A Trump Plan Breaks a Great Deal for Ranchers and Park Lovers

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.