President Donald Trump’s pick to manage the U.S. Department of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, is promoting a new “outcome-based” livestock management initiative on the public lands managed by the department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM).
The agency has solicited its grazing permittees to submit their ranching operations for nomination to be among the 6 to 12 projects nationwide that will be part of this “demonstration program.” The stated purpose of the initiative is, “to show that livestock grazing on the public lands can operate under a more flexible framework than is commonly used in order to better reach agreed upon habitat or vegetation goals.” It might sound good, but, as always, the devil is in the details.
The BLM’s announcement of the initiative raised an immediate red flag because it included a statement from Zinke wherein he claimed that, “Farmers and ranchers know the wildlife and the land they work better than anyone.” Really? They know it better than the department’s professional wildlife biologists? And if ranchers know so much, then how come livestock grazing has done more damage to wildlife habitat on public lands than all other commodity uses combined? (Grazing is far more ubiquitous on public lands than mining, drilling, and tree cutting.)
The obvious message behind Zinke’s initiative is that the BLM’s current management of public lands grazing is unfair to ranchers. How? They don’t specifically say, other than to imply that it’s too rigid. The BLM explained that, “Grazing authorizations typically emphasize process and prescription. The new authorizations will instead emphasize ecological outcomes, allowing livestock operators more flexibility to make adjustments in response to changing conditions such as drought or wildland fire.” So it seems they believe that a proven prescription to achieve a desired ecological outcome is bad because it’s too strict, while more flexibility will magically provide an alternative to removing livestock from public land that has burned or is experiencing drought.
The BLM’s announcement also said that Zinke’s initiative will give local “stakeholders” a say in these demonstration projects, but it didn’t explain what that meant. Under existing federal law, the agency is required to employ the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) public planning process when it implements a new livestock management plan for a grazing allotment. The NEPA process is important because it provides the general public with their only significant opportunity to provide input into livestock management on public lands. Zinke’s initiative is a demonstration project, so it’s unclear if NEPA applies, but it seems they are trying to invent a new public participation process, when a good one already exists.
I called the BLM’s national office on November 6 to ask them if the general public will have any opportunities to participate in the formulation of these new “flexible” grazing management plans. I was told that they don’t know, and that I should call my state BLM office to ask that question. So then I called the Arizona BLM office. They told me they don’t know either because they haven’t received any direction yet from the national office.
Perhaps my inability to get an answer about Zinke’s grazing initiative is simply because it’s a new program and the BLM hasn’t sorted out the details. But it’s a proposal from the Trump administration, and President Donald Trump has already proven to be the most anti-environment president in modern history, and a threat to the perpetuation of the multiple use doctrine on our public lands. So I have good reason to fear that the general public’s opportunity to participate in this demonstration program will be restricted. It’s important that it’s not, because the BLM manages more than 21,000 public lands grazing allotments on millions of acres across the West and they plan to expand the use of this new process if they deem it to be “successful.”
Updates
On March 28, 2018, the BLM announced announced 11 demonstration projects in six states for the Trump administration’s outcome-based grazing authorizations initiative.
On December 14, 2018, Interior Secretary Zinke was forced to resign due to a scandal.
On August 29, 2019, the BLM issued an Outcome Based Grazing fact sheet.
On January 21, 2020, the Trump administration’s BLM issued a A Notice of Intent to prepare an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to revise the agency’s grazing management regulations. Deadline for submission of scoping comments is March 6, 2020.