Pure Water and Clean Air

by

Before the summer wildfires come, we should take a moment to cherish the unspoiled landscapes that we still have, and the clean water that comes from them. Springtime in the Yosemite high country is magical, as well as being extremely buggy. I had seen this cascade over the years, and always wanted to get up close to it.

 P9310085-web

Tenaya Canyon is a dangerous place, with plenty of glacier-polished granite. Yes, many people have died, trying to navigate the canyon. This particular cascade has no historical name, amazingly enough. A waterfall interest group wants to name it Olmstead Cascade, due to its relative proximity to the mandatory tourist stop called Olmstead Point.

P9310186-web

There is a warning sign at the top of this cascade, warning people that they need climbing gear, or face possible death. This area is relatively easy to get into but, not many visitors have the “woods sense” to safely navigate the Yosemite “Trail-less Areas”. I wonder how much it would take to punch a trail, similar to the Mist Trail, from Yosemite Valley to Tenaya Lake. There is significant rockfall in Tenaya Canyon, and they had a major one a few years ago, just east of Mirror Lake.

P9319867-web

www.facebook.com/LarryHarrellFotoware

“Walkable” communities driving Western mountain housing market

by
The south main neighborhood in Buena Vista, Colorado.
The south main neighborhood in Buena Vista, Colorado.

Travis’s post reminds me of this story in the Denver Post business section a few weeks ago, which was deep in my pile of “to be posted.”

Here’s the link to the Post story.

Here’s an excerpt:

BUENA VISTA — Homes within walking distance to shops and restaurants are forecast to drive the housing markets and economies in mountain communities of the interior West as the recession’s effects wane.

That’s according to a recent study of high-country housing trends over the past decade by the Sonoran Institute, a nonprofit public-policy group that advocates for better management of growth in the West. The group’s 60-page study — “Reset, Assessing Future Housing Markets in the Rocky Mountain West” — shows that while homebuyers are willing to pay an average of 18.5 percent more for a house in a walkable mountain neighborhood in the Rocky Mountain West, the supply of homes in or near downtown commercial areas is too small.

“There is growing demand for walkable neighborhoods, and it’s an untapped market opportunity,” said Clark Anderson, director of the Sonoran Institute’s Western Colorado Program.

Looking at homebuying trends in six Western mountain communities from 2000 to 2010, including Eagle, Buena Vista and Carbondale, the group identified a number of trends driving demand for what it called “compact walkable neighborhoods.”

Younger residents are entering the homebuying market and able to work remotely from hamlets formerly occupied by agricultural or service-sector workers. Older people are retiring in the hills and often downsizing. Household incomes are getting smaller and so are household sizes. Limited land supply in recreational mountain valleys is fueling buyer and municipal interest in denser housing projects.

“These are trends that are happening in small communities, large communities, resorts, towns and cities across the Rocky Mountains. Consumer preferences and choices are creating a different-looking housing market from what we have known in the past,” Anderson said.

The Womb of Time: Bill Cronon, Teddy Roosevelt and a Sustainable American Future

by

SONY DSC

The following is a guest post by Travis Mason-Bushman

During the first week of my tenure as an impressionable Student Conservation Association intern in the R10 Regional Office’s cube farm back in fall 2010, I was subjected to a mandatory screening of The Greatest Good, the Forest Service’s centennial documentary. In that film lies one of the reasons I ultimately chose to pursue a career with the agency – the summative words of William Cronon:

The work of the Forest Service can and should and must continue into the 21st century and beyond. Because in a way, the issues that this agency has been struggling with since its creation are at the very core of what it means to be a human being on the planet and what it means to build a sustainable human society. And it is the struggle, not just of the United States. It’s the struggle of humanity.

Maybe sappy – check that, combined with the rousing music and soaring visuals, definitely sappy. And yet Cronon’s words rang true. As Jack Ward Thomas noted earlier in the film, we are a species on this planet and like every species, we have to exploit our habitat to survive. We cannot have zero impact on the land. Sarah Gilman is right to point out the hypocrisy trap of NIMBYism, which has too often loomed in the background of environmental debates – “as long as you don’t drill next to my house, I don’t care.” Arguments that we shouldn’t log a single stick from the national forests run headlong into the fact that we do need lumber, we do use paper, we must utilize trees – and if we don’t produce what we use and instead export our environmental damage elsewhere, it is little but NIMBYism writ large. There is and must be a place for sensible, sensitive resource production.

But I was struck by the angry, dismissive responses to Matthew Koehler’s comment that “I, for one, don’t continue to insist on Americans continuing to live as we do now,” as if it is somehow an American birthright to profligately use and abuse the planet’s finite resources far out of proportion to our numbers. This is the true entitlement crisis: the belief that we are entitled to exploit and use up every resource we can possibly get our hands on or our drilling rigs into.

A growing number of Americans, and particularly those of my generation, are recognizing that what modern humans have been doing – “our way of life” – is entirely unsustainable. There is not oil enough on this planet, forest enough on this planet, carbon capacity enough on this planet, for humans to live exactly the way we lived for the last 100 years for the next 100 years. Infinite growth on a finite planet is, quite simply, impossible.

Does that mean we have to go back to the Stone Age? I don’t think so. But does that mean we might rethink decisions about our way of life that were made in the last 50-100 years, often without a full understanding of their impact on ecology and resources? Does that mean we should perhaps reconsider what we need and what we want? Does that mean we ought to view our activities as a species through a much longer frame of perspective? Yes, yes, and yes. (A rare acceptable use of the Oxford comma.)

As I have been fond of pointing out in interpretive talks at the Tongass National Forest’s rapidly-retreating Mendenhall Glacier – perhaps the Forest Service’s single most frying-pan-in-the-face obvious example of climate change – I don’t own a car. In fact, I’ve never even possessed a driver’s license. I biked to work every day, rain or shine (and if you know the Tongass, it was mostly the former.) That has been a conscious decision, that I will be one less internal combustion engine on the roads of the United States. And I am far from alone – studies have shown, time after time, that Millennials are driving 20% less than our parents did at similar ages. Cost, convenience, environmental sensibilities, culture – for all those reasons and more, my generation is car-sharing, using transit, walking, biking and generally using any number of forms of transportation that are far more energy-efficient and less carbon-dependent. We support high-speed rail, view climate change as a real threat and are eschewing suburban sprawl that has consumed precious land and energy.

Will these changes alone solve our collective human challenge? Of course not. But they are, unmistakably, a sign that my generation recognizes that challenge – the challenge of adapting a way of life left to us by a generation apparently unwilling to confront the limits of geology and ecology that we are rapidly approaching. We must be wise stewards of our natural resources, because these are all we have or will ever get. We must have concern for the planet’s ecosystem, because there is but one in the universe.

And yet this view of a planet with limits, a civilization built for the long run, is hardly new and ought not be controversial. After all, it found one of its most eloquent defenses nearly 100 years ago from one of the men responsible for creating the Forest Service in the first place:

The “greatest good for the greatest number” applies to the number within the womb of time, compared to which those now alive form but an insignificant fraction. Our duty to the whole, including the unborn generations, bids us restrain an unprincipled present-day minority from wasting the heritage of these unborn generations.

That man, of course, was Theodore Roosevelt. And it is to his view of the “greatest good” which I believe our future society must adhere – one that considers most important not profitability next quarter or GDP growth next year, but the ecosystem’s next decade and the climate of the next century.

Travis is a Tongass National Forest SCEP trainee/Pathways intern/whatever they’re calling us this week, and worked for the last two summers as a ranger-interpreter at the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center. He just completed a master’s degree in recreation at Indiana University, with his thesis being a study of visitor experiences and interpretive outcomes at Mendenhall Glacier Recreation Area.

The Efficacy of Hazardous Fuel Treatments: Report from Ecological Restoration Institutet

by

waldo photo from report 19

Here’s a link to this report. There are many good photos in the report in addition to the one above. You can click on the photo above to enlarge it.

Have the past 10 years of hazardous fuel reduction treatments made a difference? Have fuel reduction treatments reduced fire risk to communities?

● Using an evidence-based approach to objectively evaluate the relevant literature, researchers found
that for the forest ecosystems that were examined, the evidence suggests that restoration treatments can reduce re severity and tree mortality in the face of wildre, and also increase carbon storage
over the long-term.

● Studies that use the avoided cost approach to examine the cost of re demonstrate that treatments result in suppression cost savings.

● Modeling studies that evaluate the effectiveness of fuels treatments in terms of changes in wildland
re size, burn probabilities, and re behavior demonstrate that fuel treatments applied at the proper scale can influence the risk, size, and behavior of re therefore reducing suppression cost.

● Modeling also demonstrates that where treatments are sucient to change dynamic re behavior, suppression costs are reduced.

● Modeling demonstrates that fuel reduction treatments are eective at reducing re behavior (severity) where implemented, and can successfully reduce re risk to communities. However, it also shows that fuel reduction treatments that occur at broader scales would have bigger impacts on the overall reduction of crown re. Perhaps most importantly, the results show that WUI-only treatments result in areas of unchanged crown re potential across the untreated landscape, therefore leaving it vulnerable to large, severe, and expensive (mega) landscape-scale re.

● Although few studies exist on the topic, fuel reduction treatments signicantly enhance the price of adjacent real estate, whereas homes in close proximity to a wildre experience lower property values.

The executive summary is on pages 4 and 5 and an easy read.

Here’s one news story I found about it.. in the Deseret News, others?

SFI, FSC, CSA and LEED II

by

We had 62 comments on the previous post here, but annoyingly the columns get smaller and smaller the more comments and replies you have and at some point they get hard to read. I think we reached that point. We are working on this by moving the blog, but for now, I’ll just start another post on the SFI -CSA-LEED question.

First of all, I would like to express my appreciation to Jason for engaging in this dialogue. If I stand back from all this, I see that when groups use hype to make their points and accuse others of bad intentions, certain personalities (if there is a “natural resource professional” personality,) just tunes them out and erects a barrier for self-protection. The problem with the barriers (on both sides, and you can extrapolate to partisan dialogue about a lot of things) is that we can’t listen to others because we don’t like to be maligned. But if you think peace is good, and that the best ideas for our mutual future come from a diverse group, then there is no alternative to talking across our comfort zones. As a Denver metro area resident, I see this more often with the energy industry. Anyway, I really appreciate that Jason has given us so many thoughtful comments.

One of his comments that I found very interesting was this one about sustainability and cutting 40% of the total land area at once. This is something we can work with.

Sustainability, Montreal Process and CSA

So if we go back to the definition of sustainability, as a bureaucrat I would tend to go with the Montreal Process Criteria and Indicators here. They are really designed for countries, though, so let’s go to the CSA standard, in which our northern neighbors consciously stepped down the C&I to specific land management.

Here’s how they started, so they don’t seem to have the same “industry dominated heritage” of SFI.

CAN/CSA-Z809 – Canada’s National Standard for Sustainable Forest Management
CSA worked with a diverse range of stakeholders interested in sustainable forest management to develop

Canada’s National Standard for Sustainable Forest Management (SFM) CAN/CSA-Z809. A volunteer technical committee, representing consumers, environmental groups, government, industry, Aboriginal, academia and other stakeholders was established to develop the Standard. CSA committees are created using a “balanced matrix” approach, which means that each committee is structured to capitalize on the combined strengths and expertise of its members – with no single group dominating over the content of a CSA standard.

This voluntary Standard, developed by an open and transparent multi-stakeholder consensus-based process, resulted in an endorsement by the Standards Council of Canada as a National Standard of Canada.

The CAN/CSA-Z809 SFM Standard, developed according to an internationally recognized and accredited standards development process, is based on the international Helsinki and Montréal processes. It incorporates Canada’s own national SFM criteria, which were developed by the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers. The Standard links adaptive forest management to forest certification through three key requirements:

Performance Requirements
Public Participation Requirements
System Requirements

Now remember, major US imports are from Canada.
here is the 2012 Certification report from Canada.

Canada leads the world in attaining third-party sustainable forest management certification. This independent verification provides added assurance of responsible forest practices from a country with some of the world’s toughest and well-enforced forestry regulations.

The phenomenal growth of forest certification in Canada has been spurred on by a forest industry commitment to third-party certification. In 2002 the Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC) – whose members manage the vast majority of the commercial forest in Canada – became the only national forest trade association in the world to require members to certify their operations to any of the three major, credible standards recognized in Canada:

Canadian Standards Association (CAN CSA/Z809 or Z804)
Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)
Sustainable Forestry Initiative® Program (SFI)

Four years later that goal was met. This commitment has been instrumental in spurring the phenomenal growth of forest certification in Canada, allowing the country to meet the growing customer demand for certified forest products.

SFM Certification Status in Canada—2012 Year-end
Standard Used Acronym Area Certified (hectares)
Canadian Standards Association (CAN/CSA-Z804 or Z809) CSA 44,921,371
Forest Stewardship Council FSC 54,080,929
Sustainable Forestry Initiative SFI 57,577,838
Total Certified for all SFM Combined: (some areas double counted) 155,950,138
Total Area Certified: (double counting removed) 147,928,855

So I think that it’s important in the LEED debate to also talk about CSA which doesn’t suffer from SFI’s alliance with timber industry. And in these certification debates, we seldom talk about CSA, despite the fact that about 1/3 of Canadian wood is certified to it.

It’s interesting that the dialogue tends to be from FSC about SFI and not so much about CSA. But even if you think SFI is not sustainable, why shouldn’t LEED give the same credits to CSA?

Now onto a specific example that might be enlightening.

Jay stated that:

In a state like WA or OR, you have to reforest after a regen harvest, but if you own 50,000+ acres and just cut 40% of your landbase over several years, how sustainable is that for local mills in the coming years (many now severed from a source of timber), ecological processes and organisms dependent on later seres or successional stages of forests? How is that sustainable for workers and communities when so many harvests were crammed into such a short period of time that labor/contractors had to be imported from outside of the community, only to leave when the cutting is done .

Now my read of any standard (SFI, CSA and FSC) is that cutting 40% of your landbase within several years would not meet the criteria. If we knew what company that was, maybe we could investigate how SFI treated it.

SFI “Greenwashing” Complaint Filed with Federal Trade Commission

by

Last month this blog explored some of the differences and validity of the two main “green” wood certification programs in the U.S. – the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI).

The FSC bills itself as “an independent, non-governmental, not for profit organization established to promote the responsible management of the world’s forests” while the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) (which the U.S. timber industry established in 1994) bills itself as “an independent, non-profit organization responsible for maintaining, overseeing and improving a sustainable forestry certification program.”

SFIYesterday, ForestEthics and Greenpeace filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asking the agency to investigate the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI)’s claim to be a ‘green’ certifier of forest products. The complaint argues that SFI’s claim that it is an independent, non-profit public charity is deceptive and misleading because SFI is substantially governed and financed by the timber industry and because its vague and ambiguous forestry standards are developed and approved by timber industry personnel in a closed process.

The complaint is based on the FTC’s recently revised “Green Guides” and is joined by more than 2,800 individual consumers filing their own complaints, and supported by over 8,000 who signed a petition demanding that the FTC take action. This is the largest number of Green Guides complaints concerning a single scheme that the FTC has ever received.

Here is the opening portion of the complaint filed with the FTC:

On behalf of ForestEthics and Greenpeace, the Washington Forest Law Center (“WFLC”) submits this Complaint because consumers are being deceived by the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (“SFI”), a timber industry-funded forest certification system developed for the deceptive “green” marketing of lumber and paper products.

This Complaint provides detailed evidence that SFI is materially not in compliance with the Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC”) revised “Green Guides,” which were formally re-promulgated on October 11, 2012. As set forth below, ForestEthics, Greenpeace, and allies believe that SFI engages in several unfair and deceptive acts and practices, which detrimentally mislead corporate and individual lumber and paper consumers who rely on certification in making purchasing decisions. Hundreds of millions of dollars in “green” spending are at issue.

We ask the FTC to investigate this Complaint and to take enforcement action requiring SFI to either cease its deceptive marketing practices or to make the necessary disclosures so as to comply with the revised Green Guides.

News of this FTC complaint follows closely on the heels of four more major US companies, Hewlett Packard, Office Depot, Southwest, and Cricket, announcing plans to move away from the SFI.

ForestEthics began its campaign against SFI’s greenwashing of forest destruction by filing complaints with the IRS and FTC in 2009. Since then, 24 companies have moved away from the SFI.

In April, the SFI sent a ‘cease and desist’ letter – a threat to sue – to ForestEthics. But, if sued, ForestEthics intends to vigorously stand by its First Amendment right to challenge SFI with truthful facts and opinion and to report SFI to consumer protection government agencies.

“The Sustainable Forestry Initiative label is the timber industry’s cynical effort to get a piece of the highly valuable green marketplace in the US, which is currently valued at $500 billion dollars annually.  We have demonstrable proof that in many regions of the U.S. and Canada, SFI offers virtually no environmental protection beyond that already required by state and federal laws and worse, it offers cover and false marketing for companies trying to take advantage of consumers’ best intentions,” said Aaron Sanger of ForestEthics. “It’s no surprise that the SFI is trying to intimidate ForestEthics with threats of a lawsuit – the green marketplace is growing more valuable by the day. Our Federal Trade Commission complaint today is proof positive that we will not be bullied.”

The complaint submitted by ForestEthics and Greenpeace yesterday centers around the following: The FTC’s Green Guides forbids deceptive claims of independence. The SFI claims that it is independent, but it has direct material connections to the forestry and paper products industry. In 2011, 93 percent of SFI’s funding came from SFI “program participants,” that includes a veritable “who’s who” of the timber and paper industry such as logging giants Weyerhaeuser, Plum Creek, and Rayonier.

The FTC works on behalf of consumers to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices and to provide information to help spot, stop, and avoid them. The FTC’s Green Guides were introduced in 1992 to provide guidance to companies that want to call their products “green” or “eco-friendly” and help marketers ensure that claims they make about environmental attributes of their products are truthful and non-deceptive. The Green Guides were last revised in 1998 although the FTC began a comprehensive review of the Green Guides in 2007, which resulted in the 2012 revisions.

ForestEthics’ ongoing campaign to expose the SFI’s certification program in the U.S. marketplace began in 2009. ForestEthics’ work has revealed that the widely-used forest certification program is financed and governed by the timber industry. The SFI misleads well-intentioned companies and consumers into thinking they are making environmentally sound choices, when in reality the program “certifies” forestry practices that wreak environmental harm, including logging that create massive landslides, destroys rare wildlife and fish habitat, pollutes streams and rivers, and contaminates communities with toxic herbicides and fertilizers. By engaging with supporters and allies, ForestEthics is exposing the truth behind the SFI label while persuading regulators like the Federal Trade Commission and market leaders like Fortune 500 brands to take a stand against SFI “greenwashing”.

ForestEthics is represented by the Seattle-based Washington Forest Law Center, which played a key role in preparing ForestEthics’ FTC complaint.

Using and Producing Natural Resources: Sarah Gilman Essay in High Country News

by

sarahHere is a thoughtful essay by Sarah Gilman of High Country News.

Now, thinning forests is not as “industrial” as oil and gas development. And thinning forests is not always done to produce wood products. Still, if the alternative is to burn it in piles..as with hazard trees.. one has to wonder..

Here is the link.

Below is an excerpt:

At an environmental film festival in Paonia soon after the BLM’s decision, the audience booed throughout a Google Earth tour of the parcels still up for lease. When a staffer from the conservation group who hosted the event noted that the mountain biking parcel had been withdrawn, discontent only grew. Many refused to accept any leasing whatsoever.

Opponents believe, as do their counterparts in many communities facing oil and gas development, that some places are too special to drill. It’s a valid view; I often share it. But that raises an uncomfortable question: Are there any places so unspecial that they should be drilled? Mr. ConocoPhillips knows well that few of us in Paonia or elsewhere can say we don’t rely on these fuels — for heat, for transport, for electricity, for the fertilization of food. Every place matters to somebody. And what patch of Earth isn’t habitat for at least a few wonderful somethings?

As Bobby Reedy, who runs a local auto shop in Paonia, told Heller: “I wanna flick the light switch and know the lights are gonna come on. If it’s not in my backyard, whose is it gonna be in?”

If we continue to insist on living as we do now, maybe we need to see drill rigs from our kitchen windows and hiking trails, even our school playgrounds.

How else can we truly understand the costs of something we use unless we’re confronted with them daily? This isn’t just the machinery of corporate greed; it’s the machinery of our vast collective energy appetite. And if we can’t look directly at it, and can’t accept what it does to our water and air, then it’s time to do more than just fight drilling. It’s time to go on an energy diet.

The “Logging” or “Timber” or “Forest Products” Industry: What’s In a Name?

by

In our recent discussions, the timber industry (or wood products) industry has been called the “logging industry,” at least by Matthew. I first became fascinated by what industries are OK environmentally and which not, when I worked on an assignment with the Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Clinton Administration. I was the Science Lead on a CEQ/OSTP Interagency effort to review US regulation of genetically engineered organisms released into the environment.

At the same time, the 2000 Planning Rule was being cleared and I helped folks at OMB to understand the rule. It seemed at the time the timber industry on public lands was questionable from the environmental perspective, but the biotech industry was not particularly questioned, even the mild recommendations of our team did not go forward. I remember the meeting where we presented our findings to George Frampton, the Chair of CEQ at the time. Many of us were surprised that “environmentalism” was strong in some areas, and weak in other areas. I also thought the role of the science community was an interesting contrast, since the “listened to” scientists thought logging was harmful to the environment, but that ge organisms were harmless and in fact, the salvation of the future. We can still see that today. Clearly the same scientists can’t know about both (well I know something about both, but I am not among the “listened to” scientists. How governments choose to partition their environmental inclinations across industries would be worthy of some graduate student studies.

I wondered why one industry was so important and the other rejection-worthy. I had a variety of hypotheses, of course
1) who donated to the campaign
2) the amount of bucks generated
3) did not capture the attention of environmental groups to the same extent (or not as effectively).

In Colorado, we had a curmudgeonly wonderful columnist named Ed Quillen, who used to refer to “the Committee that really runs America”. I can only guess that the timber industry had a falling out with the Committee at some point, while the biotech industry did not.

Sometimes I wonder whether folks project all their guilt about using resources onto one convenient industry. so we do not examine the semiconductor industry or the medical equipment industry, (or even agriculture) with the same fine-toothed environmental comb.

Anyway, if we could talk about an industry who provides products for people by their extraction techniques rather than the products they produce, let’s think about that:

I just got back from the family place in western Kansas, so we can think of wheat and field crop farming as “the cutting industry” as in Custom “Cut”ters or “cut”ting hay.

We could think of vegetable growing as the “picking” industry. Or oil and gas as the “drilling” industry. Sometimes we talk about coal as the “mining industry” but mostly the “coal” industry. Now we have molybdenum and other mines in Colorado, so we call those the “mining industry”, perhaps because if you are mining these other minerals than energy, there are so many of them.

So let’s look at solar industry might be the “cell manufacturing” industry. Wind might be the “turbine manufacturing” industry. I just think it’s interesting how people talk about these things, with my concern being that talking about extracting as opposed to what the product is removes us from the link between us and our lives and the products we use. You can’t look out the window in my town without seeing a great many wood products in construction and reconstruction, in art, in furniture, and so on.

Bill to Reform Federal Public Lands Grazing Program Introduced: Act Would Protect Environment, Save Taxpayer Dollars

by
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Contact: Ben Halle, (202) 570-2771

Congressman Smith Reintroduces the Rural Economic Vitalization Act

Legislation Would Reform Federal Grazing Program to Protect Environment, Save Taxpayer Dollars

Congressman Adam Smith has reintroduced legislation that would address the wasteful, environmentally damaging, and economically inefficient federal grazing policy on our public lands.  H.R. 2201, the Rural Economic Vitalization Act, would change federal law to allow ranchers with grazing permits to voluntarily relinquish their permits to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the U.S. Forest Service in exchange for private market compensation.  It would further allow the BLM and U.S. Forest Service to permanently retire the grazing permit.

“The current federal grazing program is among the most economically inefficient uses of our public lands,” said Congressman Smith.  “This legislation opens the door for private solutions to a long-standing problem that costs taxpayers millions and has prevented public land ranchers from efficiently utilizing resources available to them.”

Current law does not allow for the retirement of grazing permits.  This not only is to the detriment of wildlife, watersheds, and the surrounding ecosystem, which continue to be harmed by domestic livestock grazing, but also to federal taxpayer dollars wastefully spent to continue an antiquated grazing policy  on public lands.

“Grazing is an important use of our public lands, but it’s a very impactful use”, said Rep. Raul Grijalva, who joined Congressman Smith in introducing the legislation. “Excessive grazing impacts wildlife habitat, soil composition, local hydrology, and even heightens the impacts of climate change. Retiring some permits will help save taxpayer money and benefit federal conservation efforts. Right now, when we are looking for ways to save taxpayer money, REVA is a win-win. Ranchers that want to retire their permits should have that opportunity.”

“Many permit holders would choose to retire their grazing permit if they could recoup their investment from private funds,” Smith said.  “By providing federal grazing permit holders the freedom to exchange permits for market value compensation, this legislation would spur private investment, provide ranchers with the opportunity to pursue new business ventures or retire with more security, and protect public lands from the damaging environmental effects of livestock grazing.”

In addition to the environmental damage, the federal grazing program is heavily subsidized and costs American taxpayers over $115 million a year.  The Government Accountability Office reported that the BLM and Forest Service spend over $132 million a year on managing the grazing lands, yet they only collect $17 million a year in fees.

“At a time when the federal government is looking for ways to cut outdated programs and become more efficient, this bill eliminates wasteful spending and saves taxpayer dollars,” continued Smith.  “This legislation is a win for all involved.  The American taxpayer saves money, ranchers have a choice to retire their permits for market compensation, and public lands are given the opportunity to rebuild their natural habitats, native plants, and wildlife.”

For more information, view the Rural Economic Vitalization Act fact sheet.