Grazing

The “Grizzlies and Us” Series

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Here’s a really interesting series in the Missoulian. It’s it’s a 10- part series comprised of more than 20 stories. Lots of stories and they seem to be visible to those without a Missoulian subscription (thank you, Missoulian! and Lee Enterprises!)

I picked this one as the bikes/grizzlies issue seems to be of interest to TSW readers, but there are many others.. feel free to discuss any.  Here’s one about livestock guardian dogs and technology protecting sheep, and the work of ranchers and the group People and Carnivores.

Grizzlies are expanding their range.. how are people getting along with them?

US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Wayne Kasworm had just replaced Servheen as interim leader of the grizzly recovery effort. Treat’s death crystallized one of his top tasks: Getting people to agree on how much safety they all must give up to coexist with bears.

“They’re wild animals, and we are not controlling them,” Kasworm said. “What we attempt to do is provide information so people can make reasoned judgments about what is safe activity or not safe activity. We’re trying to get some conversation going, to get people thinking about what is going on out there in the woods.”

To deal with objective dangers in the outdoors, people already self-limit their recreation in many ways. Boaters avoid rivers during spring runoff, or accept the consequences of lost gear, wrecked boats, and possible death. Golfers voluntarily leave the links when a thunderstorm brings lightning over their metal clubs and spiked shoes. Snowmobilers and backcountry skiers check avalanche forecasts and weigh the risks of the day’s adventure.

“We’re trying to get folks to recognize and take on responsibility for their own safety when they walk into known grizzly bear habitat, when grizzly bear habitat is taking over more and more of Montana,” Kasworm told me. “When a bear results in a human safety issue, or it’s killing livestock repeatedly, we remove the bear. But if you’re tooling around on your mountain bike and you bump into the bear and you’re scared, that’s not necessarily a reason to remove the bear.”

Is it a reason to remove the bikes? And what about everything else humans like to do in bear country? Whose interests rule?

Three years to the day after Treat’s death, Flathead National Forest Supervisor Chip Weber declared his disagreement with Servheen’s report. New controversy had arisen over a commercial ultramarathon and a backcountry bike shuttle service in the national forest land around Whitefish, Montana, about twenty miles from Coram.

“I want to start by strongly repudiating the notion that as an agency, we ought not promote, foster or permit activities because engagement in those activities presents risk to the participants,” Weber told the Interagency Grizzly Bear Committee’s summer 2019 gathering in Missoula. “The issues around this are much broader than trail use, and grizzly bears and both people and wildlife may suffer if the discussion isn’t expanded.”

As to Board of Review report, Weber told me he had great personal respect for Servheen but “his (Servheen’s) focus is grizzly bear recovery and solely grizzly bear recovery. Mine is serving the American public and the needs they want in the context of many wildlife species and an overall conservation mission that’s very, very broad.”

Individual sporting events like the Whitefish ultramarathon have such minimal impact on grizzly bears, Weber said, they fall under a categorical exclusion from in-depth environmental review. At the same time, those events endear increasing numbers of people to their public lands as the number of users grows year after year.

“There’s a broad public out there with needs to be served and not just the needs of the few,” Weber said. “We think that greater good for the greatest number will be served. That fosters connectivity with wildlands and a united group of people that can support conservation. And the best conservation for bears is served by figuring out how to have these human activities in ways that are as safe as they can be, understanding you can never make anything perfectly safe.”

Grizzly CSI by Angus Thuermer for Wyofile

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Wyoming Game and Fish Large Carnivore Biologist Zach Turnbull determines the cause of death on a calf in 2014 (provided Mark Gocke, Wyoming Game and Fish).

Another great article by Angus Thuermer of Wyofile. This depicts the daily life of one of those professionals in the middle- and in the details- of a thorny natural resource/environmental conflict. It also shows how important trust is for people involved in making the policy machinations happen in real life and the role of professional judgment based on experience. There’s also a great deal on the nuts and bolts of the Wyoming Animal Damage Compensation Program.

The entire article is well worth reading, but I excerpted the paragraph about Turnbull’s professional credibility

$1.5 million
On this hot July 18, Turnbull isn’t satisfied he has an answer on this cow until he is done skinning. He drags the hide out from the morass of would-be hamburger and lays it out in the sagebrush and grass.

He examines the underside of the skin, looking for puncture holes from the teeth of a bear or wolf, rips from a grizzly’s claws.

“For being as ugly as she is, she’s pretty clean,” he says. “Clean” meaning there’s no sign of attack. “She doesn’t have a hole in her except where she’s [been] fed on.”

Although he will make his report later, at this point he considers the “more likely than not” standard of predation. “I’d say she’s far below that,” he says.

Turnbull’s 16 years’ field experience from his post in Pinedale has earned him credibility. In 2019 the Green River Cowbelles/Cattlewomen honored him as a Friend of Agriculture for his work. Ranchers called him responsive, responsible and fair.

“I’ve been there on those kills,” says Charles Price, one of the ranchers whose stock grazes near Union Pass. “I have a lot of respect for him.”

“He goes through it and looks — there’s maggots crawling, flies, it smells bad,” Price says. “He sits there and does the work. I couldn’t do it myself.”

Price doesn’t always agree with Turnbull’s verdicts and has “bumped heads with him a few times,” he says. But, “most of the time I would bet on his call even when I disagree with him,” Price says. “I support him.”

Fed/State Coordination

Repeat offenders
There’s another aspect to Turnbull’s job. When grizzlies are persistent in killing stock, Game and Fish will move or kill them.

That’s done in coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But Turnbull often makes the first call.

Ranchers seek to avoid depredation. The cattle association has altered its grazing sequence to keep smaller animals farther from grizzly haunts and tried other methods.

“After the 2015 grazing season, the Association worked with an organization to sponsor a number of seminars focused on methods to reduce large carnivore depredation of cattle,” Sommers wrote in his declaration. “Out of these discussions, in an effort to reduce depredations, the Association tried cattle bunching techniques in one pasture system for two consecutive years.

“The goal was to make cattle less susceptible to predation,” he wrote. “[H]owever, the Association did not see any reduction in depredation and has discontinued that practice.”

There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for when to trap or move a bear, Turnbull said. “One strike, two strikes, three strikes — it’s not really how it happens,” he said. “It’s not a really good description of conflict management.

“There are bears that we have captured and removed the first time we have captured them,” he said. “There are bears we have captured several times before we removed or didn’t remove them.”

PERCs Take on Strategies for Eastern Washington Wolves

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At one of the WGA (Western Governors’s Assocation) Working Lands meetings, I remember a speaker saying “some people think of ranchers as the enemy, what if we thought of them as partners?”. A number of years ago, I worked with environmental lawyers and others on the regulations around releasing genetically engineered organisms into the environment. It seemed like people who have worked in the polluting chemicals kinds of environmental issues wouldn’t think of Monsanto as a partner. The act of regulating industries should be more or less arms-length (you have to understand their processes, or you can’t be good regulators). But maybe natural resources-related environmental conflicts call for a different, more inclusive, and less adversarial approach. We see that with fisheries management, the sage grouse initiative, and so on.

I was thinking of #EnvironmentWithoutEnemies when I read this summary of a report by PERC. The whole summary and report can be found here. I bolder a few of my favorite statements.

The governor’s letter demonstrates the difficulty of managing the political pressures associated with wolf recovery. Wolf populations have been steadily increasing and are not dispersing across the state as initially expected, creating a high-conflict zone where wolves and ranchers are both heavily concentrated. The weaknesses in the state’s approach to managing this conflict are being magnified, and there is a need to adjust the existing management strategy.

Additionally, as WDFW begins planning for post-recovery, there is an opportunity to examine the current strategy and determine what changes should be made to protect the livelihood of ranchers while ensuring that wolves continue on their path to full recovery and delisting throughout the state.

Ensuring there continues to be a healthy ranching economy is a matter of fairness, economic strength, and environmental sustainability. The counties most affected by the return of wolves have some of the highest unemployment rates in the state, nearly double the state average. Ranchers, range riders, and hunters are also good partners in caring for the land and in funding wildlife stewardship. Successful wolf management that protects the livelihoods of ranchers and farmers while helping wolf populations grow is economically, morally and environmentally responsible.

Based on the history of wolf recovery in Washington and other western states, the best path would combine (1) improved non-lethal management approaches, (2) more rapid lethal removal of problem packs, and (3) expanded compensation programs designed by ranchers and others in the community where conflict is occurring. Some of these tactics are already being used but are not as effective as they could be for a variety of reasons. Additionally, since wolves have not dispersed across the state, the state should delist the species in Eastern Washington, as the federal government has, and focus its recovery efforts on other regions where wolf recovery is proceeding more slowly. The state can also pilot post-recovery strategies in Northeast Washington where the density of the wolf population is at a level that justifies delisting. Those pilot strategies should be developed primarily by the interested parties representing ranchers, conservation groups, and others in the affected communities. The state will always act as a backstop to any agreement, but it should encourage and be guided by a collaborative solution. Doing so would encourage groups to engage cooperatively rather than appealing primarily to the agency or to judges to intervene, which would increase conflict, mistrust and animosity. There is no quick solution, but as the experiences of other western states demonstrate, wolf recovery can be successful while providing ranchers with fairness and adequate levels of protection.

Judge: No evidence of ‘certain and great harm’ to grizzlies-Wyofile Story on Green River Litigation

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This is just the rejection of a PI, but of interest. Here’s the link. Thanks to the reporter Angus Thuermer, for summarizing parts of the judge’s opinion.

A judge shared his reasoning Friday on why he refused to halt the killing of grizzly bears, killings that protect a historic Wyoming cattle drive and ranching operation on the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

Conservation organizations presented no evidence wildlife managers will remove more female cattle-eating grizzlies from federal Sublette County grazing allotments if he doesn’t immediately step in, U.S. District Judge Amit P Mehta said.

The conservation groups sued the U.S. Secretary of the Interior and others claiming the grazing plan violated the Endangered Species Act, among other laws, in part because it did not limit the removal or killing of female grizzly bears. Protected by the ESA, female grizzlies are a key component of the Yellowstone ecosystem population in question. The conservation groups sought an injunction to immediately stop the killings and removals.

But the nonprofits Western Watersheds Project, Yellowstone to Uintas Connection, and Alliance for the Wild Rockies “have not offered evidence of a ‘certain and great’ harm that is ‘likely to occur,’” while the case wends its way through court, Mehta wrote. In past years, an average of 0.7 female grizzly bears a year have been removed from the Upper Green River grazing area, the judge wrote. That suggests “the taking of more than one or two female bears during the pendency of this case is unlikely to occur.”

The conservationists did not convince the judge “that the killing of a single member of a threatened species constitutes irreparable harm, especially where, as here, the grizzly bear population has been growing for years,” Mehta wrote.

In reaching his conclusion, Mehta wrote that wildlife managers have several safeguards to ensure that the removal or death of female grizzlies to protect livestock does not endanger the Yellowstone Ecosystem population of an estimated 728 bears. “The lethal taking of a nuisance bear is a last resort,” Mehta wrote, “and there are many checks in the process to ensure that the killing of such a bear, especially a female, cannot be a sudden or spur-of-the-moment decision.”

Among the alternatives are trapping and relocating a suspected cattle-eating grizzly.

Western Watersheds and its allies wanted urgent action but were not urgent in their judicial appeal, Mehta also wrote. The plaintiffs waited more than three months before giving the government a required notice they were going to sue, Mehta wrote. That delay undermined arguments that the grazing plan required emergency intervention, he wrote.

The federal grazing allotments, authorized in 2019, allow ranchers to herd up to almost 18,000 animals, about 9,000 cow-calf pairs, onto the Bridger-Teton National Forest above the Green River. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided the plan posed no jeopardy to the continued existence of the Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly.

In doing so, the federal wildlife agency bound the Forest Service to terms and conditions that call for a reassessment of operations should grizzly deaths exceed certain parameters. Ecosystem-wide, for example, Fish and Wildlife Service set the threshold for female grizzly mortality at 9% of the population.

But the Forest Service did not engage in “formal consultation” with FWS about the Kendall Warm Springs Dace, an endangered fish species whose only home on the planet is 984 feet of the 85-degree Kendall Warm Springs. A tributary of the Green River on the Bridger-Teton National Forest, the warm springs lie across the path of the Green River Drift.

Although grazing cattle are fenced out, cattle in the drift can pass through the 160-acre exclosure. That prospect alarmed the conservation groups who said the bovid herds would trammel the sensitive environment of the two-inch-long dace.

Ranchers agreed to either trail herds around the exclosure or truck them through, according to Mehta’s 31-page June 19 order. He rejected conservationists’ request for a “just-in-case” Warm-Springs-Dace injunction because “there is no additional relief that the court can grant.”

There’s other interesting stuff in the article. Here’s some info on the Green River Drift, in use since 1896. I guess there’s a story there somewhere bout how the dace survived drives for the last 124 years and what is different now.

Predating most federal land management agencies, the Green River Drift cattle trail has been continuously used since the 1890s by the Upper Green River Cattle Association ranchers to get cattle from spring pasture on the desert to summer pasture in the forest. Chilly fall weather causes the cattle to “drift” back out of the forest to return to their home ranches. The trail, 58 miles long with 41 miles of spurs, crosses BLM, State of Wyoming, National Forest, and private properties. It has played a pivotal role in the development of ranching in the area as well as in the development of relationships between Federal agencies that manage grazing allotments and private property owners. The Drift was listed on the National Register in November, 2013. Because it is still being used much as it has for more than 100 years, the Drift was listed as a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP), the first ranching related TCP in the nation.

Impacts to Ranchers, Oil and Gas Workers and Their Communities in Times of Covid

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For whatever reason, there are two activities/businesses that seem to attract an outsize amount of what feels like hate, especially in federal lands discussions.

In many states, though, these same activities- ranching and oil and gas production also occur entirely on private land. In the Denver Post business section over the past few weeks, there have been articles on the impacts of Coronavirus to these two activities, their employees, and others who benefit from what they produce/ their taxes/ and contributions to communities.  Two are about ranchers and challenges they face (and also opportunities to decentralize).  What I like about these is that the reporters (Judith Kohler and John Aguilar) interviewed the people impacted, so we get a much closer to the ground view of these communities and the challenges they (and others who depend on them) face today. They also put a face on the folks working in and around the “oil and gas industry” (many industries with different interests) and the “meat industry” (also different groups of people with different interests).  Since most media today is generated from the Coasts, these are voices we might not otherwise hear. It’s harder to engage in “othering” when people are sitting across the table, and when you can hear their voices.

There are also people responding to the challenges as in this piece  also in the Denver Post by Josie Sexton about local grocery stores, prices, processors, and ranchers.

We do try to be competitive and fair, but it has to be fair throughout the supply chain,” Marczyk says. “Not just fair to my customer, it has to be fair to my producer.”

Brunson agrees. He pays his farmer $2.50 per pound of beef as opposed to the commodity rate of 82 cents, he said. And what he’s getting is the difference between a “BMW or a Pinto” — all Colorado grass-fed, Black Angus beef.

Marczyk says people go to the grocery store and ask for any 80% ground beef, “and (those meats) are just not all created equal. They’re just not,” Marczyk said. “The average consumer out there, they have no idea.”

Marzcyk and Brunson think that consumers will come out of this period with a better appreciation for their food, and especially their meat — where it came from, what’s in it and who got sick while processing it along the way.

“A supply chain based on monoculture is very, very dangerous,” Marczyk said. “There’s all this economy in consolidation, but there’s risk in consolidation.”

Formerly an investment banker, Marczyk puts it this way: “We talk about diversity all the time… and then we do just the opposite in our food system. Consolidate, consolidate, consolidate. Bigger, bigger, bigger.”

Meanwhile, River Bear this year will expand its Denver facility by another 3,500 square feet. And Marczyk says the outpouring of support for his small grocery stores and their workers has been humbling.

The next step now, and something that’s close to both of their hearts, could be the creation of more regional and local USDA slaughter facilities, so that the same bottleneck in the system doesn’t happen again. But each processing plant can cost somewhere between $3 million to $8 million to build.

“So it’s a huge hurdle for small family farms to do that, but if we start thinking like a community…” Brunson said.

And until then, “We think we can keep our prices stable,” according to Marczyk. “If the (farmers’) costs of production increase, of course we’re going to have to charge more, but if they don’t, we’re going to hold that line.”

Here are the other three pieces.

Farm-to-table operations now taking an online farm-to-public approach in the age of coronavirus

Coronavirus-linked problems in meat supply chain could mean shortages, trouble for ranchers

This one is about oil and gas declines in Weld County with associated impacts to other businesses, taxes, and charities.

Colorado’s oil and gas country – and its people – suffer from twin hits to industry

Climate Science Voyage of Discovery. V. The Satellite Gaze and Grazing Animals

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We’ve seen before that “where you drop the pin” (where you start) or at what scale you choose to examine a problem can lead to fundamentally different conclusions. In some cases, there seems to be no formal institution for the type of communication between people on the land, and people modeling the land. We might call this the “satellite gaze” after the idea of the “imperial gaze.”

Imperial gaze, in which the observed find themselves defined in terms of the privileged observer’s own set of value-preferences.[8] From the perspective of the colonised, the imperial gaze infantilizes and trivializes what it falls upon,[9] asserting its command and ordering function as it does so.

So let’s look at beef production, and the study that the chart above was based on. The authors are from Oxford, and published in Science. According to Our World in Data, in this study, the authors looked at data across more than 38,000 commercial farms in 119 countries. If you look at the study itself, (and the errata) the modeling is mind-bogglingly complex.

Science has a section for e-letters. Ilse Kohler-Rollefson of the League for Pastoral Peoples and Endogenous Livestock Development wrote:

This article, both in its database and its conclusions, totally ignores the vital role of livestock for the life and livelihoods of the people living in the non-arable parts of the world. Without livestock large parts of the world wold become uninhabitable. Please see http://www.ilse-koehler-rollefson.com/?p=1160
In addition, one wonders about the usefulness of “land use” as indicator for judging the environmental impact of a food production strategy. Applying this indicator to livestock production would give preference to intensive and factory animal farming over extensive herding.

When this graph was posted on Twitter, I and a fellow from Sasketchewan and a woman from Ireland pointed out that some people raise animals because (1) people can’t raise anything else, or (2) in the case of Sasketchewan, the prairie was plowed for wheat, canola and lentil monocrops, which are arguably worse for biodiversity. I pointed out that there is no land conversion associated with beef in the prairies and the answer was that “if you look overall at beef, you have to account for the env cost of land converted to corn/beef.” My point being that consumers don’t have to look overall at beef, they only have to look at the beef that they’re buying. Who decided that we needed to make a purchasing judgment call based on a global average, and call it “science”? You can follow the Twitter feed here.

A variant of the same convo occurred in the letter section of New Scientist this month:

You might think that as a livestock farmer I would resent vegans claiming that my way of life is unethical, and you would be right. You quote Michael Clark saying that eating animals fed on plants must be less efficient than people eating plants. This ignores the fact that many herbivores can, and do, get much more feed value out of plants than people. What’s more, much of the north and west of the UK and Ireland can only be farmed practically using grazing animals.

The editor writes:

Much of the world’s beef is now produced in intensive feedlots – pens without pasture. This may have a lower carbon footprint than pasture-fed beef. We suspect that most of that is done on fertile land, not rough grazing. It is even harder to find figures for other meats. We note that in the UK, upland sheep production is only marginally viable even with EU subsidies.

There are two more ideas here- that feedlots (feeding animals lots of grain) produces less carbon than feeding animals grass. Again, the editor “suspects” that most of it is done on “fertile land”. And upland sheep production is only “marginally viable” even with subsidies.

At the same time in the US, grassfed beef is undergoing popularity for environmental reasons, and as as of 12/27/2019, USDA FSIS published new guidelines clarifying grass-fed labeling.

As this HuffPost piece says:

Our best bet is to educate ourselves about where our meat (and all our food) is coming from and the practices used to raise it.

“Don’t be afraid to ask questions,” Williams told HuffPost, adding that consumers have an incredible effect on the market. “Go to the grocery store and ask for products that are regeneratively produced. Go to restaurants and demand grass-fed meat and dairy. You’ll be amazed at how quickly those businesses will respond.”

A complex question indeed. What does “the science” say? Who produced it, and how relevant is it to our lives and choices?

Bats and bighorns and bears (oh my?)

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Two of these were originally posted as comments related to other posts and the third I would have, but Sharon intimated that they might not get noticed there, so here they are at the top end of a post.

BATS

We were discussing how the wolverine is most affected by climate change, and yet ESA requires mitigation of other less harmful activities that we have more control over. The effect of an introduced disease on bats also came up there.  A federal judge has just overturned a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect northern long-eared bats as threatened rather than endangered under the Endangered Species Act.  Here’s the Center for Biodiversity’s read-out of the judge’s opinion (there’s a link to the opinion, but I haven’t read it):

The Service argued that since the species was primarily threatened by disease, there was no need to protect its habitat.  But the court rightly noted that, in combination with disease, habitat destruction and other threats can cumulatively affect the bats, and thus are cause for concern.

It’s a point of contention these days whether climate change should be a factor in listing decisions when there is little likelihood of reducing its effects, but the law says it’s important to address and potentially mitigate other actions that may harm the species.

BIGHORNS

The Bridger-Teton National Forest is considering a restocking request for returning domestic sheep to two vacated allotments in the Wyoming Range.  It hinges on changing the forest plan to deemphasize protections for the Darby Mountain bighorn sheep herd. This would purportedly be consistent with the State of Wyoming’s bighorn plans.  The Forest is proposing to do a “focused amendment” to their forest plan,  but …

Bighorn advocates and conservationists who have watchdogged the restocking conversations wanted the Forest Service to instead deal with the issue in its forest plan (revision). The years-long revision process was supposedly coming up, though O’Connor said it’s now indefinitely on hold. Wyoming Wild Sheep Foundation Director Steve Kilpatrick said the Darby Mountain Herd deserves the longer, closer look.

I’m not sure the Forest is going to be able to do a “focused amendment” for this issue, since bighorn sheep should be a species of conservation concern under the 2012 Planning Rule, which warrants greater attention. Maybe this is a case where the inability to revise a forest plan is going to cause some problems. Then there is the question of why these allotments were vacant. The permittees were “bought out” through the efforts of the National Wildlife Federation (to protect bighorns?). Would they need to be paid back?

GRIZZLY BEARS

The discussion of reintroducing wolves to Colorado brought up the experience with grizzly bears in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Montana and Idaho.  A reintroduction proposal was rejected in 2001, but at least two bears have been documented there in recent years.  Here is the recent news about that.  The Fish and Wildlife Service has written to the Forest Service that bears that have made it there are fully protected by the Endangered Species Act (not an experimental population). All four of these forests are revising or will soon revise their forest plans and will have to provide conditions to support grizzly bear recovery.  The Nez Perce-Clearwater is farthest along but has been avoiding doing that.

Why Don’t Environmentalists Just Buy the Land They Want To Protect? Because It’s Against the Rules

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WEG worked to retire a permit for 50 cows on the 8,454-acre Alamocita allotment.

This is a thoughtful piece by Shawn Reagan of PERC in Bozeman, Montana about some of the same NGO’s we see litigating on federal lands trying approaches of buying and retiring leases to stop activities they don’t like, say grazing or oil and gas. As he says, in many places environmental groups feel that they can’t just buy land (as the example yesterday) because the land of interest is owned by the feds or state.  He has examples from grazing, oil and gas and timber, so it’s too long for me to excerpt meaningfully. I’d recommend reading the whole thing. He also has a more in-depth journal article with a co-author, Bryan Leonard of Arizona State University in the Natural Resources Journal.

Disputes between environmental activists and developers often have a predictable result: litigation. Environmental activists have perfected a zero-sum game of suing, suing, and then suing some more to halt development projects or other land-use activities they don’t like. An alphabet soup of environmental laws—from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) and the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA)—gives groups ample opportunities to stall projects with legal challenges or to thwart them entirely.

But increasingly, environmentalists are testing the strategy of bidding for the rights to natural resources instead. In recent years, activists have attempted to acquire oil and gas rights in Utah, buy out ranchers’ public grazing permits in New Mexico, purchase hunting tags in Wyoming to stop grizzly bears from being killed, and bid against logging companies in Montana to keep trees standing.

“It’s a market-based approach,” says Judi Brawer of WildEarth Guardians, an environmental group that has negotiated several grazing permit buyouts from ranchers in the Gila National Forest in New Mexico. “And it’s way more effective at the end of the day.”

Environmentalists paying to protect landscapes isn’t itself new. Nonprofit organizations such as the Nature Conservancy do it all the time, raising millions of dollars in donations to buy land or easements to protect important landscapes from development. But the extent of these voluntary market-based exchanges is often limited to private lands. On federal and state property—which makes up most of the land in the American West—such deals are much more complicated, if not outright prohibited.

I’ll share some of my own perspectives on the topic:

1)  The oil and gas industry hires working-class (as well as other) people and pays them good wages, which leads to other purchases and taxes and so on, plus federal money goes to states which they use for education, etc.  So for the people, the county and the state, it’s not just the cost of the lease itself.  Example from this article: “The check, for $486,000,000, represents the portion the state receives from federal oil and gas lease sales. In total, the New Mexico has received revenues exceeding $1 billion in 2018 from BLM’s mandated quarterly lease sales.”  On the other hand, environmental groups might not pick the leases most likely to be developed, because of the cost.

2) This is a bit philosophical, but as Shawn points out, the original laws regarding federal land were to promote use of the land.  Are we that rich a country that we don’t need to use our own natural resources anymore? Would we feel the same way about buying out a ski area lease, or a wind or solar farm lease? It is a good thing to depend on international trade and the good will of other countries to provide energy and shelter? If we use things and don’t produce them ourselves, are we in effect exporting environmental damage to other countries, and is that the right thing to do? Do we trust those other countries or are there national security implications of not producing them here? Perhaps importing wood from Canada yes, perhaps oil from OPEC, no.

3) We could change from however flawed (as we at The Smokey Wire are very aware) planning decisions made by federal employees, with the input of the public, to planning decisions made by boards of some not-for-profit.  Some not-for-profits are sometimes funded by rich people from elsewhere (though again, not always).  Nevertheless, it’s clearly less transparent and less open to public opinion than the flawed federal decision-making process. Of course, they may be the same groups who tend to  “get their way” via litigation, as in Shawn’s piece.

4) I see grazing/ranching as a different situation due to the private and public land linkages (if groups bought the home ranch property and the federal permit, that would work better) , as he points out. There is also a difference in the people employed both in numbers and pay, and the fact that the US many other food sources. Still, ranchers provide financial and social capital bonuses to many struggling rural communities in a way that leaving it alone does not.

5) In the related realm of water rights NFWF (Nif-Wif) did an extensive review here.

Much for discussion here. Other thoughts?

Ranching, Open Space and Water Rights: Gunnison River Valley

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Here’s a story about People Getting Along from the Crested Butte News.

Go to any mountain valley in Colorado with a nearby ski area and chances are you will see thousands of condominiums and hundreds of big second homes dotted everywhere within 10 or 15 miles of the resort.

But Crested Butte is different. If you stand on Brush Creek Road and look across the century-old ranch located basically below the Teocalli and East River ski lifts, the view in all directions is relatively unencumbered.

It’s not that there aren’t any impacts on the land that still looks pristine—booming recreation is encroaching and makes ranching more difficult, but the local ranching community has deliberately chosen to keep making a go of an agricultural way of life.

Ranches like this serve the Gunnison River Valley in many ways that are not visible to the casual eye, maintaining what many consider an important cultural and environmental balance beyond the economic aspect of producing beef. There is an element of the landscape that you see, the product of maintaining senior water rights and judicious irrigation to support native vegetation and ecosystems. There is noxious weed control, and managing cattle carefully to prevent resource damage.

There is also what you don’t see: the barren landscapes of other places that have opted to sell their water rights, or of commercial developments or residential subdivisions where ranches once operated and are now part of an unknown or forgotten history to future generations.

McPhail says one challenge facing ranchers is that they aren’t always known for their contributions to the valley. In a land of many uses, it is possible to lose sight of this part of our identity as we focus on adding more trails and events to spaces used by ranchers—and by wildlife.

“Many people don’t necessarily see any value in this way of life,” she says.

Ranchers can get a bad rap for their herds trampling land and damaging grasslands, but in some cases it is actually wildlife such as elk herds breaking their normal pattern of moving on to new areas each day. Increased urban interface and trail use, particularly by fast-moving, two-wheeled humans, can be confusing and unsettling for wildlife, and changes wildlife’s patterns of travel, according to McPhail.

“And where we used to have two annual bike events here, last year we had 14,” she points out.

A sign placed prominently along an entrance gate at the Brush Creek ranch property line tells a story of how cultural alignment is possible, if not always easy, between recreation and ranching. The sign says no trespassing or public access, as it is private property, but a Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association (CBMBA) logo has been printed at the top to show its solidarity with the ranch. It may help dispel an “us versus them” approach. McPhail suggests other ways to improve relations between those who do not understand ranching and the ranchers who own or lease the land. She says when trail users pass a ranch hand on public land who is moving aside to let them by, it would perhaps make a difference to say “thank you,” rather than complaining about cow manure.

Some ranchers throughout the northern and southern ends of the valley offer seasonal access through their property to beloved trails and fishing areas, as long as users are respectful of the property. Maybe this coexistence strategy is a more figurative way of laying down fences.

Conservation Opportunity?: Large “Trophy” Ranches For Sale

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Cheesman Ranch.
Russ Frisinger, photo

This from the Wall Street Journal via the Colorado Springs Gazette. Seems like a win-win for conservation organizations to buy these and allow the kinds of activities and recreation they would like (or not) without conflicts. Less conflict, more conservation..

Now, as those John Wayne-loving baby boomers age out of the lifestyle or die, they or their children are looking to sell those trophy properties.

That generational changing of the guard has led to an oversupply of ultraluxury ranches on the market. Nowhere is the glut more apparent than in Colorado, where some of the biggest and most storied properties are located.

Jeff Buerger, a local ranch broker with Hall & Hall in Colorado, said there are more large trophy ranches on the market right now than he can recall in his nearly three decades in the business. There are about 20 ranches priced at over $20 million on the market in the state, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of listings.

Some of Colorado’s most prominent listings include a nearly 12,000-acre ranch near Meeker, owned by retired professional golfer Greg Norman, which has been for sale since 2011; it is listed for $50 million. Henry Kravis, the billionaire co-founder of private-equity giant KKR, put his Colorado ranch, known as Westlands, on the market for $46 million in January. Discovery Channel founder John Hendricks relisted his ranch near the Utah border, plus an adjacent resort, for $279 million in May. (He and his wife, Maureen Hendricks, first put the property on the market for $149 million two years ago; that price didn’t include the resort.

Despite a strong local economy, buoyed by tourism, the aerospace industry and the cannabis industry, the surge in supply has led to a lack of urgency from buyers — and is putting downward pressure on prices. Some ranches have sat on the market for years. “Savvy investors… take their time to compare and contrast. They get analysis paralysis,” Buerger said.

For the children of ranchers, the Wild West doesn’t always have the same draw as it had for their parents. Ranch operations are labor intensive, and keeping up with costs can be a struggle. And grandchildren would often rather play videogames and hang out with their friends than go fly-fishing in the wilderness.

“If you look back in the day to the ’70s and ’80s, there were these guys … raised with this mythology of the West,” said Ken Mirr, a local ranch broker. “It was attachment to something Hollywood produced. Their children aren’t necessarily always as interested in operating the properties. Sometimes the kids just see cows and think ‘What should I do with this?’”

Many of the ranches have sprawling mountainous landscapes, forests, meadows, rivers, fisheries and big-game-hunting facilities. Kravis’s has its own golf course. Operating costs vary dramatically, depending on how much infrastructure ranchers have on their land and the level of agricultural activity but can often be millions a year.

And ranching is an increasingly tough business. The increasing expense of upkeep and infrastructure, coupled with the declining price of beef, is squeezing ranchers on both ends, experts said.

“I know a lot of multimillionaires who run cattle and still lose millions of dollars a year,” said Tony Caligiuri of Colorado Open Lands, a land-conservancy group. “One guy I talked to recently in oil and gas said he’s hoping to get his loss down to $1 million a year. His ranch hasn’t turned a profit the whole time he owned it.” In some ways, wealthy ranchers who can afford losses are keeping the industry afloat, Caligiuri said.

Unlike other sectors of the U.S. high-end real-estate market, ranches can’t fall back on international purchasers. Broker Tim Murphy said there is virtually no demand for ranches from international buyers, many of whom “don’t get it.”

For ultrawealthy out-of-town owners, these ranches are frequently geared toward fishing and hunting. But some want the experience of actually herding cattle and plowing fields — and often face lower property taxes if they engage in agricultural activities. Others lease some of their land to local ranchers. “They have high-stress, fast-paced lives,” Belton said. “When they can spend some time going around and around on a tractor, it’s cathartic.”

As the cowboy romance fades, sellers are also trying a new tack: targeting conservationists.

“The last wave of buyers was the baby boomers who fell in love with John Wayne and wanted that experience for themselves,” Buerger said. “Today, it’s more about conservation. You’re starting to hear more landowners talking about wildlife habitat enhancement and ecological work.” Other targeted groups include wealthy families from the East Coast or Silicon Valley.

To fans of “Practice of Science Friday,” that feature will return next week.