Western Watersheds Project, WildEarth Guardians, and Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit today to block livestock turnout in Oregon sage-grouse habitat. The turnout would occur under a grazing permit that was renewed illegally after Secretary Ryan Zinke intervened in the appeals process. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had
originally declined to renew the permit in 2014 because of the
permittee’s record of arsons and other noncompliance with the permit
terms and conditions. The livestock will spread cheatgrass, degrade
recovering sage-grouse habitats, and increase thSome background on the Hammond case Some background on the Hammond case e flammability of these
public lands.
The grazing permittees in this case are Dwight and Steven Hammond, notoriously bad actors from Burns, Oregon. The Hammonds were sentenced to federal prison for committing arsons to
increase forage for their cattle on the public lands and their sentence
served as the excuse for anti-public lands extremists to stage an armed
takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in January 2016. They
received a pardon from President Donald Trump after serving parts of
their sentences.
WWP supported the BLM's decision to cancel the permit, and we still do.
The BLM itself had stood by its revocation of grazing privileges, and
had been defending its decision until former Secretary of the Interior
Ryan Zinke ordered it to back down on his last day in office
on January 2, 2019, during the government shutdown. Zinke demanded that
the BLM renew the Hammonds permit within 30 days, precluding
environmental review and consideration of the impacts of resuming
grazing on lands that had been recovering from livestock impacts for the
past five years...MORE
As if this family hasn't been through enough.
See my post Some background on the Hammond case for the sordid history of this affair.
Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
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