Guest Column
Range War In the West
By Patrick Dorinson, Guest Writer, 7-18-09
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There is a range war out West. And unless you live in Idaho or Nevada or any other Western state you probably have no idea what is happening or why you should care. But wherever you live in America you should care because sooner or later it will affect you.
This range war is between ranchers who have worked the land raising cattle and sheep for over a century and environmental outlaws whose stated goal is driving them off the very land they need to survive and prosper. Today’s weapon of choice is not a Colt .45 or a Winchester rifle, but something much more deadly—the lawsuit
So what’s the issue?
There are more than a quarter of a billion acres of public lands in the West. For over century a system has been in place to allow livestock ranchers and resource entities controlled access to portions of public land.
Over the years there have been bitter disputes between ranchers and environmentalists over whether this practice should continue. For the ranchers this is about their very survival and the survival of the livestock industries that contribute so much to the economies of many Western states—1 ranch job creates 7 jobs to support the industry.
Recently, reasonable mainstream environmental and conservation groups like the Nature Conservancy have worked closely with the public lands stakeholders to find common ground that can address both the needs of the land while preserving a way of life essential to the West. Working together, ranchers and conservationists listened to each other and came up with plans to ensure the survival of both.
But some fringe environmentalists like the Western Watersheds Project (WWP) have no interest in compromise and consistently use and abuse our legal system to deny ranchers and other interests their rights to use public lands, especially for grazing.
WWP and its leader Jon Marvel, a transplanted Easterner that has designed huge homes for the rich and famous in Hailey, Idaho, continue to wage war against the ranching industry by pushing to let the land return to a pristine state with no cattle. I have news for Mr. Marvel, before the cattle came to the West, huge herds of elk and buffalo roamed the plains and valleys for centuries and I’ll bet they ate grass and tramped through streams.
WWP regularly sues the federal government, challenging rancher’s permits on technicalities and burying officials in a flood of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. It is estimated that just to fill the current requests it would take one person 6 years, working full time. This means that trained range managers and scientists who should be out working with the ranchers and other users of public lands are instead filling out paperwork. If you are a taxpayer you should be outraged.
I said earlier that even if you didn’t live in the West this would affect you in some way. Eventually the price of beef will rise as there will be fewer cattle merging into the food supply. And these activities might also put a severe crimp in the Obama administration’s desire to upgrade the electricity grid, build new pipelines to carry the West’s abundant natural gas to the rest of the nation, take advantage of the wind corridors that dot the West and build solar farms in the region’s deserts.
It’s already happening. Interior Secretary Salazar recently came to California to talk up building solar farms on public land near the Mojave Desert. But California Senator Dianne Feinstein is dead set against it, as are radical environmentalists. They’ve been complaining about lack of renewable energy for years and now that it might happen they suddenly develop a bad case of NIMBYism.
Why? Because these hypocrites don’t want any of that on public land either and you cannot achieve the president’s energy goals unless you use the West’s vast public lands.
Finally you should care because this type of bullying and intimidation is just plain wrong. And it’s hard to deal with folks whose goal is to drive ranchers out of business and destroy a way of life that has survived for over a hundred years despite the hardships inflicted by man and Mother Nature.
Patrick Dorinson is a communications strategist specializing in media relations, public affairs, political communications, crisis communications and government relations. During the Clinton Administration, he received Presidential appointments in communications to the General Services Administration, NASA and the Department of Energy. During California’s historic recall election of 2003, Dorinson served on press staff for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s campaign and transition teams. After the election he was tapped by Governor Schwarzenegger to be Deputy Secretary for Communications for the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency. Mr. Dorinson graduated from the University of Oregon, receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in History.
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Comments
I can't count the number of times I've heard agency people come up with some lame excuse why they continue to allow livestock graze in areas that have been totally devastated by those very livestock.
When reading permit renewal documents the BLM never admits that livestock are the reason for the failure to meet rangeland health standards even though it is absolutely apparent that they are. If the standards aren't being met they rearrange the deck chairs but always maintain the same amount of livestock use even though there are serious problems.
They have mislead about whether species such as sage grouse are using a particular allotment even though their own mapping shows that they are. Judges don't like that and that's why we win.
The livestock industry wants it all, wolves, bears, lions, coyotes, ravens, buffalo, elk, and a whole array of wildlife are killed outright so they can maintain their custom and culture. Other species have and are disappearing because of their abusive grazing practices so they can maintain their custom and culture. Habitat is being destroyed, water is being polluted and the land is pounded into dust so they can maintain their custom and culture. They have "captured" university range departments to concoct science to justify their carnage upon the land so they can maintain their custom and culture. They have killed literally thousands of buffalo under the guise of disease management which turns out to be a scheme to protect grass so they can maintain their custom and culture. They cherry pick science to deny the fact that their domestic sheep kill OUR bighorn sheep so they can maintain their custom and culture. They destroy vast areas of important sagebrush steppe and piñon/juniper habitat by mowing, poisoning, hacking and burning under the guise of habitat improvement or "fuels" projects but which are in reality ways to increase forage for livestock so they can maintain their custom and culture.
Unfortunately the "custom and culture" argument falls flat when you look at who is involved in public lands ranching. Companies like Barrick Gold (a Canadian mining company) and other mining companies, the Simplot Corporation, and the Southern Nevada Water Authority, and rich hobby ranchers are the big players in public lands ranching at least in Nevada and parts of Idaho. These companies use public lands ranching for various reasons. These mining companies, agribusiness, and water speculators buy base properties and hire ranchers to graze the public lands allotments. That is hardly the "custom and culture" that one thinks of when the subject is brought up but it is becoming the norm. They have expensive lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians to further their priorities while the public is being rolled and asked to subsidize this destructive practice.
And what do they pay for the privilege? $1.35 per Animal Unit Month which entitles them to graze a cow and a calf or up 10 domestic sheep on OUR public lands.
The hyperbole that Mr. Dorinson, who is "a communications strategist specializing in media relations, speech and op-ed writing, public affairs, political communications, crisis communications and government relations" according to his website (http://www.pdcomm.com/About.html), is seemingly meant to disparage anyone who may be opposed to the interests of the livestock industry. He fails to mention the devastation that the livestock industry has wrought upon the land and the wildlife while trying to gain sympathy for the "custom and culture" which is benefits the few landed elite, politically connected, and hobby ranchers.
I'd rather have elk and buffalo 'trampling' the streams then cows. Once again, we're asked to believe, regardless of the science (and obvious visible proof) that cattle are not causing more damage to the land then bison and elk. Maybe if you live in the east, you'd fall for that one. Any of us who have seen land grazed by cattle and land grazed by bison find it laughable. Oh, and by the way, elk don't eat grass, so I'll take that bet.
And finally, I point out the "Finally" part of this absurd piece of trash. "It's just plain wrong." Wow. That's some arguement. I'm going to start using it for everything I don't support.
public lands ranching is the single largest cause of landscape desertification in the country, among the largest non-point sources of water pollution in the west and the biggest weed/exotic-plant spreader in the west.
The Bureau of Land Management itself claims that the western range is in the worst condition ever.
the mythical range-riding, rough-shoden' "cowboy" of the movie-theaters existed during a period of time of roughly 20-years in the 19th century - since that time, it hasn't existed - it's a myth. Mining companies, water-authorities, politicians, and hobby-ranchers have held the lion's share of the title - usually making money somewhere else, but holding the ranch to ride the myth with the locals they need to cut the state/county/local red tape for their other commercial/extractive pursuits, hold the *water* associated with base-properties and write-off the rest of the loss against their real bread-winning tickets. These are corporate operations - decisions are made in board-rooms ~ not around campfires.
the ridiculous $1.35 /AUM (enough forage to feed a cow and a calf or 10 sheep for a month) charged ranchers to graze away our public land, water-sources, and wildlife habitat barely covers a fraction of the expense to administer public lands for the grazing use. That's where tax-payers pick up the tab to keep the myth alive. The deficit is over $100,000,000 a year and if externality costs (spraying weeds, blading roads, wildlife eradication etc.) that would otherwise not need to be cleaned up are accounted for - public lands ranching costs taxpayers closer to a half a billion dollars a year.
So cinch up that bolo-tie, wax up that mustache, position that ten-gallon hat just.. right.. close your eyes and we'll pretend together --- but in the real-world it's the wildlife and wild-places that most people care about, and soon as we see that the 'poor family rancher' is really a multinational gold-mining company (*Barrick Gold company - grazes a quarter million acres+ of public land *Simplot Inc. - grazes ~ a million of public lands), the pixie-dust world Mr. Peter Dorinson rests his rage on is going to come crashing down. Boy - that'd be a hell of a show ...
p.s. - *boo*
He's a "communications strategist specializing in media relations, speech and op-ed writing."
The overall impression I get from his website makes me a tad nervous about his judgement of what constitutes a "mainstream" environmentalist group vs what constitutes a "fringe" environmental group.
And I couldn't help but notice that he didn't classify public lands ranchers as mainstream ranchers accustomed to trashing public lands with livestock vs fringe ranchers making an effort to do less damage.
Good ol' Patrick does his gosh darn best to sound reasonable, but fails to mention that study after study shows grazing livestock on public lands harms to land--it's just a matter of degree. How reasonable is it for ranchers and their livestock to degrade public lands? That's a sensible question, but if you ask it, Patrick says you're part of the lunatic fringe and refuses to discuss it.
And he certainly fails to mention how the cattle and sheep ranchers have devasted the arid west in the last hundred years. The only point I'll give him is that Easterners should defintely pay attention to what's going on. But not because their beef on the grill will be threatened, but because the irreplaceable public lands they own in common and the disappearing wildife are threatened by continued commercial livestock grazing.
In any event, our health and the land's health will be better off if the arid west's public lands ranching goes by the wayside.
And Dave Skinner, you're a boor. Many of us who are opposed to welfare ranching live outside the big cities. I, for example, live in a small mountain town of about 2,000, and spend 100+ days outside on public lands. I am tired of ranchers' devastation and steward of the earth rhetoric when the reality comes down to diminshing wildlife, trampled riparian areas, and barbed wire carving up the public lands.
Whatever other twisted lines of logic you may be weaving in your editorial, this excerpt proves beyond a shadow of a doubt how completely clueless you are about basic ecology and the species of which you speak. Do your homework on the behavioral differences between wild ungulates and domestic cattle, particularly in regards to water sources, before you make such ridiculous assertions.
Btw, your essay might have held more validity had you not included your biography. I'm glad you did.
The should just pipe down about the free ride ranchers have had for almost a century and a half.
Those ranchers ancestors--many of them--were here in the west before there were states in many cases--and they didn't get nearly the deal most railroads got from the feds!
So what if their land was mostly pretty damned cheap and they have never paid much more than a pittance for all that open range?
They've been around long enough to be considered truly entitled to what they're used to.
There ought to be laws to protect them from criticism...
They think they are entitled to all of the public range land. At this point, they have the delusion they own it at the devastating expense to all wildlife on public lands.
Cattlemen are powerful. Influential $$$$ in Washington, DC.
They "own" the Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). It is all about GREED.
But what goes around, comes around. Americans are becoming more and more aware of the corruption involved and health risks of beef.
Who cares if the price of beef goes up. Just means an ever increasing, not buying beef, will increase.
for way too long. No public land should be used for grazing any
private animals, at any price. This countrys public land are so overgraze they will not recover for centuries.
Did Dave Skinner just threaten to shoot "Rangenet types" with his rifle, or is there another way to interpret his comment?
The 3% number for beef production on public lands is a disingenuous number, also, since the production on public lands is calves to be sold each fall at 400-700 lbs to livestock feeding operations in the middle of the cornbelt. There, the livestock is raised to 1200 lbs or more and then slaughtered. That skews the numbers for a place like Iowa of Nebraska higher, and takes from the output of the states with a majority of the land in public hands.
Oregon is a 65% public lands state. We have RustBelt unemployment because there is little possibility to create jobs in those counties where 75% or more of the land is public. Add to that a lack of means to raise public money to fund schools, roads, and county government. Grazing fees do pay funds that do stay in the county of origin. A concerned group of enviro purists can certainly stop all uses of those lands, but I believe there is an implicit duty to replace the lost money. The county has police issues with those lands. We have huge marijuana grows on Federal lands each summer, with significant environmental degradation from water diversion and chemical use. The counties spend too much money trying these people in court.
If I were a sheriff, or a DA, I would tell the US Attorney that dope grows on public land resulting in arrests don't use my jail, my public defender, my DA, my court system. If you don't pay us taxes or fees to support our government, take your perps somewhere else and try them in Federal court, hold them in Federal jail cells, defend them with Federal court appointed attorneys, spend Federal money on defense. Or ask Marvel to pay for it. He seems to have enough money to be a permanent occupying force in some Western Federal court on a daily basis. We need all the money we have just to keep the schools open. With no timber or graze money, we can't afford to even do that by reasonable taxation of existing private property, incomes, and resources. Our towns exist because of past Federal policy to encourage the population to spread out and use Homestead Act lands, railroad grant checkerboard lands, and resources from the public domain such as graze, minerals, water, and timber. That now being withheld, by urban desire, will need replacement money to fund the American stated goals of "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness." The broken promise of resource availability does not pay the bills in rural areas today.
I have seen the societal destruction from the Northwest Timber Plan, and the shells of towns left behind, the meth, abuse, and hopelessness. Al Gore told a congressional committee a month or more ago that he thought the NTP was a wonderful solution that saved the spotted owl and other species. He is clueless. About as stupid, ignorant, uninformed a statement I have heard from a living being still living his charade of self importance. The poster boy for "couldn't pour piss out of a boot with a hole in the toe and directions on the heel." And the reason Nobel prizes now come in Crackerjacks boxes.
If an adversarial society is what the likes of Marvel et al want, I am sure he and others will find out that they will have determined adversaries. My life experience is that you had better leave your foe an escape route or you will experience mayhem as you get run over by the person you thought you had cornered. All politics is local, and Democrat or Republican, the congress has to run locally no matter what their minders in the White House want or need. Losing your job, your home, and no prospects for a better life will mean that ObamaNation results will have to be real, large, and timely or there will be changes in who shows up in congress for swearing in the January of 2011.
Too many people, over too much of the landscape, are broke, without means, and many more are just hanging on. In my state of Oregon, industry after industry has lost jobs in five digit numbers, and double digit percentages. But government has gained 3% at a time when we are laying off teachers, shutting down state agencies, going without days in court, jail beds being emptied, and higher education raising tuition while pink slipping faculty. So it must be the Feds who are hiring. It is not state and local. If killing more jobs, taking more away from the economy is going to happen, there will be that perfect storm of revolt sooner than later. A sea change, as they call it, to use American resources to build American products to sell to Americans using them. Or, we are going to see those with means just leave to where taxes are lower, service is better, and class and racial tensions are not exacerbated by government favor and favorites. Environmental "gains" that kill jobs will not be looked on with favor in 2010.
And Grizzled, I'm glad you have the free time to enjoy your public lands. But I'm not so impressed that you see fit to attack those whose lot it is to try to WORK on public lands.
By the way, here's what a boor be:
A person with rude, clumsy manners and little refinement.
2. A peasant.
So I guess that means you're an elitist toff?
The GUARDS are put in so that the PUBLIC can ALSO drive on the graded road without stopping every mile to stretch wire -- or drop the gate down so the cattle get out.
Never mind the water truck is probably needed because some lawsuit got the water improvements taken out.
The false canards believed by the posters here just blow my mind. If this is the true political environment, and these are the attitudes of otherwise reasonable and intelligent people, well, no wonder it's so easy to conduct a cultural pogrom.
Cows don't graze snow. They don't graze on emerging grass. So the season is short, and gives the rancher time to put up hay on the land, and when that is in the stack, then they hope to water up enough grass to have some fall feed on the home place until the ground freezes. And on the public range, the cows are gone by early to mid September, and the grass grows anew behind them, leaving new, nutritious feed for wildlife to fatten on before winter, and if the wind blows the snow off the ridges, some feed there for winter. The wildlife that feeds in the alfalfa fields, the hay fields, is getting a free ride from the private rancher. So when you see the deer and elk in an alfalfa field in december, or march, you really should add that feed to the cost of the grazing permit on the public domain. They are there because they don't have the ability to dig through six feet of snow to get to the grass on the summer graze the rancher uses by permit.
But an understanding of how things really work is not what you are interested in. You are interesting in gaining exclusive access to what someone else has. Just greed, really. Something for nothing. At least the rancher pays for his use. You don't for your use of Federal lands. The locals pay for the access roads that get you there. The locals pay for the law enforcement. The locals pay for the emergency services. If I were a country commissioner, a local government leader, I would push for a plan to assess anyone from out of county needing emergency services the true cost of providing those. Send them a bill. And if pay is not forthcoming, put it into collection, go to court for a judgement. That is how Marvel et al work it. Quit subsidizing the tourists who want to put you out of work. Make them pay their way, too.
You might need a editor and a fact checker.
Regards,
Andy
Grazing permits/leases issued by the Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service allow the permit/lease holder the privilege to use publicly owned forage on federal public lands. The permits do not confer a right to permittees/lessees to graze public lands. This distinction was intended by Congress in the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 [A] (BLM) and the Granger-Thye Act of 1950 [B] (Forest Service), articulated in agency regulations [C], restated in federal grazing studies [D], affirmed by scholars [E], and upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 2000 [F]. Federal grazing permits and leases are revocable, amendable, non-assignable ten-year licenses to graze federal public lands that do not convey property rights to grazing permittees/lessees.
The misnomer of “grazing rights” can leave one with the impression that livestock grazing on federal public lands has a superior position to other uses of those lands, which is untrue. Our public lands are habitat for wildlife, sources of drinking water, and valued by Americans for myriad recreation opportunities.
[A] 43 U.S.C. sec. 315b.
[B] 16 U.S.C. sec. 580(l).
[C] 43 C.F.R. sec. 4130.2(c) (BLM regulation); 36 C.F.R. sec. 222.3(b) (Forest Service regulation).
[D] E.g., USDI-BLM, USDA-Forest Service. 1995. Rangeland Reform ’94 Final Environmental Impact Statement. USDI-BLM. Washington, D.C.: 125.
[E] E.g., D. Donahue. 1999. THE WESTERN RANGE REVISITED: REMOVING LIVESTOCK FROM PUBLIC LANDS TO CONSERVE NATIVE BIODIVERSITY. Univ. Oklahoma Press. Norman, OK: 38.
[F] Public Lands Council v. Babbitt, 529 U.S. 728, 741 (2000). See also U.S. v. Fuller, 409 U.S. 488 (1973) (holding that the federal government is not required by the Fifth Amendment to compensate a property owner in a condemnation action for the extra value of his private property attributed to his federal grazing permit).
Your ignorance is exceeded only by your arrogance.
A PR man. Indeed.
Question is, for who?
"'Federal Claims Court Judge Loren A. Smith, based in Washington D.C., ruled that government restrictions severely reducing water flows to the Hage family’s land “deprived them of the water they needed for irrigation, making the ranch unviable.”
Like judges before him, Smith said the cancellation of Hage’s grazing permit as a result of overgrazing and trespassing did not constitute a “taking” prohibited under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution because a grazing permit is “a license, not a contract or property interest,” he said.'''
But he concluded the government committed a taking when the Forest Service ......... .......... made it impossible for him to maintain irrigation ditches."
Pay special attention to the second paragraph.
Hage ended up with all his filed on water, and evidently the grass it grows along the ditches, and in seeps. Whether the Hage family is still running cows, and any on public lands, I have no idea. Tragedy seemed to follow them for a while as Hege fell to cancer and Helen Chenoweth, his wife, to not wearing a seat belt. But she was the kind of woman who did go through life without a seat belt. Like her or not.
But at the least, the Piss Fir Willies failed in taking Hage's rights to water, and the case is important water rights law. Any who gain access to a permit to graze his old leases will have to pay to use the water, and have their cattle not graze his heirs grass, even though it is on public lands.
I guess the PissFir Willies could run it all into a pipe to Hage land, at their expense. That would solve some problems. Hard on game, though. Oh, and wild horses. The fabled wild horses.
I see that several Northwest Tribes are now wanting to construct or have access to, a horse slaughter for human consumption facility. Too many horses with no owner of record on Tribal lands raising Holy Ned with the environment, and seriously in need of culling, thinning, paring, call it what you like. Unmanaged, horse herds grow by 20% a year, compounded. Every 4 years the population doubles. That does a lot to explain why the Hage allotments and many others in the Great Basin appear overgrazed. Feral horses, sagebrush rats, eating the feed to the pebbles, and fouling the water sources, drying up some. Even the US Dept of Defense has a feral horse problem on the vast acres they control in the West. Their PR folks don't know how to respond when they find a hundred head or so dead from no water or starvation. A fine example of husbandry of this wonderful symbol of free living...
So you sign a 10 year grazing permit, and at the end, you have five times the feral horses on the claim than were there at the beginning of the lease, and the range is declared overgrazed. Gee whiz! I wonder why? If the BLM and USFS say one horse eats two and a half times the feed of a cow and calf pair, a hundred horses is like having a beef herd of 250 mother cows.
All is not as reported or appears, when your information comes only from advocates of no more grazing. Unless the horse deal is addressed realistically, morally, the range will never recover, and the people advocating for recovery will lead you astray, all of it to no good. That is what polarized advocacy has become in these United States. That is why we never get divisive problems solved. We will never get all cows off public land, and we will never have universal health care.
Look at how Medicare is being used as the funding source for universal health care by the ObamaNation. Don't pay doctors their costs, which will reduce Medicare payments, which are politically determined. Oregon is 48th in what Medicare pays to a doctor. New York, Texas and California are in the top 10. So a doctor in Oregon gets a couple of thousand less for a hip replacement than a doctor in the high population states. No big deal. But patently unfair, political, and those large states only have two senators each, so we will not get universal health care past the Senators whose states lose more money and coverage, Democrat or Republican, than they might gain through universal health care. Mess with Medicare people, cut them off from doctors due to cost/loss payments to fund patients in higher population states, and support for the Obama plan means screwing people out of health care who already have it. Won't fly. Too many smaller states get hosed. The beauty of the Senate. Montana has as many in the Senate as Texas, New York or Texas. And so do North Dakota, Alaska, Rhode Island, Delaware, and many others. Taking money from doctors who already make less for the same procedure means fewer doctors to do the procedure, means you limp for life while waiting for a willing doctor. Won't fly. And no public graze ranching won't fly either. The advocates for change got old, and younger turks are not forthcoming. Besides, the rich guys in the hubs of commerce own the ranches now, and are not about to lose land use they bought with the ranch. They didn't get rich by being stupid.
Has nothing to do with grazing privileges.
Which is waWathis article is about.
And as always the rest of your rant is little more than disconnected gobbledy-gook.
Las Vegas taking water wherever it can is not about conservation, or about environmental protection. It is about Reid and the Del Webb corp., and development interests in Las Vegas.
Hage can't hurt you. Reid will.
Water is the big dog in the West, right now. It controls how many homes you can build, how much pollution those homes can produce, how many more drivers there can be, how many more trucks delivering goods, how many more goods have to be produced and sold. All hinging on water.
I thought this article was about grazing on public lands in the western states.
Maybe you should find a story about what you want to comment about and have at it.
However one part of what you say is true although I doubt you even realize it.
That is that the vast majority of public land grazing takes place on what is geographically a desert, with very little moisture, and as such is the most ill suited place for grazing an animal that is essentially a import suited to tropical, sub-tropical climates, which is a big reason why the streams and ponds, ect. suffer so much with cattle grazing.
"By the way, here's what a boor be:
A person with rude, clumsy manners and little refinement.
2. A peasant."
Definition 1. above may fit you, but I think the best word to describe you is "truculent". Merriam-Webster online lists four definitions; two of those are appropriate:
3 : scathingly harsh : vitriolic <truculent criticism>
4 : aggressively self-assertive : belligerent
You don't need to be an elitist toff to use an online dictionary. Even you can do it.
3. aggressively hostile; belligerent.
Or how about The American Heritage Dictionary:
1. Disposed to fight; pugnacious.
2. Expressing bitter opposition; scathing:
<a >
3. Disposed to or exhibiting violence or destructiveness; fierce.
Sounds like they had you in mind!
"a truculent speech against the new government."
You're down with that, aren't you Dave?
Not to elevate myself beyond peasantry, but Winston Churchill was truculent as well. So I'm in good company.
interest'n comments and above all kinna like vigilante talk...lol
Thumbs Up from de Colonel on dis one!!
Giddup
Anyways, not too worry too much. Our gov is still looking out for you. The FY2010 budget has you and your kind earmarked for over 130 M next year. Be sure to get your application in on time.
As for your fear of development on our public ranges, why not just leave them alone? There would still be room for wild horses and various recreational activities such as ORV and/or ATV riding....we could do this if it werent ffor the cows.
Those in the know and study after study says it true,..the ranges are declimated because of over 100 yrs of overgrazing....
Stop using the cows as an excuse for holding onto your permits, which, as you should know,are worth infinately more than your cow business.
No summer range means no way to grow feed for winter. So the ranch, without the public summer permit, is not a ranch. It is an uneconomic hay farm in a place with a short growing season. However, there is no end to people with more money than sense who would very much like to have a cabin in Montana or Colorado who would pay residential property prices to have ten acres of paradise. Subdivision. The public range is not used for grazing, and the private land hosts many more people to clutter the landscape with fences and homes, which always bring domestic livestock for pleasure, dogs, cats, and weeds. If you read this slowly, you might understand what I said. The result is a diminished capacity to overwinter wildlife, and the gain for wildlife to the formerly grazed summer range in nil or a loss. Habitat is a word that encompasses the whole of an animals needs. Winter range, the lower elevation land on which to seek security and food, is not improved by the end to public grazing. Distance from fences, homes, roads, is what constitutes security for wildlife. Private ranches are mostly barely big enough to provide that security. Make them smaller by subdivision, and the security is gone, and so is the winter range.
Central Oregon mule deer have been decimated by their winter range being occupied by several hundred thousand new homes and subdivisions in the last twenty years. The security is gone, habitat is gone, and the high speed roads that service the scattered amenity property developments have killed the migrating deer by the tens of thousands each year as the move from the high desert to the mountains and back each spring and fall. "Povery with a view", the new name for Bend, is also "Impoverished winter habitat with a McMansion" for wildlife. 28 golf courses smack in the middle of critical habitat is not being "green." Of course, all that land was once owned by timberland holders and ranches, both now banished by the swells from the big city recreating because it is their right.
Stop all public land grazing tomorrow, and you will have the greatest decline of wildlife in the West since the Winchester repeating rifle showed up. But if that is what the smart people in town really want, it will happen, and when things go to rat shit, as they have in the forests since the banning of logging, they will blame anyone but themselves. I don't have a dog in the fight. Do what you need to do. But if you replace cows with wind turbines and solar panels, I want to know what the gains are for the sacred public lands.
In fact, if I were a Montana rancher in the windy areas, and I lost my grazing permit, I would be investigating wind turbine leases just to make sure the local area had income and all the beauty that comes with the monster white flop-floppers whirling away macerating bats and birds in the name of environmental protections from the smart people in town.