Nice Try Erick

“ . . . ranchers are gunning for the one law that can save fish, wildlife, and their own industry. . .

After the public gets finished paying for public-lands grazing in lost fish, wildlife, plants, soil, and water, it gets to pay for it again in dollars. . . .10 federal agencies lost $123 million administering grazing in fiscal 2004. On average, an ‘animal unit month” (AUM)—the amount of forage a cow and her calf supposedly can consume in a month—costs ranchers $1.79 on public land and $13.30 on private land. Meanwhile, the public buys ranchers cattle guards, water troughs, water pipes, and wildlife-killing fences on its rangeland; it hires contractors to rip up its native plant communities and replace them with alien grasses favored by alien bovines but hurtful to its wildlife; it hires predator-control agents to shoot, trap, and poison its native mammals that might eat livestock; and it hires pest-control agents to poison its prairie dogs because ranchers imagine they ‘compete” with cattle. . . . ‘welfare ranching,” evokes the image of the Marlboro Man unhorsed and scrounging cigarette butts from hotel ashtrays. . . .

Livestock are the main source of nonpoint water pollution in the West and the main reason 80 percent of the region's fishes and 90 percent of its grassland birds are declining. . . .

The rules so worried the US Fish & Wildlife Service that it prepared a report on them for the BLM, making such observations as: ‘The owner of the trespassing livestock that are found on National Wildlife Refuge lands, for example, would no longer risk loss or suspension of his BLM grazing permit. Such a change communicates to permittees that attention to a healthy rangeland ethic ends at their permit boundary.’ And: ‘We believe that many of the Proposed Revisions would give priority to a use that is often in competition with fish and wildlife resources.” The BLM did not acknowledge these comments, nor did it include them in its final EIS.

The BLM had assigned biologist Erick Campbell to a team of 15 agency scientists charged with vetting the new rules. ‘The Proposed Action will have a slow, long-term adverse impact on wildlife and biological diversity in general,” wrote Campbell, a respected 30-year BLM veteran who had worked closely with ranchers and was anything but anti-cow. ‘Upland and riparian habitats will continue to decline due to increasing an already burdensome grazing appeals process, lack of ability to control illegal activities on public lands, and allowing livestock operators to acquire rights to livestock management facilities and vegetation on public lands.”

The response of the Bush administration was to kick Campbell off the team and rewrite his comments and those of his fellow team members so that grazing reappeared as a honey-flavored ecological elixir. Campbell, who retired in frustration, told me this: ‘BLM's D.C. office said, ‘We can't put this on the streets; this shows that grazing is bad.' Well, all the scientific literature says it is bad. The stuff I cited was peer-reviewed. They took the substance out of what I wrote and reversed me 180 degrees. This whole thing was at the behest of the livestock industry. You can make some progress like [former Interior Secretary Bruce] Babbitt's rangeland standards and guides, which were a hundred years overdue. But when you finally get something that's working, the industry comes in behind you and destroys it.” . . .
Sacred Cows By Ted Williams

Bush Gang Distort Science to Facilitate More Destructive Cattle Grazing on Public Lands

NEW GRAZING RULES

And that ain't all. See, Feeding the Rat - Congress and Lobbyists