Obama’s public lands policy leaves legacy of conflict

Push to control state lands at odds with locals

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell looks from Dead Horse Point, near Moab, Utah, where President Obama designated one of two national monuments Wednesday, that have become key flash points over use of public land in the U.S. West. (Associated Press)

By Valerie Richardson
The Washington Times

With two new massive set-asides in his final weeks in office, President Obama has moved aggressively to solidify a legacy on public lands that’s often put the White House at odds with state officials who want to see more local control over land use.

Mr. Obama already held the record for creating or expanding national monuments when he used the Antiquities Act last week to set aside a combined 1.65 million acres for Bears Ears in Utah and Golden Butte in Nevada.

In doing so, however, Mr. Obama also solidified his reputation for using public lands to reward his friends and enrage his enemies.

Environmentalists cheered his commitment to conservation, but Republican lawmakers, state officials and locals accused him of ignoring their input in order to score political points, lock up productive lands and expand federal control.

Rep. Rob Bishop, the Utah Republican who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee, said the hotly disputed designations represent business as usual for Mr. Obama.

“Much of the agenda, like the monuments, was done behind closed doors, in the shadows, in secret, and would otherwise be rejected under established democratic processes,” said Mr. Bishop. “They systematically abused executive powers through unilateral rules, orders and memorandums designed to make energy and resource development uneconomical.”

In the name of environmental protection, the Obama administration has tightened its hold on federal lands, adding layers of regulation on energy development, halting new coal leases, using the Endangered Species Act to restrict grazing, and taking a hard line on violations.

“Keep it in the ground, lock it up and let it burn. That’s been the policy for the last eight years,” said Montana state Sen. Jennifer Fielder, who heads the American Lands Council.

The result has been a backlash by groups such as the council, which formed in 2012 to counter the Obama administration’s expansion of federal authority by calling for transferring control of federal lands to the states.

Environmentalists have responded by doubling down with a push to stop energy development on public lands altogether with the “keep it in the ground” movement.

Mr. Obama’s final year in office has also seen a surge in unrest from protesters on public lands. In January, anger on the ground turned deadly when Robert “LaVoy” Finicum was shot and killed at an FBI roadblock during an armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Oregon.

The protest centered two ranchers sentenced to five-year prison terms after fires they set to control weeds spread to federal land.

On the other end of the political spectrum, thousands of protesters converged on federal land near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, to object to the administration’s approval of the Dakota Access pipeline easement near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation.

Hundreds have been arrested by local authorities since Aug. 10, but the Obama administration has taken a hands-off approach to the occupation. The protesters scored a win Dec. 5 when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers agreed to withdraw the easement in order to conduct another environmental review.

In the administration’s corner are those who argue that Mr. Obama has provided balance to a public-lands policy that has in the past favored industries, including energy and agriculture, at the expense of conservation.

Matt Lee-Ashley, senior fellow and director of public lands for the liberal Center for American Progress, said part of the tension has come from the changing balance of power.

“I think if you look back for decades, extractive industries have had greater power in Washington and have had a big say in the decisions about the management of public lands, and we’re seeing greater balance now from the outdoor recreation industry, for example,” said Mr. Lee-Ashley. “A lot of states are weighing in on behalf of conservation and recreation. There are more people sitting at the table making these decisions, including conservationists, recreationists and Native American leaders.”

He said he saw Mr. Obama’s approach to environmental protection on public lands changed after his 2012 reelection victory.

“We saw the pace of conservation work pick up dramatically in the second term,” Mr. Lee-Ashley said. “There was a much greater balance between development and conservation on public lands in the last two or three years of his presidency.”

Mr. Obama has countered naysayers by pointing out that oil and gas development on public lands has increased during his administration, but his critics have argued that the increase has been far greater on private land.

The average leased for energy extraction on public lands has decreased steadily since Mr. Obama took office, according to figures from the House Natural Resources Committee.

Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, blamed in part what she described as the Obama administration’s “bureaucratic stifling.”

“There’s just so many ways that they have blocked productive uses of federal land,” said Ms. Sgamma. “Making it more difficult at every step of the process, whether you’re trying to graze on an allotment that’s been in your family for over 100 years, or trying to move forward with your leases and get through the environmental analysis that the government simply won’t complete.”

Whether Mr. Obama’s latest monuments will survive is also in question. Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes has vowed to file a lawsuit, while Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, and others have called for the designations to be repealed.

“We look forward to working with President-elect Trump to follow through on his commitment to repeal midnight regulations,” Mr. Chaffetz said in a statement. “We will work to repeal this top-down decision and replace it with one that garners local support and creates a balanced, win-win solution.”

The Larger, but Quieter Than Bundy, Push to Take Over Federal Land

Duane Ehmer riding his horse, Hellboy, last week at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge near Burns, Ore., where an armed group of antigovernment activists had seized control. (Rob Kerr/Agence France-Presse—Getty Images)

By JACK HEALY and KIRK JOHNSON
New York Times

DENVER — Ken Ivory, a Republican state representative from Utah, has been roaming the West with an alluring pitch to cattle ranchers, farmers and conservatives upset with how Washington controls the wide-open public spaces out here: This land is your land, he says, and not the federal government’s.

Mr. Ivory, a bespectacled business lawyer from suburban Salt Lake City, does not fit the profile of a sun-scoured sagebrush rebel. But he is part of a growing Republican-led movement pushing the federal government to hand over to the states millions of acres of Western public lands — as well as their rich stores of coal, timber and grazing grass.

“It’s like having your hands on the lever of a modern-day Louisiana Purchase,” said Mr. Ivory, who founded the American Lands Council and until recently was its president. The Utah-based group is funded mostly by donations from county governments, but has received support from Americans for Prosperity, the group backed by the billionaire Koch brothers.

The idea, which would radically reshape the West, is one that resonates with the armed group of ranchers and anti-government activists who seized control of a wildlife refuge in Oregon more than a week ago. Ammon Bundy, the crew’s leader and the scion of a Nevada ranching family steeped in disputes with the federal government, said he and his sympathizers had gone to Oregon to give the refuge back to local ranchers.

Many conservatives — Mr. Ivory among them — criticized Mr. Bundy’s gun-toting tactics, but their grievances and goals are nearly identical. And the outcry has grown amid a dust storm of rural anger at President Obama’s efforts to tighten regulations on fracking, greenhouse gases, smaller streams and other environmental issues that put struggling Western counties at odds with conservation advocates.

In the past few years, lawmakers across the West have offered up dozens of bills and resolutions seeking to take over the federal lands inside their borders or to study how to do so. Some of the legislation has been aimed at Congress, to urge it to radically revise the laws that have shaped 550,000 square miles of national forests and terrain run by the federal Bureau of Land Management, stretching from the Great Plains to the Pacific.

The effort — derided by critics as a pipe dream that would put priceless landscapes on the auction block — has achieved little so far.

Utah is the only state to pass a law demanding that Washington hand over federal land to the state. That transfer never happened, so now, Republicans on a state land commission are pressing for a $14 million lawsuit to claim 31.2 million federal acres of canyons, scrub desert and rolling mesas. The state’s attorney general, a Republican, has said he is studying the case and will make a decision about whether to move forward.

Colorado’s experience illustrates how the land-transfer discussion far exceeds any concrete results. Last year, a Republican state senator from the agricultural eastern plains sponsored a bill to create a Colorado Federal Land Management Commission, to study turning over federal lands to the state. The measure never made it out of the Republican-controlled state Senate.

In Congress, Republicans have supported moves to set up a land-transfer fund and create a “framework” to hand federal acres to the states.

Last week, Representative Greg Walden, the Republican who represents the Oregon district where the Bundy takeover is playing out, stood up in Congress to deplore the tactics of the armed protesters, but sympathized with their frustration.

“More than half of my district is under federal management, or lack thereof,” Mr. Walden said, expressing anger at the Bureau of Land Management. “They have come out with these proposals to close roads into the forests. They have ignored public input.”

In July 2014, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas proposed preventing the federal government from owning more than half of any state’s land. (Five states are more than half federal land, according to a Congressional Research Service report.) And Representative Cresent Hardy, Republican of Nevada, whose district includes a ranch run by Mr. Bundy’s father, introduced a measure that would block the government from buying any new land unless it could pass a balanced budget.

But land experts say the movement offers few details about what would happen the day after the federal government handed over all its land. How would states afford hundreds of rangers, officers and administrators to keep the land safe and comply with complicated federal laws on environmental policy and protecting endangered species? Would the land stay public, or be sold off to the highest bidder?

“They conveniently avoid all the difficult questions,” said Martin Nie, the director for the Bolle Center for People and Forests at the University of Montana.

In its mission statement, the American Lands Council says its strategy for securing local control of public land in the West involves four tenets: education, negotiation, legislation and litigation.

In practice, local land disputes — fueled by deepening antagonism toward federal land agencies — now unfold like social-media passion plays. Last summer, groups intervened at the request of mine owners to provide security at mines in Oregon and Montana amid complaints about federal land managers. And in December, Phil Lyman, a commissioner in San Juan County, Utah, received a 10-day jail sentence after he led a protest ride on all-terrain vehicles through a federal area that had been closed to motorized use.

“All I did was drive down a canyon road,” Mr. Lyman said. “It seems to be getting worse, and the federal agencies, they are expanding. Their restraints are being overstepped. It’s not the way this country was set up. It’s not the founders’ design.”

Not surprisingly, environmental activists have opposed dismantling federal lands, but so have hunters and anglers who worry their elk-hunting grounds and trout streams would be sold to private hands and developed. Unlike the federal government, many states require that their land be used as profitably as possible.

About an hour’s drive from the wildlife refuge where Mr. Bundy’s group is facing off with the government, Erin Maupin and her husband, Jeff, pay the government each summer to feed their cattle on 19,000 acres of federally owned land. She said that like many ranchers, they wanted to work with the government, but that layers of grazing restrictions and environmental rules were getting out of hand.

“We want somebody to make sure we’re doing it right,” Ms. Maupin said. “But it’s got to the point where there’s no common sense in it.”

The resentments toward federal land managers feel sharpest in economically strapped rural counties from Arizona to Montana, where up to 90 percent of the lands are federally managed. People love the beauty that surrounds them, but seethe at policies that they say have whittled away logging and mining jobs, left national forests vulnerable to wildfires and blocked access to public land.

“The land policies now are, basically, lock it up and throw away the key,” said Leland Pollock, a commissioner in Garfield County, Utah, a county roughly the size of Connecticut with pine forests and stunning red-rock spires. “It’s land with no use. The local economy’s really suffered as a result. Grazing has been reduced. We used to have a thriving timber industry — that’s all but gone.”

Endangered Amargosa voles return to Mojave Desert

University of California, Davis veterinary professor Janet Foley holds an Amargosa vole in Shoshone, Calif. Twelve endangered voles were set free at a spring-fed marsh near Tecopa, Calif. (Jeff Scheid/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

By HENRY BREAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

SHOSHONE, Calif. — The Davis Dozen is on the loose.

Shortly after sunrise Friday morning, 12 endangered Amargosa voles raised at the University of California in Davis were set free in the waist-high grass at a spring-fed marsh near the tiny town of Tecopa, about 90 miles west of Las Vegas.

It marked the first release of captive-bred voles into the wild since the rare rodent was added to the endangered species list more than 30 years ago.

A group of bleary-eyed members of the Amargosa Vole Team celebrated with coffee and a hard-earned nap.

Brian Croft is acting division chief for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service in California’s Mojave Desert. He came out to observe the release and wound up as one of four people who camped out at the marsh with the voles Thursday night.

Croft said breeding the animals in captivity and releasing them into the wild has been part of the agency’s recovery plan since the 1990s, and now it’s finally happening.

“It’s really a momentous thing for us,” he said.

INTO THE DESERT

The operation began Wednesday in Davis, where team members loaded their test subjects into cages for the 500-mile-plus drive to a mobile home in Shoshone they would use as their bunkhouse and staging area.

On Thursday morning, the collection of veterinarians, biologists and graduate students gathered around the dining table to prep the voles — six males and six females, including four mated pairs, all roughly the size of a cardboard toilet paper tube and ranging in age from about 6 months to a year.

Each animal was placed in a zippered plastic bag and weighed before being injected with a small identification chip known as a PIT tag just under the skin behind its head.

“It’s the same thing you give dogs and cats and criminals, only smaller,” said UC Davis veterinary professor Janet Foley, co-leader of the species recovery project.

Eight of the test subjects also were injected with tiny doses of anesthetic to knock them out long enough to be fitted with radio tracking collars weighing less than a nickel.

The collars will allow the research team to track the voles’ movements until the batteries die in about three months — or the animal gets eaten.

Foley said “everything” preys on the dark-brown rodents, including coyotes, bobcats, owls, egrets, falcons, snakes, bullfrogs and even the occasional house cat.

But the biggest threat to the species is habitat loss. The Amargosa vole is only found in a handful of marshes east of Death Valley, where it survives on an exclusive diet of heat-loving bulrush that greens up as the temperature rises to 120 and beyond.

Over the past three years, drought and human disturbance led to the destruction of most of the rodent’s core habitat around Tecopa, prompting emergency collection of 20 juvenile voles in July amid concern the species could disappear in as little as a year.

Those voles have been breeding at UC Davis ever since, building a captive colony that now includes about 60 animals. Foley expects that number to double by year’s end, depending on the success of Friday’s operation and another pilot release planned later this summer.

BABIES ON BOARD

One of the first voles prepped Thursday was a beefy 6-month-old male that topped the scales at well over 100 grams.

“He’s one of the largest males we’ve made,” said a proud Risa Pesapane, the UC Davis graduate student who runs the captive breeding program.

“He’s just a handsome specimen of voleness ready to go out and find a wife,” Foley added.

As she examined another animal a short time later, a smile spread across Foley’s face. “She’s pregnant,” the veterinarian said.

Doing some quick math in her head, Pesapane guessed this surprise litter would arrive within the next week or two, the first of many wild-born voles the team hopes to produce.

“I want this to be successful because I don’t really want to own a zoo of Amargosa voles,” Foley said later. “I want to see them recovered out here.”

At dusk Thursday the voles were transferred into wire cages placed in the marsh two months ago so they could spend the night getting used to the sights, sounds and smells while safe from predators.

Four members of the team camped out nearby to keep watch on the cages, sleeping in shifts so at least two people were on sentry duty at any one time. Foley said a few coyotes came around during the night but were chased away with a flood light.

At about 6:10 a.m. Friday the cage doors were opened so the voles could begin exploring their new home. Within a few hours, several of the animals had ventured into the surrounding marsh.

For four members of the Davis Dozen, the release was a homecoming. They were among the 20 juveniles hastily captured in July.

Since then, Pesapane said, the four “originals” have paired off and mated, producing three or four litters each. They are now back in the wild in a different, better-quality marsh than the one where they were born.

The team plans to document the voles’ movements for at least the next week and to return in a month. The animals will be tracked and trapped regularly for genetic and disease testing and to “check for babies,” Foley said.

“That’s the million-dollar question with one of these captive-bred voles,” said Deana Clifford, a California Department of Fish and Wildlife veterinarian and Foley’s co-lead on the recovery project. “Will it breed with a wild vole that’s already out there in that marsh?”

A GAME OF INCHES

This is by no means the only vole work underway.

Foley said scientists at the University of California, Berkeley are performing genetic comparisons of the captive and wild populations, while a researcher at Purdue University assembles a detailed map of the species’ DNA.

“We’re going to have an Amargosa vole genome in a month,” she said.

Meanwhile, efforts are underway to restore and expand existing marshes in the area and to create new habitat on nearby public and private land. That work is being led by another UC Davis graduate student, Stephanie Castle, whose knowledge of bulrush and her success cultivating it has earned her the nickname “vole lunch lady.”

It’s literally a game of inches. On Thursday afternoon, Castle stopped to inspect the plants and water at what was once the area’s largest and lushest marsh. The sudden loss of this habitat is what prompted last year’s emergency capture of juvenile voles.

Castle hopes to restore the marsh to its former glory by slowly raising the water level an inch or two at a time to spur new growth without drowning voles still there.

Though the exact population is unknown, there might only be a few hundred Amargosa voles left in the wild.

They were first collected and described by naturalists in the late 1800s, but habitat destruction by early settlers led scientists to declare the animal extinct in the early 1900s.

The rodent was rediscovered in the late 1970s and listed as endangered by the state of California and the federal government in the early 1980s.

The Amargosa Vole Team originally planned to release 29 voles in April, all of them captive bred, but that operation ended in disaster when all but three died in their cages during the trip from Davis. Researchers later determined the voles probably were killed by a combination of heat, dehydration and stress.

The team took a host of precautions this time around, including transporting the voles in larger cages surrounded by circulating fans and temperature gauges. To avoid the daytime heat, they made the roughly 10-hour drive at night.

They arrived in Shoshone before dawn Thursday morning, exhausted but ready for a happy ending.

Desert tortoise gets 7,400 acres

Biologist Jeff Valentine, working for BrightSource, walks back to his truck just outside the gates of the BrightSource solar project in 2011, after releasing a desert tortoise in the Ivanpah Valley. A large amount of desert tortoises have been displaced to make way for the companies large-scale solar project.

BY JANET ZIMMERMAN
Press-Enterprise

More than 11 square miles of private land and prime habitat in eastern San Bernardino County have been set aside for the desert tortoise - which is sliding toward extinction - to offset the impacts of future renewable energy projects and other development.

While environmentalists were pleased with the conservation, they accuse Cadiz Inc. of establishing the preserve to appear more environmentally sensitive and win favor for its widely opposed plan to pump groundwater from the Mojave Desert and pipe it to cities across Southern California.

Cadiz’s new “conservation bank,” on the southeastern edge of the Mojave National Preserve, is separate from its proposed water mining operation in a valley to the south, between the preserve and Joshua Tree National Park.

Critics of the pumping project, including Seth Shteir of the National Parks Conservation Association, say it would deplete the ancient aquifer and dry up seeps and springs for the desert tortoise and other creatures in the surrounding Fenner Valley. And that has cast a shadow on the newly declared preserve land.

The conservation bank “doesn’t alleviate or minimize or mitigate the damage that will be caused by the Cadiz water project,” said Shteir, senior program coordinator for the group, one of several that sued unsuccessfully to block the water project. “We feel that this recent effort is an attempt to greenwash that project.”

Los Angeles-based Cadiz established the 7,400-acre conservation bank earlier this month through the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. The concept is similar to cap and trade, with developers buying mitigation credits in the bank if their project affects the tortoise or its habitat, rather than having to search for property on their own.

The desert tortoise is a hardy species, able to live years without water and survive temperatures of 140 degrees Fahrenheit. But their numbers have dwindled since the 1950s as their habitat was swallowed up by development. They were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990.

Since then, the battle over their territory has grown even more heated as utilities hustle to meet a mandate that one-third of their energy come from renewable sources by 2020. Solar and wind energy projects have been approved for almost 48,000 acres of the California desert and applications on more than 70,000 acres are pending, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

The conservation land is made up of a dozen separate parcels around Interstate 40 and U.S. Route 95 west of Needles. It is part of the 70 square miles Cadiz has owned in the Mojave since 1993.

“This is a way we can harmonize our other land uses while providing land benefits,” said Scott Slater, the company’s president and CEO.

The conservation bank stands to be profitable for Cadiz.

With quality habitat and privately owned parcels hard to find, desert land that once sold for less than $1,000 an acre now sells for five times that, said Ileene Anderson, a biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity, which also sued to block Cadiz’s water project.

“These lands would be hard to develop and this is one way they can make money off these lands and also look environmentally sensitive,” she said.

Slater denied any financial motives for setting up the Fenner Valley Desert Tortoise Conservation Bank.

The company doesn’t need the mitigation land for any of its projects, spokeswoman Courtney Degener said. Depending on where a project is located, the developer must acquire one to four acres of mitigation land for every one acre disturbed.

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WHAT IS A CONSERVATION BANK?

• A conservation or mitigation bank is privately or publicly owned land that protects threatened and endangered species habitat.

• Mitigation is required to compensate for a project's impact on threatened or endangered species or their habitat. Steps taken to minimize environmental impact can include setting aside habitat outside the project area or buying credits in a conservation bank.

• In exchange for permanently protecting, managing and monitoring the land, the bank operator is allowed to sell or transfer habitat credits to developers who need to satisfy legal requirements for mitigating the environmental impacts of projects.

• Conservation banks help consolidate small, fragmented mitigation lands into large, contiguous preserves, which have much higher wildlife habitat values.

• Agencies that approve and regulate conservation banks are the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service.

Source: California Department of Fish and Wildlife

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Desert tortoise

STATUS: In the early 1900s, as many as 1,000 tortoises per square mile inhabited the Mojave Desert. As late as the 1950s, the population averaged at least 200 adults per square mile. More recent studies show the level is now five to 60 adults per square mile. In 1990, the tortoise was listed as threatened with extinction under the Endangered Species Act.

THREATS: Primarily human activities causing loss of habitat, including road construction, housing and energy developments, conversion of native habitats to agriculture, grazing and off-road vehicle use, as well as disease.

HABITAT AND RANGE: Creosote bush scrub at elevations ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 feet above sea level, although they are known to occur in suitable habitats up to about 5,000 feet in elevation. They occur over a relatively large region including the Mojave and Sonoran deserts of California, Nevada, Utah and portions of Arizona.

FEEDING: Vegetation, including annual wildflowers, grasses and new growth of selected shrubs, cacti and their flowers. Desert tortoises forage in the spring and again in the fall, and obtain most water from moist spring foods. During the late summer, they may emerge from their underground burrows to drink standing water after thunderstorms. They may go many years without drinking.

BEHAVIOR: Tortoises are able to live where ground temperatures may exceed 140 degrees farenheit by digging burrows 3 to 6 feet deep to escape the heat of summer and the cold of winter. The animals spend up to 98 percent of their time underground.

Source: Defenders of Wildlife

Desert plan shifts focus to public land

Federal and state officials put plans for privately owned land on the back burner.

Larry LaPre, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, describes the location of a solar energy development planned near the Mojave National Preserve.

BY DAVID DANELSKI
Press-Enterprise

A ballyhooed energy development and land conservation plan for California’s deserts will now focus just on public lands managed by the federal government, at least for the time being, state and federal officials announced Tuesday, March 10.

The Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan has been hailed by the Obama administration as an all-encompassing plan for the desert regions of seven counties, including Riverside and San Bernardino.

In the works since 2009, its goal was to get federal, state and local officials to agree on the best places to locate huge solar, wind and geothermal projects while also preserving the desert’s most important wildlife habitat, and archeological and recreational areas.

When the 8,000-page draft was released last fall, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell appeared in Palm Springs to promote it.

The draft called for directing alternative energy development to 2 million acres of mostly privately owned land that is expected to have little value as endangered-species habitat.

But after receiving 12,000 public comments on the plan, federal Bureau of Land Management and California Energy officials, in a conference call with reporters, appeared to reel back expectations, if not the plan itself.

With no certain time frame, the plan now is being broken into phases, the first of which will pertain only to public lands managed by the BLM, said Jim Kenna, the agency’s California director.

Planning for privately owned land will be delayed to give local officials in the seven counties more time to complete their own planning initiatives, he said.

The draft plan now calls for some 392,000 acres of public land for focused alternative-energy development, 4.9 million acres for conservation and 3.6 million for recreation, Kenna said.

Officials with Riverside and San Bernardino counties have expressed concerns that large-scale solar increases demand for county fire and sheriff’s services without providing the county additional property tax revenue.

San Bernardino County officials also are concerned that large-scale solar projects could be made obsolete by other technological advances.

“We don’t want obsolete solar projects on land that would have been good for other kinds of development,” said county spokesman David Wert.

Ileene Anderson, a biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, said it was disconcerting that the focus now is on public land, because most of the already disturbed land most appropriate for development is privately owned.

“This was supposed to be a grand, coordinated plan,” she said.

Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan

What is it? A proposed land-use plan for California's deserts that strives to place big solar, wind and geothermal projects in place that do the least harm to wildlife habitat and cultural resources.

Where is it? Desert portions of Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Los Angeles, Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego counties.

Who is doing it? The plan is a collabaration led by the Calfornia Energy Commission and U.S. Department of Interior.

What's is the Preferred Alternative?

A version of that calls for:

-- Renewable energy development focus on more than 2 million acres of public and private land, where environmental conflicts are expected to be minimal.

-- Conservation designations for 4.9 million acres of public land managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

-- Recreation designations on more than 3.6 million acres of BLM-managed lands.

-- More than 183,000 acres of land identified for future analysis.

Source: The California Energy Commission

Las Vegas ‘tortoise gulag’ paroles last inmates

A desert tortoise crawls free after being released into the desert near Primm on Friday, Oct. 10, 2014. The Desert Tortoises Conservation Center which housed the tortoise, relocated its final 53 tortoises before the center is scheduled closing in Dec. (David Becker/Las Vegas Review-Journal)

By HENRY BREAN
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL

JEAN — After years — perhaps a lifetime — in cushy captivity, desert tortoise No. 6349 spent his first five minutes of freedom hunched motionless under a bush in a rocky dry wash 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas.

Finally, as his human handlers backed away, 6349 poked his head out of his shell and started to explore his new home — slowly, of course.

He had no way of knowing it, but he marks the end of an era. He was part of the final batch to be set free in the wild before the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center shuts down for good in December, after more than 20 years at the southwestern edge of Las Vegas.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced plans to close the 220-acre center last year, after its federal funding was eliminated. Since then, the center’s contract operator, the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research, has been working with its partners to empty the facility, mostly by releasing healthy tortoises into the wild.

The center was caring for roughly 1,400 of the animals as recently as 18 months ago. Today, all that remain are about 50 adults awaiting shipment to a new exhibit at the Springs Preserve, a research facility in Battle Mountain and the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary in Utah.

Another 40 hatchlings born at the center will sleep through the winter in covered outdoor pens at the site and be released into the wild next year, said Mike Senn, assistant field supervisor with the Fish and Wildlife Service in Southern Nevada.

Senn said no tortoises have been euthanized — or will be — because of the closure of the center, though some animals have been humanely killed over the past two years because they were too sick to save.

He estimates that about 30 percent of tortoises that came into the center had to be put down for medical reasons.

Since 1989, the desert tortoise has been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The conservation center was established in the 1990s as a place for developers to put tortoises removed from job sites in booming Clark County, but it soon became the valley’s de facto shelter for unwanted pet reptiles.

Last year, the center announced it no longer would accept former pets and strays, which were pouring into the facility at a rate of about 1,000 a year, overwhelming its budget and research mission.

The center’s closure in two months will end what has, at times, been a troubled and patchwork effort to save the tortoise, even as researchers were trying to better understand the species and the reasons for its decline.

That led to mistakes.

During the center’s first decade or so, thousands of tortoises were euthanized under a policy that called for the destruction of any animal showing signs of a deadly upper respiratory tract disease considered a threat to the species. It was later learned that tortoises could test positive for the disease but never develop it, either because they had been exposed and recovered or because they could carry it without ever showing symptoms or passing it on. That led to a change in the disease protocol that dramatically reduced the number killed.

Senn said the center’s procedures for determining which tortoises to release have also improved greatly over time and so have survival rates. Early in the program, he said, “They were releasing whatever — anything that wasn’t dead.”

Longtime local conservationist John Hiatt said the center’s legacy will be decidedly mixed. He said “it seemed like a good idea” to have a holding area for tortoises that otherwise would be literally bulldozed in the name of development.

“But in the final analysis, it just wasn’t a long-term or permanent solution,” he said, especially after it became a shelter for a pet tortoise population far larger than expected.

The center has a nickname in the environmental community: “The tortoise gulag.”

“That’s what a lot of people referred to it as because tortoises went there and were put into little pens and that was it,” Hiatt said.

Friday’s release took place in an area west of Interstate 15 south of Jean known as the Large Scale Translocation Site. Of the more than 10,000 tortoises released from the conservation center since 1997, most of them have come to this 27,000-acre swath of federal land where the species’ population density is much higher than it would be under natural conditions, Senn said.

Federal officials and their state and local partners also have established other tortoise release areas at the base of the Spring Mountains south of Pahrump and in the canyons and desert south of Boulder City. A few years ago, a group of test subjects equipped with tracking devices was set loose at the Nevada National Security Site.

Studies conducted in recent years suggest former pet tortoises, even those born in captivity, survive in the wild at about the same rate as the natural population.

“It doesn’t take them very long to go out and be a real tortoise again,” Senn said. “They have that instinct.”

On Friday, it took about 25 biologists and volunteers less than an hour to release 53 tortoises. The crew spent longer driving to the site than it did emptying the animals from their plastic tubs.

No. 6349 was set free by Daniel Essary, a research assistant from the San Diego Zoo, who could find himself out of a job in December. Essary figures he has released roughly 250 tortoises into the Nevada desert over the past five years, and he noticed something familiar about the way 6349 reacted to its release by hiding in his shell.

It’s impossible to know for sure, but Essary said he would bet that 6349 wasn’t always a guest of the government or a backyard pet.

“I’m pretty sure he’s had his time in the wild before,” he said as he watched the tortoise begin to move.

Pet desert tortoises need homes

There's no place to take unwanted desert tortoises, a reptile that is endangered in the wild. Yet desert tortoises can’t simply be put in the desert because of the dangers of overburdening the already fragile desert balance with more animals than the system can support.

Staff Reports
The Record-Courier

It’s been a busy summer so far for Tortoise Group, the Las Vegas nonprofit group that handles pet desert tortoise adoptions in Nevada.

In spite of having adopted over a dozen tortoises so far in 2014, there are still scores of tortoises looking for new custodians. And with no place to take unwanted desert tortoises now, and the Desert Tortoise Conservation Center about to close at the end of the year, finding new custodians for the reptile that is endangered in the wild is a constant problem.

“Although some tortoises lose their homes due to foreclosure or death of their custodians, the major problem is backyard breeding,” Jim Cornall, Executive Director of Tortoise Group said.

“Pet tortoises can’t simply be put in the desert, because of the dangers of introducing disease into the wild population, or overburdening the already fragile desert balance with more animals than the system can support. We have to find homes for them.”

Tortoise Group is planning to hold two workshops in July in Gardnerville and Reno – and will be bringing desert tortoises along for those that chose to adopt, and have prepared their backyards, as a result of the first trip.

The US Fish & Wildlife Service is assisting with funding for the efforts.

Over 150 people attended the two initial workshops, which were the beginning of Tortoise Group setting up a chapter in the capital region. The sessions led to new volunteers being recruited, and to several adoptions. Over a dozen adoptions have already taken place from tortoises already in the area, and around a dozen more tortoises will be going to their new homes in July.

Tortoises will be heading up to Reno on July 23, with assistance from the Nevada Department of Wildlife, with adoptions taking place the following two days. The first workshop is 3:30-5:30 p.m. July 26 at the Humane Society, 2825 Longley Lane, in Reno. The second workshop is 1-3 p.m. July 27 at the Cooperative Extension building, 1329 Waterloo Lane in Gardnerville.

“We were delighted by the response to the initial workshops,” Cornall said. “The people we spoke with and visited were so full of enthusiasm, and eager to be involved. We wanted to bring tortoises as soon as sufficient yards were prepared, and we also wanted to hold new meetings, both for the new members, and for anyone else who couldn't make those first workshops but might be interested in learning more about adopting a pet desert tortoise.”

For more information on desert tortoise adoptions, or the workshops, call (702) 739-7113 or email info@tortoisegroup.org

Group Will Sue to Block 'Evisceration' of Endangered Species Act

A new policy would make it nearly impossible to add new species to the Endangered list until it might be too late for them. (Photo: Jane Waterbury/Flickr/Creative Commons License)

by Chris Clarke
KCET Rewild Commentary

A seemingly arcane shift in policy on the part of two federal agencies about enforcement of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) has wildlife advocates ready to head to court, saying that the Obama administration is "eviscerating" protection for endangered and threatened species by making the change.

The shift in policy, to be formally announced July 1 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries office (NOAA Fisheries), centers on the degree to which a potentially protected species is declining in different parts of its range. Under current ESA policy, based on the language in the law itself, a species qualifies for protection as endangered or Threatened when it is "in danger of extinction in all or a significant portion of its range."

That "significant portion" language has historically allowed the agencies to protect species that are in peril in some of their range, but less threatened elsewhere. Under the new policy, the population in that "significant portion" of the range would have to be absolutely crucial to the survival of the species. That interpretation would mean neither USFWS nor NOAA Fisheries would protect species under ESA until they're in serious trouble wherever they exist. That would be a blow to wildlife protection efforts, according to the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which announced today it will be filing suit to block the new policy.

"The policy finalized today eviscerates the key requirement that species need not be at risk of extinction everywhere before they can be protected," said Brett Hartl, CBD's endangered species policy director. "The policy absolutely undermines the spirit of the Endangered Species Act and will allow massive decline of our native wildlife along with the destruction of wildlife habitat."

Under the new policy, the agencies would also disregard the historic range of a species in determining whether that species deserves protection under ESA. The justification USFWS and NOAA Fisheries offer for this change is a marvel of sophistry:

As defined in the Act, a species is endangered only if it "is in danger of extinction" throughout all or a significant portion of its range. The phrase "is in danger" denotes a present-tense condition of being at risk of a current or future undesired event. Hence, to say a species "is in danger" in an area where it no longer exists -- i.e., in its historical range where it has been extirpated -- is inconsistent with common usage. Thus, "range" must mean "current range," not "historical range."

What's this mean? Imagine if the American bison had been completely wiped out in the wild, instead of just almost completely wiped out, and that the only remaining members of the species left were the ones taking it easy on Catalina Island. Under this new policy, if the bison were at no risk of extinction on Catalina, USFWS wouldn't protect them under ESA despite the loss of more than 99 percent of the species' range and population.

"The Fish and Wildlife Service has long been criticized for only protecting species on the very brink of extinction, which makes recovery a difficult uphill slog," said the CBD. "This policy would actually codify that approach, essentially saying: Let's only protect these creatures when they're in as desperate a state as possible."

CBD contends that a number of courts, including the 9th Circuit, have already ruled the new policy illegal.

The grand compromise: The search for a public lands resolution

A possible solution to the bickering over land use in a big chunk of Utah is being negotiated with all varieties of groups at the table under an effort shepherded by Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah. Despite the challenges, he and others remain optimistic.

The moon sets in Desolation Canyon Thursday, July 1, 2010, on the Green River. (Tom Smart, Deseret News)

By Amy Joi O'Donoghue
Deseret News

SALT LAKE CITY — Imagine Rob Bishop with his head under the hood of a car and a line of people behind him telling him the best way to fix it.

That's the scenario for the Utah congressman, the "car" in this case the delicate issue of federal lands oversight in Utah, and few would dispute the current system is a junker, rife with lawsuits, stalemates and uncertainty.

Bishop, a Republican, has spent the past 20 months as the fixer mechanic, brokering a public lands initiative process that attempts to meld a legislative solution to land use issues in seven Utah counties.

"Everybody is going to get something, but not everything they demand," he said. "That is the beauty of doing it big."

Bishop's bill will propose solutions for some 18 million acres in the extreme eastern part of Utah, with possible wilderness designations that number in the millions of acres. At the same time, it would carve out certainty for recreationers, the oil and gas industry, coal mining interests, potash extraction and more.

This is no minor tune-up.

Wednesday Bishop met with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell at her request. He said she wanted to know how his "grand bargain" legislative effort was coming along.

"It was positive," he said. "She wanted a quick update of where we were in the process...We did go through in detail over the kind of things we would be putting on the table. She actually seemed very positive about it going forward."

Positive and optimistic

"Positive" is the key word that swirls around any discussions on Bishop's public lands initiative. It is the oil that keeps this engine running, even in the face of such disparate interests.

"It's quite encouraging to see the stakeholders still hitched," said Kim Christy, deputy director of Utah's School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration (SITLA), which manages lands conveyed at statehood and held in trust for financial benefit of school children.

"I am the first to admit it is a long shot." But it is a shot.

The stakes are high for Utah.

Bishop's bill, which he hopes to ready to be introduced in January, involves land swaps — it could be SITLA's largest in its history — and would mean it could trade out high-value cultural or wilderness quality lands in exchange for acreage with potential for development.

It leaves the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument off the table and it attempts to solve disputes in this swath of Utah that arise over oil and gas development, endangered species, off-roading, grazing and more.

Bishop believes faith in the continuing negotiations is helping to keep a possible monument designation in Utah by President Obama at bay, although no outright promises have been made.

"What they have said is they are positive about the process and as long as we seem to be making progress toward the solution that this would be the preferable solution where everyone is involved, as opposed to the president making a political statement," he said.

Bishop said each side can gain something and the threat of losing everything keeps everyone involved in the process.

"What we are seeing is everyone sees a potential win out of this process and that encourages them to continue on," he said. "It is important to say that unlike maybe a few years ago, when other people were less successful in trying this same kind of stuff, that everyone also views the potential of defeat."

Strange bedfellows

He said, "There have been times...that there was one side or the other who thought they had the guaranteed, safe upper hand as it was and if they stood pat, and stuck with the status quo, they would come out OK." He said now the threat of losing something provides a healthy détente.

This lands process, as a concept, has forged like positions for two unlikely bedfellows — Emery County and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA).

Representatives of both say they prefer a wilderness bill to a monument designation.

"The impetus for us doing this is to have some local control for what gets designated as wilderness," said Ray Petersen, Emery County's public lands coordinator. "SUWA's Red Rock Wilderness deal or a monument designation is totally out of control, so if we can maintain some input, and some control in this process, why would we not want to do that?"

And from Scott Groene, SUWA's executive director: "I would rather we reach agreement on wilderness legislation. It would affect a much larger amount of wilderness and there could be greater certainty with legislation. We could resolve more issues."

Working the deal

Bishop is working with each of the seven counties to come up with individual public lands management proposals that contemplate wilderness designations and zones where oil and gas development, mining and recreation occur. It could be that all seven counties are part of the final package. It could be that all are not.

"All of them are just looking for certainty," Bishop said, who is still months out from having maps that detail what that proposal ultimately will look like.

Emery County is farther along in the process than the others, having submitted its plan to Bishop two years ago.

"We have negotiated a compromise over time, since this latest effort, going back a couple of decades," Petersen said.

When the Bureau of Land Management abolished cross-country motorized travel and instead designated only specific routes where it was allowed, Petersen said it was a rancorous and dramatic change for residents.

"It was the most painful process, a big change. For some of the users, it was nearly the end of the world to have to be confined to ride on trails."

The decision closed hundreds of miles of trails and was not well received, Petersen said. But within a couple of years the locals decided they could live with it.

"It took a lot of time to go through that. The end result is that we have better management of the resources."

Park expansion?

He said that same idea is at play with the idea of expanding Goblin Valley State Park by 136,000 acres. Such a move involves a transfer of BLM-managed lands and could be accomplished through Bishop's bill.

"The east side of those canyons, day in and day out, are the busiest slots on the swell. It is the farthest away from the BLM's Price field office and it really needs management now; the BLM acknowledges that."

So how is it accomplished?

"My advice is to start 15 years ago," Petersen said. "It takes time. You have to be committed to it. You cannot do it quickly and it is not going to be easy. You have to commit to collaborate, understanding that you are not going to get everything you want."

Groene said his group is waiting to see what the individual county plans look like and what ultimately is laid out on the bargaining table.

"We have said all along the only way we will reach agreement is everyone will have to make concessions, including ourselves."

Reaching agreement on a sensitive environmental issue in which industry and advocates have to compromise is not without precedent in Utah.

SUWA, the state of Utah, Bill Barrett Corp., and a host of others forged concessions in a programmatic agreement in 2010 hailed by then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar as historic for what it gave up, and for what it allowed in the Nine Mile Canyon area.

Then, as in the process unfolding now, no one got what they wanted, but they got enough.

Petersen said ideally, public lands planning involves looking beyond one's own hood ornament as you're traveling toward your destination.

"There is plenty of resource, but every resource will not be used for every reason," Petersen said. "The big picture is we have to make land use decisions about what is best for the land, and sometimes that is not what is best for me, and I am not always going to get what I want."

Delist desert tortoise

LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
EDITORIAL

Being a desert tortoise truther these days can’t be an easy job.

For more than two decades, the shelled reptile, designated a threatened species, has received federal protection. The problem: desert tortoises are about as threatened as pigeons. Maybe even less so, a point further established by the Review-Journal’s Henry Brean in a report that announced an expansion of the Las Vegas-based Tortoise Group’s adoption program to Reno, Sparks, Carson City and Gardnerville.

Yes, there are so many desert tortoises that they need to be shipped out of the desert.

The tortoise truthers say that, while the number of pet tortoises has exploded, tortoises in the wild still need that protection. But any attempt to distinguish between wild desert tortoises and those on golf courses, in backyards or kept as pets is so politically expedient as to be nauseating. The fact is desert tortoises are everywhere — and pretty soon, with this new program, some won’t even be in the desert!

For years, as Mr. Brean reported, the U.S. Fish &Wildlife Service used to take in pets and strays at its Desert Tortoise Conservation Center on the valley’s southwestern edge. Officials put a stop to that in early 2013 because the flood of tortoises — as many as 1,000 a year — threatened to overwhelm the facility’s budget and damage its research mission: saving the wild population. Indeed, the center is expected to close by year’s end, it’s funding eliminated. And good riddance. The center’s mission was a solution in search of a problem.

In fact, over the years, government intervention on behalf of our fine shelled friends has done far more harm than good. The best example: In 2008, about 770 tortoises from Fort Irwin were released into the wild of the California desert —and 90 percent of them were quickly devoured by predators.

If desert tortoises can — and are allowed to — live in a garage in Sparks when it’s 10 degrees outside, then there is no need for government protection. It’s time to delist this animal and open up more land to productive use. The desert tortoise is not in any way a threatened species. That’s the truth.

How the Mojave ranchers were wiped out for the sake of desert tortoise

• The Mojave desert tortoise was declared an endangered species in 1989, and cattle were deemed a danger to them
• Most ranchers left, unable to afford the court battles to stay
• Cliven Bundy is the last rancher left out of about 50

Last man standing: Rancher Cliven Bundy stands near a metal gate on his 160 acre ranch in Bunkerville, Nevada May 3, 2014 (Reuters)

By REUTERS

When the U.S. government declared the Mojave desert tortoise an endangered species in 1989, it effectively marked the cattle ranchers of Nevada's Clark County for extinction.

Rancher Cliven Bundy once had neighbors on the range: when the tortoise was listed, there were about 50 cattle-ranching families in the county. Some of them fought court battles to stay, rejecting the idea their cattle posed a danger to the tortoises. But, one by one, they slowly gave up and disappeared.

Bundy has proven himself one of the most tenacious of this vanishing breed. Backed by armed militiamen, the rancher forced federal agents to stop rounding up his cattle in April, which were grazing illegally on public lands shared by the tortoises.

Bundy initially joined his neighbors in their legal fight to stay but then took a more hardline stance, refusing to recognize federal authority over the land. In 1993, he stopped paying grazing fees and his permit was canceled. In 1998, when authorities banned grazing on much of the federal range, he ignored a court order to move.

In its years-long dispute with Bundy, the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has portrayed the rancher as a scofflaw, free-riding on the backs of roughly 16,000 ranchers on BLM allotments across the United States who pay their grazing fees. They say he now owes $1 million, most of it fines.

But interviews with some of Bundy's former rancher neighbors and ex-BLM officials suggest the reality is more complex: in Clark County, at least, the BLM no longer wanted the ranchers’ fees. It wanted them off the range to fulfill its legal obligation to protect the tortoises living on its land. To achieve this, it joined forces with the county government.

Clark County is not an isolated case. Disputes over land rights are playing out in many Western states, especially in rural areas, where some residents and lawmakers question the legitimacy of the federal government's claim to swathes of land.

In New Mexico, a county government is arguing with federal land managers over whether a rancher can take his cattle to a fenced-off watering hole. In Utah, protesters have been defiantly driving all-terrain vehicles down a canyon trail closed by the U.S. government.

In Clark County, it was rancher versus tortoise.

'When they got the turtles listed as endangered ... they pushed to get the cattle off,' said Melvin Hughes, who once ranched alongside Bundy on the Bunkerville allotment, one of a dozen or so large federal grazing areas in Clark County.

The rationale for ending grazing cited by federal government agencies was plausible but, the agencies conceded, unproven: that livestock grazing harms desert tortoise populations, in part because they compete for the same foods, such as grasses and the new spring growth of cacti.

'They said the cattle was eating the feed from the turtles,' said Hughes. 'Hogwash!'

When the tortoise was listed in 1989, Las Vegas, the county seat, was one of the fastest-growing U.S. cities. For Vegas to spread even an inch farther into the tortoise-filled desert risked a federal offense under the Endangered Species Act.

The county successfully sought a permit that would allow development that inadvertently killed tortoises in some parts of the county if they funded conservation efforts in other parts.

To get the permit, the county made numerous commitments to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help the desert tortoise thrive. One of those promises was to pay willing ranchers to give up their grazing rights.

'Clark County made a choice: urban development is far more important to us than ranchers on the periphery of the county,' said James Skillen, author of a book about the BLM called The Nation’s Largest Landlord.

'The BLM is part of that larger tension between a kind of urban and environmentally conscious West and a traditional resource West,' he said. 'Those conflicts are just going to keep going and the Endangered Species Act is going to continue to be a mechanism of that conflict.'

Clark County officials did not respond to interview requests.

Bundy's refusal to recognize federal authority over the range has made him a folk hero in some conservative quarters. His two-bedroom home, in which he raised 14 children, sits south of a spill of lush grasses and reeds along the Virgin River.

Wise-cracking militia men with holstered handguns check the identities of visitors to guard against intrusion by federal agents. Although Bundy's popularity was badly dented by his widely reported remarks in which he wondered whether black people were worse off now than under slavery, dozens of supporters remain in camps on his property.

Bundy maintains the BLM’s aim from almost the moment the tortoise was listed was to drive the ranchers out of Clark County on a pretext he dismissed as 'wacko environmental stuff.'

'I could tell that the BLM was trying to manage us out of business,' Bundy told Reuters, explaining his decision to stop paying grazing fees.

His critics say he is ignoring laws that do not suit him and treating public land as if it is his own private range. The BLM said it could not answer specific questions about the Clark County disputes.

One of Bundy’s former neighbors is his cousin Kelly Jensen, a fourth-generation cattleman who owned a 40-acre ranch and grazed his cattle on the public lands around it.

Life as a rancher was not a lucrative business, Jensen recalled. Most of the Bunkerville allotment’s 160,000 acres is arid brown-dusted desert.

He estimated the profit on a cow sold for slaughter was about $50. Still, he said, ranching was 'in the blood,' and he liked its self-sufficiency: if you needed a new fridge, you just sold a couple of cows.

Desert tortoises, which can live more than 60 years, have always been part of the landscape. They face myriad threats: development, disease and a huge explosion in the population of ravens, which prey on young tortoises. People sometimes shoot tortoises or crush them in their cars.

In its 1989 listing of the tortoise, the Fish and Wildlife Service named all those threats and more, including livestock grazing. But in 1994, it acknowledged in its Desert Tortoise Recovery Plan that the 'extremely controversial' question of whether cattle harmed tortoise populations was not settled.

In 2002, the U.S. Geological Survey said in a report that the evidence for the harm done by cattle was 'not overwhelming.' William Boarman, the biologist who wrote the report, said he was not aware of subsequent studies showing a strong link.

Still, the Fish and Wildlife Service said in its recovery plan, until it could be proved beyond doubt that the two species could get along, grazing should be banned in critical tortoise habitat.

Soon after the tortoise was listed, the BLM issued an emergency rule requiring the ranchers to remove their cattle from the range, according to the ranchers. A group of them hired a lawyer and asked for a hearing before an administrative law judge to overrule the order.

'Our argument was that livestock grazing on these allotments in these circumstances is not harming the desert tortoise,' said Karen Budd-Falen, the lawyer the ranchers hired. 'The court ruled from the bench: the cows can stay, the BLM is wrong.'

About a year later, the BLM again issued a clearance order, and the ranchers won a second victory in court. It didn't matter in the long term: the BLM began tightening grazing rules and working with Clark County to convince the ranchers to leave.

'We won the case, but we still have to get off the range,' rancher Jensen said.

Bob Abbey, who was the BLM's Nevada director for much of this period, acknowledged that the steps taken by the BLM to protect the tortoise had made life difficult for some ranchers.

'When you limit grazing in such a prescriptive nature many ranchers feel they cannot make a living,' he said.

Abbey said the BLM worked with Clark County to offer payments to the ranchers because it was the 'fairest way of resolving' the issue.

Some ranchers seemed happy with the money they were offered, said Budd-Falen, the lawyer.

But ranchers interviewed by Reuters said that given the choice they were presented with, their sales were hardly willing.

'We had no say in what we were going to get,' said Calvin Adams, who also ranched on the Bunkerville allotment.

About seven years after first fighting the BLM before a judge, he accepted $75,000 to give up his grazing rights. 'I couldn't afford to pay the lawyers when they just keep taking you to court,' he said.

It is not clear how many ranchers accepted a buyout and how many left for other reasons. Either way, the efforts of Clark County and the BLM were effective: it took many years, but eventually more than 1 million acres of federal rangeland was emptied of cattle apart from those belonging to Bundy.

Clark County has spent millions of dollars of developers' money on conservation efforts, from signage to studies, and relocated thousands of tortoises that were in the way of development projects into conservation areas.

But the development allowed by the county's permit has killed hundreds of tortoises, too. A 2001 report by the county estimated that upwards of 400 tortoises were killed each year in building projects after it dropped a mandatory requirement to relocate tortoises before construction began.

It is still too soon to tell whether the tortoise population is recovering, or at least holding stable, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service and biologists.

Meanwhile public land in Clark County's Dry Lake Valley has been zoned for solar energy development. For any projects to proceed, developers would have to balance the damage by conserving tortoise habitat elsewhere.

The BLM says it has found a perfect swathe of land for these conservation efforts, pending final approval. There is one problem: it is home to hundreds of Bundy's trespassing cattle.

Bundy may soon find he is in the way all over again.

New Mexico county defies U.S. government over cattle grazing

BY JOSEPH KOLB
Reuters

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico - A rural New Mexico county has voted to defy the federal government and give a rancher's cattle access to a watering hole fenced off by the Forest Service in the latest dispute over federal control of public land in the U.S. West.

Commissioners in Otero County voted 2-0 on Monday night to authorize Sheriff Benny House to open a gate allowing nearly 200 head of cattle into the 23-acre area despite Forest Service restrictions. A third commissioner was out of town for the vote.

"We are reacting to the infringement of the U.S. Forest Service on the water rights of our land-allotment owners," Otero County Commissioner Tommie Herrell told Reuters. "People have been grazing there since 1956."

But a U.S. Forest Service spokesman said the fence has also been there for decades, protecting a delicate ecosystem surrounding a natural spring as well as an endangered species of mouse from being trampled by cattle.

The dispute is the latest squabble between federal authorities and conservative states' rights advocates in the West, who want to take back millions of acres of public land from central government agencies.

It comes in the wake of an armed standoff last month between supporters of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy and federal land managers who sought unsuccessfully to seize his cattle over his longstanding refusal to pay grazing fees.

Bundy and his allies do not recognize federal authority over the land, which has been cleared of other ranchers' livestock to protect the habitat of the desert tortoise.

In the New Mexico case, Forest Service spokesman Mark Chavez said an old barbed-wire fence had recently been upgraded in cooperation with the rancher, and allowed room for a watering canal for the cattle without disturbing protected land.

He said the fence allows calves in and out of the area and there were other watering holes on the rancher's 28,850-acre grazing allotment some 45 miles southeast of Alamogordo.

Herrell said the rancher involved had complained repeatedly to the commission about the fence. The rancher was unavailable for comment on Tuesday afternoon

Chavez said the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse was expected to be listed as an endangered species in June, which would mean those 23 acres would be considered a critical habitat.

"I've never seen one of these mice, and the Forest Service claims they caught one last year," Herrell said.

While Otero County commissioners had given the sheriff approval to obtain a court order lifting the restrictions, Herrell said that House would not act until after local officials meet with the U.S. attorney for New Mexico on Friday.

Guarding against overreach of the Endangered Species Act

Sue McCrum
Drovers Cattle Network

Recently there have been media reports that have highlighted the dangerous overreach of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Desert Tortoise, Delta Smelt, Sage Grouse, and the Lesser Prairie Chicken to name a few species, are being respected over the value of the human species as various actions are being taken across the United States to severely curtail or eliminate the use of land, water, timber and mineral resources in deference to these species. These resources are vital for the security and economic solvency of the United States as they provide food, fiber, shelter and energy for our people.

The situation cements the fact that American Agri-Women (AAW) urges that the existing Endangered Species Act be repealed. At the very least, AAW supports a requirement that the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and Critical Habitat designations be completed before restrictive regulatory action is taken. Concurrent social, economic and environmental cost/benefit analyses and compensatory adjustments for takings deemed necessary for species protection is required, and should be enforced.

AAW supports allowing a state or private property owner who is accused of an ESA violation to continue with existing farming, logging, fishing or mining practices until the suit is resolved. No fine should be assessed unless a violation is proven.

AAW opposes expansion of habitat area designations for endangered species without peer-reviewed scientific data showing the additional acres are necessary.

With an ever increasing world population that will need to be fed, clothed and sheltered land being taken out of productive use for the benefit of people will regrettably result in an endangered species listing for the human race.

Sue McCrum, President of American Agri-Women, the nation’s largest coalition of farm, ranch and agri-business women.

Environmentalists pushed Bundy ranch standoff over endangered [sic] tortoises

A helicopter takes off from a staging area of BLM vehicles and other government vehicles off of Riverside Road near Bunkerville, Nevada over the weekend of April 12-13, 2014. (Reuters)

Michael Bastasch
Daily Caller

Some have speculated that the standoff between federal agents and Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy is the result of a secretive deal orchestrated by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and political allies in the solar industry.

But the Bundy standoff is really the culmination of a long battle with environmentalists who want to keep federal lands off limits to economic activity. The primary vehicle used by government officials and environmentalists to advance this goal has been the desert tortoise, which was listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act in 1990.

The land Bundy’s family had used for cattle grazing since the late 1800s suddenly became off-limits. Bundy refused to give up his grazing rights and wound up in a prolonged court battle. The court ruled against Bundy in 1998 and ordered him to remove his cattle, or else the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) would do it for him.

The BLM even had a webpage detailing the problems they saw from Bundy’s “trespass cattle” that were grazing in desert tortoise habitat. The webpage, however, was deleted. So was the cached copy after the Bundy standoff became nationwide news.

A screenshot of the deleted page from the BLM’s website shows that environmental groups were some of the main forces aligned against Bundy’s trespass cattle. Environmentalists were pushing for the disputed federal lands to be used as “offsite mitigation” for the impact of solar development. Solar development in the area is heavily supported by Nevada environmental groups.

“Non-Governmental Organizations have expressed concern that the regional mitigation strategy for the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone utilizes Gold Butte as the location for offsite mitigation for impacts from solar development, and that those restoration activities are not durable with the presence of trespass cattle,” the BLM page says.

“The Center for Biological Diversity has demanded action to resolve trespass in designated critical desert tortoise habitat in several letters,” BLM page notes. “Western Watersheds has requested a verbal status update and later filed a Freedom of Information Act request.”

The Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and the Western Watersheds Project (WWP) have been actively pushing the government to impose heftier grazing fees on cattle ranchers for years, along with pressuring officials to close of huge areas of public lands to grazing and oil and gas development.

“While Cliven Bundy is an extreme example, WWP knows that this sense of entitlement and disregard for federal authority is not uncommon in public lands ranching,” WWP said in a statement. “Bundy’s cows are not the only livestock trampling fragile deserts, precious riparian areas, and imperiling native plants and animals. That is why WWP will continue working to end abusive public lands livestock grazing and to press for meaningful policy reform.”

“We’ve been working for the Mojave desert tortoise since 1997. Challenging the Bureau of Land Management’s grazing practices on arid public lands, we’ve helped protect millions of acres of fragile tortoise habitat,” CBD says on its website.

“It’s so blatant,” says Rob Mrowka, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity said of Bundy’s trespass cattle in 2009. “Anyone can go out there anytime of the year and see cattle. BLM employees trying to protect sensitive plants and animals are very frustrated. It’s a problem that’s been going on and on.”

In April 2012, the BLM were preparing to remove Bundy’s cattle from federal lands, but mysteriously abandoned the operation — note that this was an election year. CBD filed an intent to sue against the BLM under the Endangered Species Act for failing to remove the Bundy’s trespass cattle that year.

CBD was also enraged when the BLM halted removing Bundy’s cattle this month during a fierce standoff between armed federal agents, Bundy supporters and militia members. The BLM returned the 400 cattle they had rounded up to Bundy, angering environmentalists.

“The BLM has both a statutory and sacred duty to manage our public lands in the public interest, to treat all users equally and fairly,” said Mrowka. “Instead it as allowing a freeloading rancher backed by armed thugs to seize hundreds of thousands of acres of the people’s land as their own fiefdom.”

“The BLM monumentally failed to remove the trespass cattle, collect fees, or protect the land for more than 20 years,” Mrowka added. “Now it backed down in the face of threats and posturing of armed so-called ‘sovereignists.’ This is absolutely pathetic and an insult to ranchers and others who hold permits and pay their required fees to use the public lands.”

The Bundy ranch is not out of the woods yet. CBD and other environmentalists have also promised to hold the BLM to its court-mandated orders to round up Bundy’s cattle.

“[I]t’s clear that the BLM has a legal duty to remove trespass cattle for the land entrusted to it by the American people,” Mrowka said. “It has a moral responsibility to not let armed thugs and threats of violence seize hundreds of thousands of acres of public land for their own. We intend to hold the BLM accountable to the American people, fair play, and to justice.”

Glamis Dunes: Judge rejects lawsuit, opening new areas to off-roaders

Additional areas of the Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area, known as Glamis, will be opened to off-roaders this fall. (AP)

By Janet Zimmerman
Riverside Press-Enterprise

Ending a 14-year closure, about 40,000 acres of the popular Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area will be opened to off-road vehicles this fall after a federal court judge overruled environmentalists’ objections.

The land had been placed off limits to protect the Peirson’s milk vetch, a perennial herb listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

The 250-square-mile recreation site in Imperial County is one of the most popular off-roading areas in Southern California, drawing an estimated 1.2 million visitors a year. It’s commonly known as Glamis for the small town there — the name popularized on T-shirts, decals and bumper stickers.

Off-road enthusiasts celebrated the decision by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District Court of California in San Francisco. Her ruling last week upholds a 2013 management plan adopted by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management that includes lifting most of the milk-vetch closure.

“It’s an excellent riding area,” said Jim Bramham, a board member of the American Sand Association, on Monday. “It’s been historically some of the best open dunes for people who like to do long, lineal rides and explore the desert.”

Bramham’s group was one of 10 that helped fight the lawsuit challenging the BLM’s plan. The American Sand Association’s website urges riders to stay out of closed areas until the BLM removes red off-limits stakes.

The largest area that will reopen is in the center of the dunes, with a small portion south of Interstate 8 and another in the northern section near Highway 78, Bramham said.

The dunes are the largest such formation in North America, covering almost 200,000 acres in southeast Imperial County, near the U.S.-Mexico border. The area also is known as the Algodones Dunes.

Officials with the Center for Biological Diversity, which filed the lawsuit, said they are considering whether to appeal the decision.

In her ruling, Illston found that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is overdue in issuing a recovery plan for the Peirson’s milk vetch, and ordered one done by 2019.

The court order maintains closure of 9,261 acres of critical habitat deemed necessary for plant’s survival, as well as 26,000 acres of the North Algodones Dunes Wilderness that is permanently closed to vehicles.

The remainder, more than 127,000 acres, will be open to sand rails, motorcycles, four-wheelers and other off-highway vehicles.

Ileene Anderson, a biologist with the Center for Biological Diversity, worries about enforcement of the closures.

“The critical habitat follows the geography of the dunes. It looks like a big comb. I don’t know how they’ll be able to enforce keeping trespassing from happening in these areas that look like fingers going out from the backbone of the comb,” she said.

Terry Weiner, conservation coordinator for the Desert Protective Council in San Diego, said she has seen evidence of traffic in a closure area she regularly visits off Interstate 8 near the Buttercup Campground.

“People weren’t respecting that closure. They were riding through there,” said Weiner, who noticed many of the red stakes buried in sand or ridden over when she was there last month.

“That is the only place that the Peirson’s milk vetch lives on the entire planet,” she said. “The seeds can stay alive in sand for up to 20 years, but that requires the sand not being constantly turned up by tires, which dries them out.”

The Bureau of Land Management will work with off-roading groups to educate the public and develop new maps and signs to direct riders away from closures.


Imperial Sand Dunes Recreation Area

Size: Almost 200,000 acres, the largest mass of sand dunes in North America. The dune system extends for more than 40 miles in a band averaging 5 miles wide.

Where: In the southeast corner of California, on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Origin: The dunes were formed by windblown sands of ancient Lake Cahuilla.

Flora, fauna: Include Peirson’s milk vetch, a perennial herb, and desert tortoise, both listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

Cool fact: The dunes are popular with moviemakers, who first filmed there in 1913. The list of credits includes “Star Wars,” “Jarhead” and “Scorpion King.”

Feds Declare 2 Endangered Death Valley National Park Plants Recovered

Eureka Valley evening primrose (USFWS/Flickr/Creative Commons License)

by Chris Clarke
KCET.org

Two plants found only in Death Valley National Park that have been on the Endangered list since 1978 have since recovered, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is proposing to remove them from the list.

The Eureka Valley evening primrose and the Eureka dunegrass have been successfully protected, says USFWS, from the main threat that prompted their inclusion on the Endangered Species list 36 years ago: off-road vehicle riders trampling the Eureka Dunes. The plants are found only on those dunes, which have been part of Death Valley National Park since the passage of the California Desert Protection Act in 1994.

Though USFWS says the plants still face threats from climate change and from competition from exotic weeds, especially tumbleweeds, the agency says those threats aren't dire enough to keep the plants on the Endangered list, and is proposing to delist both species.

The proposal, which will be published in the Federal Register on Thursday, follows a 2010 petition from the Pacific Legal Foundation that urged USFWS to remove the two species from protection under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA). (Both plants only grow in federally designated wilderness within Death Valley National Park, so the likely boon to PLF's conservative constituency in getting the plants delisted would seem purely symbolic.)

The biggest threat to the Eureka Valley evening primrose (Oenothera avita eurekensis) and the Eureka dune grass (Swallenia alexandrae), disturbance from off-road vehicle use and the associated campsites in the dunes, came to a halt even before the Eureka Valley was added to Death Valley National Park. The Bureau of Land Management declared the dunes and the surrounding area off-limits to off-road vehicles in 1976, in response to the proposed listing of both plants as endangered under ESA. In 1980, the BLM declared the Eureka Dunes area an Area of Critical Environmental Concern, an administrative designation that allows the BLM to better protect the landscape.

Soon after the dunes were transferred from the BLM to the National Park Service in 1994, the whole area was declared a federal wilderness area, permanently keeping vehicles off the dunes. An October 1997 article in Esquire on the new sport sandboarding identified the Eureka Dunes as a choice destination for the sport, raising concerns that boarders would crush plants. The Park Service prohibited the sport on the dunes in 2002.

The Park Service isn't as able to prohibit the spread of tumbleweeds, a.k.a Russian thistle (Salsola). The invasive plant has grown on the dunes since the 1970s, likely brought in by livestock in the north end of the valley. But while Salsola is a serious threat to other native plants throughout the west, the evening-primrose and the dune grass seem to do fine even in the presence of tumbleweeds.

Despite the symbolic victory for the anti-environmental Pacific Legal Foundation, environmental groups are applauding the proposed delisting as well. "These two unique California plants join the long list of species the Endangered Species Act has saved from extinction," said Tierra Curry, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. "From the blue whale to Eureka dune grass, this remarkably successful law has prevented the extinction of our country's most vulnerable wild heritage for 40 years now."

The USFWS delisting proposal now launches a 60-day public comment period.