Increased Fees to Graze On Public Land Still Doesn’t Cover Costs President Obama’s proposed 2013 budget for the Department of the Interior includes a tiny bit of good news for western public lands: a $1 increase in the fee charged for livestock grazing on Bureau of Land Management lands. The fee, which is required of each public…
The effort to list the Greater Sage-grouse via the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has been an uphill battle. However, even as the end-game has yet to be realized, the effort itself has been remarkably successful at prompting bureaucratic backflips and a whole lot of paper-shuffling to accommodate consideration of the species. Unfortunately, many of the existing and developing…
Note: A number of updates have been added to this story as other news media picked this up. Lots of egg on the BLMs face! RM For these scroll to the bottom. – – – – Nov. 30, 2011. This morning Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) filed a scientific misconduct complaint with the Department…
In an implicit acknowledgement that public lands ranching is often incompatible with native species viability on public lands, Margaret Soulen Hinson provides more hyperbolic rhetoric at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands: Public Lands Council Press Release: RANCHERS WARN U.S. FOREST POLICIES THREATEN LIVESTOCK GRAZING Nov. 16, 2011…
Yesterday it was reported by Rocky Barker that Idaho Representative Mike Simpson believes that the bighorn and grazing riders are likely to make it into law. The riders, attached to the Fiscal Year 2012 – House Interior-Environment Appropriations Bill, would essentially do two things. First, the Bighorn Rider would shut down any process that the BLM…
Denial of Livestock Industry’s Petition for Writ of Certiorari seals the fate of Bush era grazing regulations on 160,000,000 acres of public land On Monday, October 3rd the United States Supreme Court denied consideration of an appeal by the Public Lands Council of prior federal court decisions won by Western Watersheds Project that overturned the…
Mike Hudak interviews Don Oman, a 35-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service, about his experience working with the agency as a part of Hudak’s series of interviews compiled for Western Turf Wars: The Politics of Public Lands Ranching Don Oman, a 35-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service explains how political pressure initiated by ranchers…
Conservationists have been putting in a lot of hours for a lot of years on the Green Mountain Common Allotment – and rightfully so; At 522,000 acres it’s the largest unfenced public land grazing allotment in the country, and it’s a landscape that’s been brutalized by livestock for far too long. Green Mountain grazing decision doesn’t…