Wild Bill Hicock and other television characters too numerous to name taught me that the world had good guys and bad guys. In my developing childhood brain complexity was dismissed and the binary circuit that divides the world into us and them, the righteous and the damned, was built.

The good guys won with guns. Guns were ubiquitous and although lots of guys got shot there was no blood pooling on the floor or spattered across the wall. Messy agony was also absent. Good guys got shoulder wounds and bad guys died dramatically but without screaming. Bystanders never got hit because collateral damage, after all, might muddy the clear divide between good and evil. Likewise, the inevitable gunfights between cowboys and Indians never involved women and children and the savages always started the fight. And the Indians who showed up on screen were mostly indistinguishable from each other and rode in whooping packs like wolves except for Tonto who had seen the light and became a good guy helper. All of this, of course, was pure bullshit. The themes and worldview of those programs had less to do with actual American history and were more about Cold War fears and ideology. A nation traumatized by a Great Depression and a Second World War was threatened by new unfathomably lethal nuclear weapons and so we retreated into a mythic past that was reassuring and inspiring.
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Point Reyes, Private Livestock Grazing, Public lands, Yellowstone everywhere

Point Reyes National Seashore Proposes to Kill Native Elk and Keep Cows

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Tule elk at Point Reyes National Seashore. Photo by wildlife photographer Matthew Polvorosa Kline. Used with permission.

Point Reyes, CA – Today, the National Park Service released its draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to amend the General Management Plan for the popular Bay Area parks Point Reyes National Seashore and the northern portion of Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Despite public opposition to the ongoing agricultural impacts to wildlife and waterways, the draft EIS indicates the agency will manage beef and dairy cows as “integral” to the parks. This includes lethally removing any of the native tule elk that interfere with ranching operations. Continue reading Point Reyes National Seashore Proposes to Kill Native Elk and Keep Cows →

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 →