CASPER — Commercial livestock grazing across the West is a growing threat to the greater sage-grouse, according to an analysis by conservation groups Western Watersheds Project and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
The groups analyzed documents from the Bureau of Land Management and concluded the agency’s latest proposal for managing sage-grouse habitat fails to remedy damage caused by livestock grazing across millions of acres of sage-grouse habitat.
Sage-grouse, a ground-dwelling bird and iconic western species, is considered a bellwether for the health of the greater sagebrush ecosystem. The bird’s population has declined precipitously in recent years across the western U.S. due to habitat loss and degradation from livestock grazing, development, mining, agriculture, and oil and gas extraction, according to wildlife biologists with the Western Watersheds Project and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.
Within the 139 million acres of greater sage-grouse habitat spanning eight western states, BLM manages more than 10,000 grazing allotments.
The groups’ analysis of BLM data reveals the following:
One-quarter of greater sage-grouse habitat covering more than 36 million acres (an area equivalent to Michigan) are in allotments failing to meet BLM’s own rangeland health standard, the minimum requirements for healthy and functioning ecosystems.
Of those, about 23 million acres (approximately the size of Illinois) within greater sage-grouse habitat fail BLM’s rangeland health standards due to livestock overgrazing.
Almost 17 million acres (an area larger than West Virginia) within greater sage-grouse habitat have never been evaluated by BLM since it began conducting these land health evaluations in 1998, more than 25 years ago.
“If it wants to prevent the sage-grouse from being listed as an endangered species, the BLM needs to get serious about stopping livestock overgrazing,” commented PEER Rocky Mountain Director Chandra Rosenthal, noting that such a listing would impose restrictions on a wide range of commercial activity in sage-grouse habitat. “As their own data points out, BLM’s efforts are falling well short as the sage-grouse is literally losing ground.”
The agency is expected to conduct rangeland health analysis every ten years.
However, Congress passed a rule in the early aughts, referred to by conservationists as the “livestock loophole,” allowing agencies to re-approve grazing permits despite backlogs in land health evaluations.
What was created as a short-term fix has now become a perpetual, agency-wide practice, PEER analysis suggests, allowing many grazing allotments to continue for more than 30 years without any review or management changes.
“It has used the loophole to renew 6,301 grazing permits covering 70 million acres [an area roughly the size of Nevada] in greater sage-grouse habitat without conducting … environmental analyses. These rubber stamped renewals account for more than two-thirds [68%] of all grazing permits,” the conservation group’s said in a statement.
BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning has acknowledged that decades-old grazing permits are problematic.
Nonetheless, the land health analysis backlog has continued to grow, and the agency’s most recent sage-grouse proposal does prioritize the review of permit renewals in sage-grouse habitat, PEER analysis shows.
“For decades the BLM has been hiding behind this insidious loophole to ignore the impacts of grazing on sage-grouse habitat,” said Josh Osher, public policy director at Western Watersheds Project. “The result is an ecosystem on life support and an iconic species on the brink of extinction. We hope BLM will strengthen the new sage-grouse plans to address the issues.”
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