John Leshy
The
Trump administration has struck another blow to common-sense management
of public lands in the West. Virtually all the spectacular country
neighboring the Escalante River in the Grand Staircase-Escalante
National Monument in Utah will be reopened to cattle grazing, thanks to a new plan for managing the monument released by the Interior Department last month.
The move manages to be both anti-rancher and anti-environment.
Without
justification, the Interior Department’s decision upends a landmark
deal between ranchers and conservationists that for the past 20 years
has allowed the flora and fauna in the remote red rock canyons of the
monument to flourish once again. This backward step threatens
free-market solutions that have given ranching families across the West
the financial flexibility to move to greener pastures.
Under
that deal, which had been honored by the Clinton, Bush and Obama
administrations, local ranchers voluntarily relinquished their permits
to graze public lands in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars
from conservationists.
Over the past
few decades, similar deals around the West have sought to resolve
conflicts between conservationists and ranchers running livestock on
public lands by cooperation rather than confrontation and litigation.
In Nevada’s Great Basin National Park,
for instance, ranchers who held public land grazing permits when the
land became part of the park in 1986 agreed to relinquish their permits
in return for being compensated by the Conservation Fund, a nonprofit
conservation group...MORE
John Leshy was the DOI Solicitor in the Carter administration who came up with concept of "non-reserved" federal water rights, which was promptly revoked by William Coldiron, the DOI Solicitor during the Reagan administration.
1 comment:
listen to them cry boo hoo
Post a Comment