Environmentalists feeling burned by rush to build solar projects

Local activists say national groups, focused on renewable energy, ignore projects' threat to the Mojave.

By Julie Cart
Los Angeles Times

AMARGOSA VALLEY, Calif. — April Sall gazed out at the Mojave Desert flashing past the car window and unreeled a story of frustration and backroom dealings.

Her small California group, the Wildlands Conservancy, wanted to preserve 600,000 acres of the Mojave. The group raised $45 million, bought the land and deeded it to the federal government.

The conservancy intended that the land be protected forever. Instead, 12 years after accepting the largest land gift in American history, the federal government is on the verge of opening 50,000 acres of that bequest to solar development.

Even worse, in Sall's view, the nation's largest environmental organizations are scarcely voicing opposition. Their silence leaves the conservancy and a smattering of other small environmental organizations nearly alone in opposing energy development across 33,000 square miles of desert land.

"We got dragged into this because the big groups were standing on the sidelines and we were watching this big conservation legacy practically go under a bulldozer," said Sall, the organization's conservation director. "We said, 'We can't be silent anymore.' "

Similar stories can be heard across the desert Southwest. Small environmental groups are fighting utility-scale solar projects without the support of what they refer to as "Gang Green," the nation's big environmental players.

Local activists accuse the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Defenders of Wildlife, the Wilderness Society and other venerable environmental groups of acquiescing to the industrialization of the desert because they believe large-scale solar power is essential to slowing climate change.

Janine Blaeloch, director of the Western Lands Project, a small public lands watchdog group, said Gang Green's members are compliant in order to make themselves more inviting to major foundations. In recent years, grants for projects focusing on climate change and energy have become the two top-funded issues in environmental philanthropy. Foundations have awarded tens of millions of dollars in grants to environmental groups that make renewable energy a top priority.

"It's not that they solely and directly make decisions based on funding, but they keep their eyes open to what foundations want," Blaeloch said.

As a result, "you've got enviros exactly where industry wanted them to be," she said.

Big environmental organizations say they have agonized over how to approach the issue. They acknowledge that development can have irreversible effects on ecosystems. But they are reluctant to stand in the way of renewable energy projects they regard as a vital response to climate change, which they consider the nation's most serious environmental challenge.

The Sierra Club, NRDC and Defenders of Wildlife filed suit last week to stop the troubled Calico solar project northeast of Los Angeles. But for the most part the big players have embraced solar development.

Instead of following the old adversarial formula of saying no to everything, they have adopted an approach they call, "Getting to yes."

'Green halo' effect

Grass-roots groups say that strategy has failed to protect the desert. What's worse, they say, is that the imprimatur of such groups as the Sierra Club has provided a '"green halo" to energy companies and the government — making it easy for them to ignore local environmental concerns.

Two major projects underway in the Mojave illustrate the divide between local and national groups.

Desert activists vigorously oppose the BrightSource Energy project in the east Mojave's Ivanpah Valley and NextEra's Genesis solar plant 20 miles west of Blythe. National groups have not mounted a strong challenge to either project.

When BrightSource was planning the Ivanpah installation, the big environmental players urged the firm to move the bulk of the project closer to Interstate 5 to avoid prime habitat for the desert tortoise, a protected species. The company responded by reducing its total footprint by 12%, which didn't solve the problem.

After construction began, large numbers of desert tortoises were discovered. According to federal biologists, BrightSource is now responsible for relocating and caring for 95% of all the tortoises expected to be found on all solar project sites in the Mojave.

Some rank-and-file Sierra Club members had wanted to sue to stop the project altogether, but the group's national board of directors vetoed that proposal in favor of a more neutral approach.

Separately, the Sierra Club has scolded some in the Southern California desert chapters for opposing solar projects. The national office issued a 42-page directive laying out the organization's policy regarding renewable energy and instructed local chapters to fall in line.

"It was pretty clear that the national club policy was to foster large-scale solar," said longtime Sierra Club member Joan Taylor. "I don't know how many times I've heard that building solar in the desert is going to save the world."

The NRDC's involvement at Ivanpah was constrained by a conflict of interest: NRDC senior attorneyRobert F. KennedyJr. is a BrightSource investor.

Abandonment urged

On the Genesis project, the Sierra Club and others met with NextEra executives and urged the company to abandon its plans for the site out of concern that

it is too close to a wilderness area. In addition, local groups warned the developer that the site contained sensitive cultural resources.

The project went ahead, only to become embroiled in controversy over the discovery of Native American cultural artifacts that halted construction on one-fifth of the site.

The Interior Department's plan to open a vast swath of desert to solar energy is another instance local activists say demonstrates the ineffectiveness of Big Green's approach.

In late 2010, environmental groups worked with energy companies and the government on a policy that restricted development to 677,000 acres in designated solar zones. Environmentalists left the table believing Interior would refine the agreement to even further reduce the land open to development.

Instead, not long after that compromise, Interior said 21 million acres would be available for development through a variance process, a change that no one in the environmental community supported. If the plan is approved as expected, the nation's leading environmental groups will have been outflanked by solar developers.

"The Sierra Club and the NRDC — their mission is to work on climate change" above all else, Sall said. "We refuse to compromise on that level."

The smaller groups have formed their own alliance, Solar Done Right, that supports renewable energy in previously disturbed or low-conflict lands. "We can have renewable energy — we can have tons of it — and we can do it in all the right ways," Sall said.

The Sierra Club's Barbara Boyle, senior lead for energy issues, said she understands the frustration of smaller groups. "I can appreciate that it doesn't seem that we have gotten what we want out of the process yet," she said.

Asked if the big players had been outmaneuvered by solar developers, Boyle said, "That's always possible."

But she said her 30 years of working for environmental causes have taught her that "the way that we win is through incremental progress."

"I have faith that we are going to get this right in the end," Boyle said. "We have made some mistakes, and that's really difficult. But it's not just any kind of development that we are working on here. We feel the urgency of getting as much renewable energy in California as soon as we can."

Leading environmental organizations fiercely dispute suggestions that they are influenced by major donors. But on solar development, they are fending off perceptions.

'Big Solar' proposal

Four years ago, the director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies in Sacramento wrote a document called "Big Solar." The proposal by V. John White was a pitch for solar developers to hire his company to help roll out projects.

White is a former lobbyist for the Sierra Club and the NRDC. He also lobbies and consults for energy companies.

White wrote that developers could get cooperation from environmental groups by creating a $500,000 grant-making fund. The money ostensibly was for campaigns to tout the virtues of solar power, but the implication was unmistakable:

Give money to co-opt Big Green.

In the memo, White singled out two organizations — the Sierra Club and the NRDC — for grants. White says the fund was never created. But the strategy, coming from a former environmental lobbyist, raised the antennae of critics and invited scrutiny of funding sources.

The Energy Foundation is among the major funders of environmental groups today. It receives its money from large endowments, although not from the energy industry, and makes grants to further the goal of renewable energy. Over the last five years, the foundation has made $150 million in grants for renewable energy efforts, including $8.5 million to the NRDC and $6.2 million to the Sierra Club.

The Sierra Club's zeal to eliminate coal-fired power plants led it to praise natural gas as an acceptable "bridge fuel." Club officials rewrote their gift acceptance policy when it was discovered that from 2007 to 2010 the organization accepted $26 million from individuals with or subsidiaries of Chesapeake Energy, one of the country's largest natural gas companies.

At the NRDC, public lands attorney Johanna Wald bristled at the suggestion that she or the organization has taken it easy on solar projects in return for grant money.

"It's ridiculous," Wald said. "I'm working around the clock on these issues. I couldn't be bought off, I haven't been bought off and I won't be bought off."

White has become something of a kingmaker in California on renewable energy, deciding who will represent environmental interests on various planning groups overseeing renewable energy development.

Every appointee he has chosen came from a major environmental group that supports most solar development.

As insiders in the process, Gang Green has framed the issues, Sall said, "basically saying we have to pave over huge areas of the West with solar or we are all going to burn up with climate change."

"That set a tone that we still have not overcome."

Los Angeles Times researcher Maloy Moore contributed to this report.

Mojave solar-power project sacrifices the desert for the Earth

Industrial-scale solar development is well under way in California's Mojave Desert, where more than 3,500 acres of public land are being covered with BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar-power project. In the fight against climate change, the Mojave is about to take one for the team.

BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar-power-plant construction site is bathed with the light from sunrise as cranes loom over the Mojave Desert and crews work to build one of facility's giant "power towers." (MARK BOSTER / MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS)

By Julie Cart
Los Angeles Times

IVANPAH VALLEY, Calif. — Construction cranes rise like storks 40 stories above the Mojave Desert. In their midst, the "power tower" emerges, wrapped in scaffolding and looking like a multistage rocket.

Clustered nearby are hangar-size assembly buildings, looming berms of sand and a chain mail of fencing that will enclose more than 3,500 public acres. Moorings for 173,500 mirrors — each the size of a garage door — are spiked into the desert floor. Before the end of the year, they will become six square miles of gleaming reflectors, sweeping from Interstate 15 to the Clark Mountains along California's eastern border.

BrightSource Energy's Ivanpah solar-power project will soon be a humming city with 24-hour lighting, a wastewater-processing facility and a gas-fired power plant. To make room, BrightSource has mowed down a swath of desert plants, displaced dozens of animal species and relocated scores of imperiled desert tortoises, a move some experts say could kill up to one-third of the reptiles.

Despite its behemoth footprint, the Ivanpah project has slipped easily into place, unencumbered by lasting legal opposition or public outcry from California's environmental community.

The public got its chance to comment at scores of open houses, but the real political horse trading took place in meetings involving solar developers, federal regulators and leaders of some of the nation's top environmental organizations.

Away from public scrutiny, they crafted a united front in favor of utility-scale solar development, often making difficult compromises.

"I have spent my entire career thinking of myself as an advocate on behalf of public lands and acting for their protection," said Johanna Wald, a veteran environmental attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "I am now helping facilitate an activity on public lands that will have very significant environmental impacts. We are doing it because of the threat of climate change. It's not an accommodation; it's a change I had to make to respond to climate."

That unusual collaboration — along with generous federal subsidies and allotments of public land — has sparked a wholesale remodeling of the American desert.

Industrial-scale solar development is well under way in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. The federal government has furnished more public property to this cause than it has for oil and gas exploration in the past decade: 21 million acres, more than the area of Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties put together.

If only a few of the proposed projects are built, hundreds of square miles of wild land will be scraped clear. Several thousand miles of power-transmission corridors will be created.

The desert will be scarred, and no amount of mitigation will repair it, according to scores of federal and state environmental reviews.

"The scale of impacts that we are facing, collectively across the desert, is phenomenal," said Dennis Schramm, former superintendent at neighboring Mojave National Preserve. "The reality of the Ivanpah project is that what it will look like on the ground is worse than any of the analyses predicted."

In the fight against climate change, the Mojave Desert is about to take one for the team.

Not cheap energy

For decades, America's Western deserts have been dusty storehouses for government scrap, a lode for minerals, a staging ground for tanks and military maneuvers.

But the thrum of industry is afoot, bringing Space Age technology and a sense of urgency.

The BrightSource solar plant stands as an exclamation point in the desert.

The $2 billion plant is an amalgam of gadgetry designed to wring the maximum energy from the sun. Computers continually focus the field of mirrors to a center tower filled with water, which will heat to more than 1,000 degrees. The resulting steam drives an array of turbines capable of generating 370 megawatts, enough to power roughly 140,000 homes during peak hours.

Capturing a free and clean source of energy is not cheap. Solar is the Cadillac of energy, with capital costs and other market factors making it three times more expensive than natural gas or coal.

Ratepayers' bills will be up to 50 percent higher for renewable energy, according to an analysis from the consumer advocate branch of the state Public Utilities Commission.

What has opened the way for such a costly source of energy is the dramatic turn in federal policy. As early as 2005, the Bush administration established generous programs to reward renewable-energy developers. The Obama administration sweetened the pot, offering $45 billion in federal tax credits, guaranteed loans and grants.

On the state level, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger freed large solar plants from property taxes and handed out $90 million in exemptions from sales and use taxes. Under Gov. Jerry Brown, the state invested more than $70 million in clean-energy research last year, paid for by a ratepayer surcharge.

The money has sparked a land rush echoing the speculative booms in mining, railroad construction and oil and gas on Western federal land.

One of the first firms out of the gate was Oakland-based BrightSource Energy, which received $1.6 billion in federally guaranteed loans in addition to hundreds of millions in private investment.

By taking advantage of the available government subsidies, shrewd solar developers can get taxpayers to cover close to 80 percent of a multibillion-dollar project. The rest comes from investors, attracted by what amounts to a tax shelter.

Federal and state officials have used job creation to partly justify their subsidy of solar companies. During the two to three years of a solar plant's construction, most new jobs will go to union tradesmen. But after a plant is built, employment opportunities are limited.

BrightSource's Ivanpah facility is expected to employ 1,000 workers at the height of construction, but that will shrink to 86 full-time maintenance and facility workers once it is up and running.

"What troubles me is that the public has bought the whole solar expansion hook, line and sinker because it's 'renewable,' " Schramm said. "The public would be up in arms if someone was building Disneyland next to a national park."

The environmental cost

Larry LaPre, the Bureau of Land Management's wildlife biologist for much of the Mojave, said some aspects of the project have been carefully considered and painstakingly done. Other approaches, however, are "complete nonsense," among them BrightSource's experimental approach of shearing the tops of desert plants so they fit under elevated solar mirrors. The company calls it "gentle mowing."

"To get another barrel cactus, even a small one, takes 100 years," he said, driving around the Ivanpah construction site. LaPre peered through the windshield and ticked off what living things might be left after the developers finish.

"The birds are already gone. They're outta there," he said. The site "will have plants, short plants, and it will have mice and kangaroo rats and some lizards. That's it. Maybe some more common birds. The insects are an unknown, because you could have massive losses of pollinators because you have all these insects getting burned in the mirrors."

Mainstream environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society, Defenders of Wildlife and the Natural Resources Defense Council, have been largely mute, having traded the picket line for a seat at the table when development plans were drawn.

The Center for Biological Diversity, one of the nation's most aggressively litigious environmental groups, has not challenged the Ivanpah project. It signed a confidential agreement not to oppose the project in exchange for concessions for the desert tortoise, mandating that BrightSource buy land elsewhere for conservation.

Some 24 environmental groups signed statements largely supporting the aims of solar developers.

Federal officials, solar companies and environmental groups argue that the urgency brought on by climate change has forced difficult trade-offs.

"We did the best we could," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

Renewable energy plan creates rift

Environmentalist David Myers says eSolar does energy right at its Sierra SunTower location, which has not used pristine land. (Robert Hanashiro, USA TODAY)

By Andrea Stone
USA TODAY

AMBOY, Calif. — The morning heat hits triple digits as a whiptail lizard darts below a creosote bush near Route 66. Gazing across the desert valley, power company executives, environmentalists and federal land managers stand beneath a cloudless sky and argue over the landscape.
PG&E project manager Alice Harron says she is "comfortable" with the solar power plant her utility wants to build on government land here along 4 miles of the Mother Road that connected Chicago and Los Angeles long before the interstate system.

David Myers of the Wildlands Conservancy is not. Renewable energy projects such as this one — which could power 224,000 homes — sound good in theory, he says, but if they tear up pristine vistas, they're not "green."

President Obama wants a "clean-energy economy" that relies on renewable sources such as solar and wind power instead of coal and oil. He wants to put these new utilities on federally owned lands like this stretch of the Mojave Desert, one of the sunniest places on Earth.

The administration wants to lead the way by taking advantage of its vast holdings, which account for 20% of all land in the USA, mostly in the West.

That idea is creating a rift among environmentalists, who favor renewable energy but are at odds over where to produce it. Some are willing to compromise with utility companies to build large power plants on remote federal lands to accelerate the transition to clean energy.

Purists are dead set against disturbing pristine landscapes.

Obama's goal is to meet 25% of the nation's energy needs from renewable resources by 2025. Today, the figure is 11.1%, according to the Department of Energy.

One purist is Myers, who worries that the government will industrialize the desert with acres of solar mirrors, trampling treasured landscapes. Groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) counter that large, centralized projects are needed to speed the shift to non-polluting energy.

"It's hard, because many of us have fought to protect the very lands" that could be affected, says Johanna Wald of the NRDC.

Starting 'a new beginning'

In a wood-paneled Washington conference room, under the words "America the Beautiful," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says he runs "the real department of energy."

After decades of allowing private companies to lease public lands for coal and oil, "we have started a new beginning" to make room for solar mirrors and wind turbines, he says. As with the older leases, operators would pay to use the land.

Salazar has designated 24 tracts in six Western states as possible solar project sites. There is none on federal lands now.

The Interior Department will open offices to eliminate a five-year backlog of applications. There are 158 pending solar projects on 1.8 million acres of public land. If all went through, they could power 29 million homes.

Not all will be approved, Salazar says, because of environmental and other concerns. Still, the White House plans to streamline approval for at least 10 solar plants it hopes will create 50,000 jobs by 2011.

Nearly half the solar proposals are in the Mojave Desert, home to the threatened desert tortoise, Indian petroglyphs and an intact stretch of Route 66, the historic highway dotted with vintage diners and derelict gas stations.

Not far from the iconic Roy's Motel and Diner, PG&E consultant Scott Galati tells environmentalists that surveys reveal no rare plants or threatened species on a planned solar site. A nearby rail line and access road are proof, he says, the land is hardly pristine.

Myers of the Wildlands Conservancy says an abandoned farm farther from Route 66 would be a better choice. PG&E's Harron says it is privately owned and would be difficult to acquire.

The great advantage of government land, she says, is how much of it there is and the relative ease and cost-effectiveness of building projects on public property.

Too easy, says Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. In a letter to Salazar last month, she said she was "deeply concerned" about a "bias under which solar developers believe they are more likely to receive a permit to build their projects on pristine public lands than on previously disturbed private lands."

Myers fears taxpayers are subsidizing inappropriately large-scale projects. He'd prefer a focus on rooftop solar panels and other small-scale solutions in urban areas that would reduce the clout of big energy companies.

Wald, the NRDC lawyer, says the government is taking a balanced approach. She spent 35 years battling the oil and gas industry and now is working with them to find appropriate sites for wind and solar plants. She agrees that energy self-sufficiency is important but says Myers' approach would take too long. "Even if (some environmentalists) don't like it," she says, large-scale projects "are going to happen."

Monumental roadblock?

Feinstein wants to establish a national monument that would bar energy development on hundreds of thousands of acres of desert between the Mojave National Preserve and Joshua Tree National Park. The area includes former railroad land the Wildlands Conservancy donated to the government a decade ago.

If Congress establishes the monument, PG&E and 22 other companies would have to build someplace else.

Across the border in Nevada, Feinstein's Democratic colleague Harry Reid is taking a different approach. The Senate majority leader supports a proposed wind turbine farm on federal land near Searchlight, his hometown.

That has some of his neighbors livid. Many say they fled to the quiet desert town to get away from California's massive, densely packed wind farms.

They fear the same in Searchlight, where the tallest structure is the 150-foot flagpole at Terrible's Casino.

Duke Energy wants to put up 95 wind turbines with blades that reach 415 feet off the ground. Though few in number compared with older, less efficient wind farms — some with thousands of turbines — that's still too many for some people.

"It's going to ruin our way of life," says Verlie Doing, 85, a friend of Reid's late mother. Doing owns the Nugget Casino.

Twelve miles south in the Nevada town of Cal-Nev-Ari, retired energy company electrician Robert Carty supports the turbines. He sees "the global picture" of climate change and calls opponents "CAVE people — citizens against virtually everything."

Across the Mojave in Lucerne Valley, Calif., where neighbors are arguing over a proposed solar plant on 516 acres, county employee Andrew Silva sighs.

"Folks in the East," he says, "don't necessarily recognize how complex and beautiful and diverse the desert is."

Free range

by B. Christine Hoekenga
High Country News ONLINE

Livestock foraging on 160 million acres of public lands could roam more freely than ever, thanks to a recent policy change at the Bureau of Land Management. On Aug. 14, the BLM granted eight new “categorical exclusions,” designed to speed up the approval process for a slew of activities on public lands, including grazing, logging, oil and gas drilling and recreational use.

Among the major changes is a paring down of the renewal process for the roughly 18,000 grazing permits the agency administers. Previously, when a permit was up for renewal, the BLM was obliged to conduct a formal environmental assessment and call for public comments under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), giving the average citizen an open invitation to speak up.

Now, under the new guidelines, if a grazing allotment appears to be in good shape and the permit is being renewed for roughly the same use as before, the agency may approve the renewal without a rigorous environmental assessment – or formal public comment.

It’s this last part that has environmentalists worried. Bobby McEnaney, public-lands advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, is concerned about losing the eyes and ears of the public in the renewal process. “There have been a number of cases around the West where an individual citizen has pointed out a sage grouse lek or salmon habitat (on grazing lands), and the BLM has made a change,” he says. “The key fatal flaw is that public input will not be valued in this process.”

Others welcome the new procedures. Jeff Eisenberg, director of federal lands for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, believes that the changes will allow the under-funded BLM to be more efficient. Federal land management agencies have an enormous job and not enough resources, he says: “When they are scrambling around and can’t do their work adequately, that makes it hard for us.”

For several years, the cattlemen’s association has supported changes that would streamline grazing permit renewal. Resolutions in its annual policy books dating back to 2003 recommend that the BLM and Forest Service allow the public to have a say only in larger-scale decisions, not in the nitty-gritty of individual grazing permits.

And it appears that the association’s wish has been granted, at least partially. According to BLM estimates, approximately one-third of the roughly 2,300 permits that are renewed each year will be eligible for the new fast-tracked approval. Even so, a determined individual can still find ways to get involved in individual allotment decisions, according to Bob Bolton, a senior rangeland management specialist with the BLM. People can visit their local BLM offices to request information, express concerns or appeal a permit renewed under a categorical exclusion, he says. The agency will notify those who make this extra effort about decisions affecting the allotments in question.

It’s hard to tell whether the changes will ultimately harm public lands, says Sherman Swanson, a rangeland management extension specialist with the University of Nevada, Reno. As with other procedural changes issued by federal agencies, much depends on how the new rules are implemented. “If the opportunity to do a categorical exclusion allows them to go through another round (of permit renewals) without making changes where they need to,” he says, “then it is simply a pressure valve, and we haven’t accomplished much.”

A Hidden Agenda For the NPS

... to prevent Hoffman from overruling NPS biologists who said artificial watering systems should not be installed in the Mojave National Preserve in California ...

The Ledger - Lakeland, FL

The Coalition of National Park Service Retirees is a watchdog group of 410 former Park Service workers. The average member worked for the NPS for 30 years. Suffice it to say they have an abiding interest in seeing these national treasures protected.

Indeed, when the nation's park system was created in 1916, Congress declared the "fundamental purpose" was to "conserve the scenery and the national and historic objects and the wildlife therein and to provide for the enjoyment of same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations."

As longtime employees, coalition members were committed to that goal. As retirees, they are still devoted to it.

They are extremely disturbed about a proposed rewrite of NPS rules that has managed to grow to nearly 200 pages with no public input and little attention. The group uncovered it recently, and has sounded the alarm.

It is, said Bill Wade, former superintendent of the Shenandoah National Park and the coalition's executive council chairman, an "astonishing attempt to hijack the management of the 388 areas of our nation's park system and convert them into vastly diminished areas where almost anything goes."

Jerry Rogers, former associate director for cultural resources of the NPS, said the rewrite "stands nearly 100 years of national-park stewardship on its head."

Judging from the language in the draft document (available at www.npsretirees.org), their assessment of impending commercialization and exploitation are not without foundation.

Instead of having preservation as its "fundamental function," the NPS mission would become avoiding "impairment," which the document defines as permanent and irreversible damage. That basic shift opens the parks to all manner of development.

This sentence in the current rules now governs new activities for parks: "In cases of doubt as to the impacts of activities on park natural resources, the Service will decide in favor of protecting the natural resources." It is completely eliminated in the proposed rules. While current rules referred to parks as "classrooms of our heritage," the coalition notes the new ones see them as recreation opportunities.

The proposed rules also would require the NPS to obtain approval from state agencies in areas where the NPS now has the sole responsibility of acting on behalf of all U.S. citizens. The revised rules instruct the NPS to "cooperate" with towns and cities rather than to merely seek "collaboration."

Officials of the coalition for the park retirees said the proposed regulations are mainly the product of Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary at the Interior Department who oversees the Park Service. He was Wyoming state director for Vice President Dick Cheney from 1985 to 1989 when Cheney was in the U.S. House of Representatives. Hoffman then served as director of the Cody, Wyo., Chamber of Commerce until early 2002, when he was appointed to the deputy assistant's post.

This spring, the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and the Center for Biological Diversity filed suit to prevent Hoffman from overruling NPS biologists who said artificial watering systems should not be installed in the Mojave National Preserve in California.

The Park Service is apparently trying to distance itself from Hoffman's proposals now that they've become public. David Barna, NPS spokesman, told the Casper (Wyo.) Star-Tribune that Hoffman was "playing devil's advocate" with the proposed rules and "had some initial suggestions and prompted us." Those suggestions are now being revised, he said.

Craig Obey, vice president for governmental affairs with the National Parks Conservation Association, a nonpartisan parks-protection organization, said it's difficult to believe Hoffman's ideas formed in a vacuum: "I would find it surprising that someone would put something like this together as a think piece. Documents like this are put together with a purpose."

Obey's association, along with the Friends of the Earth, Natural Resources Defense Council, and The Wilderness Society released a joint statement criticizing the proposal.

It ended: "As watchdog organizations, we share the concerns expressed by park professionals that these policy revisions depart radically from the fundamental stewardship ethic that has preserved our national parks from their beginning. We urge the Department of Interior to immediately abandon this rewrite, heeding the advice of National Park Service professionals who have effectively managed our heritage for decades."

Immediately, if not sooner.

Interior encourages BLM land sales

Selling public lands will let Western cities sprawl into new territory

Zachary Smith WESTERN ROUNDUP
High Country News

In a couple of years, BLM lands around fast-growing cities like St. George, Utah, could hamper growth.

More than 20 years ago, President Ronald Reagan and his advisors looked across the West’s public lands and saw dollar signs. Money was something they desperately needed in 1982, as the national deficit hit $128 billion.

So James Watt, then U.S. secretary of the Interior, and John R. Block, the secretary of Agriculture, earmarked 35 million acres, or 5 percent of the nation’s public lands (excluding Alaska), for the auction block.

The plan to privatize public lands was met with outrage and skepticism, not only from Western liberals such as Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt, but also from conservatives like Sen. James McClure, R-Idaho, who objected because the states were cut out of the deal.

Watt eventually withdrew Interior lands from the sale; shortly thereafter, the Forest Service’s sale lost steam, too.

However unpopular the proposed sales were, they weren’t illegal. And the idea didn’t go away. The framework for selling public lands has inched forward since the Clinton administration, and now the Interior Department wants to give it a higher priority.

The 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) required the Bureau of Land Management to identify lands that were "uneconomical to manage," or that stood in the way of a community’s development.

But the BLM lacked a strong incentive to identify such sellable lands: Under FLPMA, any money received from their sale would go directly into the U.S. Treasury, rather than into the agency’s own coffers.

Then, in 2000, Congress and the Clinton administration passed the Federal Land Transaction Facilitation Act (FLTFA), which changed how profits from BLM land sales were distributed.

Twenty percent of any land-sale revenue would go toward the BLM’s administration costs, while the other 80 percent had to be used to buy private inholdings within BLM lands that contained "exceptional resources."

The act was based on a land disposal and acquisition mechanism in the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998, which was crafted to accommodate Las Vegas’ rapid expansion onto neighboring public lands.

But FLTFA’s profit scheme applied only to sellable lands identified before July 25, 2000. At that time, the BLM estimated it had 3.3 million acres of sellable land, but thanks to better inventories, its estimate has since shrunk to as low as 330,000 acres.

From 2001 to 2003, the BLM sold almost 11,000 acres under FLTFA.

Today, cities like Phoenix, Ariz., and St. George, Utah, are butting up against public lands, and the BLM is facing a $320 million budget reduction from last year.

At the same time, the agency is chipping away at a backlog of dated land-use plans, which gives it the opportunity to identify more disposable lands. Now, politically appointed staffers at the Interior Department want to give the BLM even greater incentive to do so.

In August, Assistant Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett, who oversees the BLM, wrote to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., asking for legislative amendments to FLTFA that would encourage the BLM to sell off more land. She has asked Congress to make the identification and selling of disposable land an ongoing process, rather than one limited to land identified before the July 2000 cutoff date.

Twenty percent of any revenue would still go to the BLM’s administrative costs, but under Scarlett’s proposal, only 60 percent of the money would go toward land acquisition. The other 20 percent would go toward "conservation enhancement projects," to fund local projects such as riparian improvement or removing invasive weeds.

Abolishing the July 2000 deadline gives the BLM "the incentive to decide to designate (new) lands as disposable," says Johanna Wald, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. Wald thinks this change could open the door for much more land to be added to the "for sale" list.

The Beef with Livestock

by TODD WILKINSON
National Parks

Grazing is allowed at about three dozen parks and preserves. Although the practice is legislatively mandated, it frequently causes conflicts with wildlife and natural resource policies. The clash is most apparent at Grand Teton National Park.

LAST AUTUMN, a traveler from Tuscany came to America with hopes of catching a glimpse of the "Wild West." His imagination whetted by the classic outlaw movie, Shane, Daniele Tiezzi decided to hike in Grand Teton National Park not far from where the motion picture had been made half a century earlier.

Yet as the young Italian walked through the park and posed for a photograph in front of the spectacular mountains, he was rudely awakened by the clashing values of the Old and New Wests. Confronted by an angry Jackson Hole cowboy working for a local rancher, Tiezzi was ordered to leave because his presence, he was told, might frighten cattle grazing inside the national park boundary.

For wildlife biologist Franz Camenzind, who accompanied Tiezzi on the hike and who oversees the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance in Wyoming, the incident provides proof that livestock still are treated as sacred cows in some parks--even when the domestic animals dash with native wildlife, the National Park Service's mission of landscape preservation, and enjoyment for park visitors.

Although the National Park Service (NPS) is working to phase out grazing in some parks--notably Mojave National Preserve, Death Valley National Park, and Channel Islands National Park--others continue the practice and may in fact be extending it at parks such as Grand Teton. Some three dozen different parks and preserves began the 21st century with nonnative livestock grazing inside their borders, and at least another four sites allow grazing through agreements with the Bureau of Land Management.

Even as the National Park Service works to change the policy--a tedious and expensive process--Congress sometimes works to continue it. Led by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N. Mex.) and Rep. James Hansen (R-Utah), some members of Congress have tried to stall grazing reforms, in some cases authoring legislation that would solidify the grip of livestock grazing on public lands in the West.

But a growing chorus of prominent ecologists posits that no single human activity has negatively affected the arid West more than livestock grazing.

In addition to land, grazing has a tremendous impact on riparian areas and their inhabitants. Of the 12 Western states that have a state fish, eight are considered endangered mainly because of grazing.

A 1994 study by the National Wildlife Federation tided Grazing to Extinction found that grazing contributed directly or indirectly to a minimum of 340 species listed or becoming candidates for listing under the Endangered Species Act. In the arid West, the federally protected desert tortoise has been especially hard hit by grazing. Beginning this year, NPCA has made examination of the real costs of grazing in parks a primary component of its State of the Parks program, established to identify threats to biological diversity as well as the health of natural systems and the condition of historical parks.

"Cattle grazing in national parks is an incompatible activity, given what the parks were established for, especially in as spectacular a park as Grand Teton where the needs of native wildlife should be preeminent," says Tony Jewett, NPCA's northern Rockies regional director. "Cattle compete with native wildlife, degrade native plants, and disrupt visitor experience. The longer cattle persist in these parks, the longer there is going to be conflict."

Jewett notes that some units of the system, such as Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site in Montana, were set aside specifically to celebrate the history of frontier-era farming and ranching, but they are exceptions.

The National Park Service is being forced to confront a prickly and politically volatile question: What legitimate presence, if any, should livestock have in parks?

Debra Donahue, a law professor at the University of Wyoming, is the author of a scathing critique of livestock grazing titled The Western Range Revisited (University of Oklahoma Press). Donahue is also an academically trained biologist.

"One of the only reasons that cattle remain in many national parks and many Forest Service wilderness areas is the incredible political clout that the livestock industry wields in Congress," she says. "There is little or no scientific justification that can be made for livestock grazing in parks."

In all cases where grazing persists, it is legislated by Congress. Compromises were struck to ease tensions over fears that new national parklands would be "locked up" and unavailable for traditional local uses. Grand Teton provides a vivid example. The park was carved out of the picturesque valley of Jackson Hole when livestock still ruled the range. Over the years, many cattle allotments in Grand Teton have been phased out, and "those that remain are supposed to end upon the death of the beneficiaries named.

Camenzind puts the Grand Teton impact in perspective. The park, he says, spends more than $40,000 annually to maintain these allotments, and it receives about $8,500 a year in grazing fees. The cost to graze the same cattle on private land in Jackson Hole would be about $81,900, meaning that the ranchers enjoy more than $70,000 in subsidies each year.

"And what does the public get?" Camenzind asks. "We get unnecessary conflicts between cattle and federally protected grizzly bears, which resulted in a grizzly being killed inside the national park. We got a very intensive and expensive surveillance of a wolf den in the national park because it was near the cattle. We get thousands of acres of national parkland infested with alien weed species and a corresponding depletion of biodiversity. We also get over 100 miles of fences in our national park, much of it crisscrossing major wildlife habitat and migration routes. In all, the arrangement results in an almost complete loss of winter forage on about 2,700 acres and a severe depletion of forage on another 5,600 acres. This is forage that should be available for buffalo, elk, pronghorn, and other wildlife."

Park spokeswoman Joan Anzelmo says the park has not ignored Camenzind's concerns.

"Grand Teton was born of extraordinary political compromise and one of the compromises involved the continuation of livestock grazing. Sometimes short-term compromise is necessary to accomplish long-term objectives."

George Helfrich, a management assistant in the superintendent's office who is working on an environmental review of grazing, says that grazing was established as a legitimate use in the park by Congress, which means the park itself cannot unilaterally act to end it. Scientists, he says, have differing views on whether cattle cause all of the problems asserted by Camenzind, but one thing is certain. As wolves and grizzlies continue to recolonize, conflicts with cattle are likely to increase.

Recently, park officials have made overtures about extending the leases for grazing in Grand Teton, arguing that helping to keep large ranches in the valley is important to protecting open space and wildlife habitat. If ranchers lose access to grasslands inside the park, they say, the agrarians may have no other choice but to subdivide their pastures and pave them over with development. Currently, the park is in the midst of a congressionally funded study to determine the relationship between cattle grazing and the protection of open space and wildlife habitat surrounding it. Congress also is considering an appropriation to buy conservation easements on adjacent ranches that would benefit Grand Teton's bison, elk, and pronghorn.

"I say there are alternative ranching operations that could be adopted that would free up the parkland and give it back to wildlife," Camenzind says. "We could take the dollars currently used to subsidize the permittees [ranchers] and buy winter hay or pellets for the cattle."

"Instead we give the park forage to the cattle," Camenzind continues, "and buy winter feed for our elk and buffalo on the National Elk Refuge. And throughout all of this, the permittees have made no guarantee that they would keep their ranches operating and in open space. I think protecting open space is as important as phasing cattle out of the park. I just do not accept that the two are inextricably linked."

Every park that has livestock grazing inherited it as part of the arrangement for the park's creation. Conservationists understand that deals were cut to assuage local citizens who opposed park designation; however, continuing the practice has merely extended a protracted struggle.

In desert parks such as Mojave National Preserve and Death Valley National Park, where precipitation is minimal, it might take hundreds of acres of land to sustain a single cow, where in other, moist parts of the country, a few cows can subsist on a single acre of green pasture. It means that in the desert, the limited forage that cows consume and the patterns of their movements can cause severe stress for other plants and animals.

In these two parks, as well as Great Basin National Park in Nevada, the Park Service is having success at eliminating what were once extensive grazing allotments, but the process is far from complete.

At Mojave National Preserve, which supports prime desert tortoise habitat, the preserve had been encumbered with livestock grazing leases on 1.25 million of its 1.6 million acres. Within the last year, according to John Reynolds, the western regional director of NPS, the Park Service has been working on a project that could allow NPS to buy out the first set of grazing rights and has received a significant commitment in private pledges to buy out the remaining rights.

At Death Valley National Park, the largest park in the lower 48, the situation is just as positive. According to NPCA's Defending the Desert, a report released last fall on the anniversary of the California Desert Protection Act, the Park Service had eliminated two-thirds of the grazing in the park. Last year, the Park Service canceled the Last Chance grazing permit because of the rancher's lack of compliance with existing regulations. Additionally, the park is canceling grazing on parcels that connect to larger allotments on neighboring BLM lands. This would leave the park with only one area open to grazing.

Studies collected on lands analogous to Mojave and Death Valley show a clear correlation between cattle and environmental destruction. The Park Service's own resource guidelines recognize "the pervasive quality of grazing impacts on park resources" and cite a long list of resource concerns, including vegetation changes, water quality degradation, and degradation of cultural resources.

Johanna Wald, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, says, "It is well established that livestock grazing can have significant adverse effects in arid environments like the Mojave National Preserve."

Unfortunately, individual park superintendents do not have the power to take action, says Reynolds. Title 36 of the Code of Federal Regulations, section 2.60, prohibits "the pasturing or grazing of livestock in a park area, except as specifically authorized by statute, as required under a reserved right, or as conducted as an integral part of a program to maintain an historic scene. In all the parks where we have cattle, it is authorized by Congress."

Although the hands of NPS personnel may be tied to some degree by Congress, Helen Wagenvoord, NPCA's associate director of the Pacific region, says the agency has an impressive arsenal of laws at its disposal to counter some of the worst effects of grazing. These include the Organic Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act.

Over the past few years, the Park Service has made some impressive gains in eliminating grazing from some parks where it had been most entrenched.

"Where we have been working pretty diligently is trying to arrange situations where it is beneficial for the ranchers with grazing arrangements to phase out over time," says Reynolds. "Where we have had financial partners to help facilitate the transition, the success rate has been pretty high."

Reynolds cites the recent withdrawal of cattle from 46,000 acres in Great Basin in Nevada--although sheep grazing continues--after ranchers were compensated for their allotments. In January 2000, grazing also was phased out of the Cades Cove meadows in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee after 70 years. These actions, in the East and West, are considered potential models for remedying the ongoing conflict with cattle.

NPCA's Southwest Regional Director David Simon says the land use history of Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico demonstrates why intensive livestock grazing is incompatible with parks in the parched West. In arid environments, cattle have especially insidious effects because they reduce native grasses and their hooves break open the thin cryptogamic crust that anchors native plants and serves as a protective layer against wind and water erosion.

In 1879, 140 cattle were grazed in the entire state of New Mexico. Four years later, aided by the arrival of the railroad, which could ship animals to market, there were 1 million head, and a decade after that, millions more swarmed public lands including the landscapes of future parks.

"In Bandelier, the scars caused by cattle, sheep, and burro hooves are written deep into the land," Simon says. "Many believe the park is in intensive care, suffering from a combination of grazing, climate change, and fire suppression. The last burros were pulled out of Bandelier in the 1970s, and 20 years later the park is beginning to figure out how to grapple with all the problems," says Simon. "Overcoming the wounds is going to cost a lot of money, but who should be responsible for fixing it? It's like a Superfund site where nobody wants to pay the bill."

In response to public pressure, the Park Service has assigned Kathy Davis, a resource specialist based in southern Arizona, to draft a report on park grazing issues that could form the basis of a national management policy.

For tourists like Daniele Tiezzi, any reforms will not occur soon enough. He now realizes that the frontier mentality that shaped cowboy classics is not a fiction. In the "Wild West," including some of America's finest national parks, the jingle rings true: Cattle is king.

TODD WILKINSON lives in Bozeman, Montana, and is a frequent contributor to National Parks. He last wrote about the decline of the California sea otter population.

COPYRIGHT 2000 National Parks and Conservation Association