The BLM is proposing to spend $1 million building 100 miles of fences in one of America’s largest fence-free ranges in Wyoming’s Green Mountain Common Allotment. This area has the potential to host abundant diverse wildlife - but has been pounded by livestock for so long that the BLM seeks to fence it down into 6 allotments.
WESTERN WATERSHEDS PROJECT
NEWS RELEASE
May 16, 2008
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Contacts:Â
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Dr. Steven G. Herman: Â 360-894-0751; cell 360-451-0089
Bob Tuck: 509-945-7250
Kristin Ruether: 208-342-7024 ext 208
Jon Marvel: 208-788-2290
Litigation Filed in Thurston County Superior Court To Challenge Livestock Grazing of Quilomene/Whiskey Dick Wildlife Area
Western Watersheds Project (WWP), a west-wide conservation organization, has expanded a lawsuit in Washington State’s Thurston County Superior Court to challenge a permit issued by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) permitting commercial livestock grazing of the western portion of the Quilomene/Whiskey Dick Wildlife Area, on an area known as Skookumchuck.Â
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The suit challenges the WDFW’s failure to conduct any environmental analysis of the permit as required by the State Environmental Protection Act. The permit was signed on April 22, 2008, without any public comment period, environmental analysis, or disclosure to the public of the environmental effects of allowing grazing on the Wildlife Area.
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This wolf was apparently legally killed near Cambridge Idaho.
Click for larger view. More photos below :
The LA Times covers translocation efforts after a 2001 Ft. Irwin military expansion right over endangered Desert Tortoise’s habitat. Now, the translocated tortoises are encountering coyote predation, an oversight conservationists maintain should have been foreseen.
A good video clip including Western Watersheds Project’s California Science Director Michael Connor’s take is included in the article:
Slow, Steady — and under siege
LA Times
Photograph Copyright Micheal Connor
WWP commented on and is planning to protest the proposed continuation on livestock grazing on the hot desert lands of the Yuma Field Office, Bureau of Land Management. The proposed Resource Management Plan makes a big deal out of closing part of the planning area (889,700 acres) to livestock grazing, but then admits that permits on those 12 allotments weren’t being used anyway and haven’t been for up to thirty years.
What the BLM doesn’t seem to get is that the proposed plan to reauthorize grazing on 643,500 acres of the planning area on a perennial basis is outrageous. These lands have been continuously grazed yearlong at ratios as low as 14.9 acres per AUM in areas that receive less than 6 inches of rain a year.
Even the agency’s own assessments include statements like these:
The public lands do not regularly produce sufficient amounts of forage to sustain a consistent livestock grazing program throughout the allotment Cattle are principally grazers, and the ecological sites do not have the potential to produce sufficient quantities of grasses. Further, as the uncontrolled private land is developed, the allotment will become fragmented and almost unusable in many places. The land use plan is the most appropriate process to determine whether perennial grazing use continues to be considered and appropriate on these lands.
So why didn’t they propose closing the allotments? Apparently, the $4,443 dollar value and the 0.03 jobs associated with grazing cattle on these BLM lands is more important to the agency than the resource protection that closing these allotments would afford. The 1.46 jobs resulting from direct employment on the associated ranches means more to the BLM than the public interest in providing habitat for the Sonoran desert tortoise, the pronghorn, bighorn sheep, and numerous other species who are uniquely adapted to dwell in these regions and who are threatened by livestock grazing.
Is it any wonder we end up in court all the time?
