Conservation groups sue BLM for rangeland degradation
The lawsuit alleges the agency isn’t conducting environmental assessments before renewing grazing permits.
The Bureau of Land Management oversees 246 million acres of land — scrubby sagebrush, rolling deserts and dense forests — mostly in the Western U.S. It’s home to all sorts of things, from sage grouse, pronghorn and ponderosa pines to dirt bikers, cows and drilling infrastructure.
But a new lawsuit, filed today in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that the BLM is not managing its land in a way that fulfills its environmental responsibilities. Attorneys from Advocates for the West filed the lawsuit on behalf of environmental nonprofits Western Watersheds Project and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). “Across much of the West, we see BLM as the Bureau of Land Mismanagement,” said Chandra Rosenthal, Rocky Mountain PEER director, in a press release. (Disclosure: Rosenthal is a sibling of HCN’s executive editor.)
The lawsuit states that the BLM hasn’t conducted required environmental reviews for almost two-thirds of its 35,000 current grazing permits. The agency leases more than half of its acreage to ranchers as grazing allotments for livestock.
The reviews are required under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, which established a framework for assessing the environmental impacts of activities like grazing and mining. But reviews aren’t occurring on the majority of grazing allotments that overlap with important conservation areas, the lawsuit says, including national monuments, national conservation areas, critical habitat for endangered or threatened species, high-priority sage grouse habitat and land where domestic sheep graze in close proximity to wild bighorn sheep. According to the complaint, the agency’s failure to complete these assessments violates the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which mandates that grazing allotments with environmental significance be prioritized for reviews, depending on available funding.
Grazing permits have been renewed multiple times without assessments, the complaint notes; some allotments haven’t had a NEPA analysis for 15 or more years. According to the BLM’s own data, analyzed by Western Watersheds Project for the lawsuit, this is a growing trend: The percentage of allotments reauthorized without an environmental assessment rose from 28% in 2013 to 54% in 2021.
“For decades, the BLM has been ignoring the reality that permitted grazing causes significant environmental impacts that must be addressed through a transparent, public, science-based process,” said Josh Osher, public policy director at the Western Watersheds Project. “Instead, the BLM has been exploiting a loophole in the law that was intended to fix the problem of unregulated grazing while the hole the agency has dug for itself just gets deeper and deeper.” A BLM spokesperson declined to comment.
The lawsuit is seeking a court order that will force the BLM to schedule and complete the outstanding environmental analyses, a major undertaking that would require evaluating conditions on thousands of commercial livestock grazing allotments. Grazing permits cover 155 million acres across 13 states.
Previous reporting by High Country News found 54 million acres of these rangelands in rough shape according to the agency’s own “land-health standards.” Those standards, which take into account factors like soil health, water quality, plant species diversity and the quality of habitat for threatened and endangered species, are the minimum benchmarks land managers need to achieve and maintain in order for landscapes to function and be used sustainably. Struggling allotments are found across the West but predominantly located in cold desert ecoregions in the Great Basin with little moisture and extreme temperatures.
Note: This story was updated to correct the name of Advocates for the West.
Kylie Mohr is a correspondent covering wildfire for High Country News. She writes from Montana. Email her at [email protected] or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
