Escalante grazing - a monumental tug of war

by Jodi Peterson

Much of south-central Utah, from the Aquarius Plateau to the red-rock desert, has been grazed for more than a century by Mormon settlers and their descendants. But when President Clinton designated 1.9 million acres of the area’s forests, canyons and mesas as Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996, local ranchers feared that the Bureau of Land Management would start to cater just to recreationists and push their cattle out.

But that hasn’t happened. Grazing was grandfathered in, and more than 96 percent of the monument is still open to cattle, with 102 permittees on 82 allotments. The ranchers wield a lot of political power, which is one reason that the monument’s top managers don’t stick around long. (There have been six since 1996.) The BLM is only now devising its long-overdue grazing management plan. Even some monument staffers think that “the ranchers and county governments are running the monument,” says Mary O’Brien of the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust. “The BLM is frightened and paralyzed.”

Environmental groups had hoped for large reductions in the number of cows roaming the monument’s fragile desert soils and riparian areas, but have managed only a few small wins. In 1998, the Grand Canyon Trust began buying grazing permits from willing ranchers, eventually acquiring leases on about 344,000 acres of the monument. It relinquished some of the permits to the BLM, which closed some allotments to grazing, established some as grass banks, and reduced cattle numbers on others. Worth Brown, then-chairman of the Canyon County Ranchers Association, told a local newspaper in 2002, “The BLM is working with preservation groups to put us out of business.”

However, a federal memorandum issued that same year has made it difficult for future buyouts, by forcing the BLM to first declare that lands within grazing districts are no longer “chiefly valuable for grazing” before allowing a permit to be retired.

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