The U.S. Bureau of Land Management told scientists working on a $40 million study mapping ecological trends that they couldn’t look at the effects of grazing, an environmental group says.
The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed a complaint Wednesday saying the BLM study violated the Department of Interior’s new policy designed to limit political interference.
The complaint is the first major test of a policy that Barack Obama promised environmental groups in the 2008 presidential election.
Obama said his administration would emphasize science over political considerations, contrasting that approach with what critics said were Bush administration officials who handcuffed scientists and subverted science on public lands, wildlife and endangered species — including keeping sage grouse from being listed as an endangered species.
Earlier this year, the Interior Department, the BLM’s parent agency, adopted its first scientific-integrity policy prohibiting political interference with, or manipulation of, scientific work.
“This allegation will be reviewed under the standard procedures contained in (the department’s) scientific integrity policy,” Interior Department press secretary Adam Fetcher said Wednesday.
‘ANXIETY FROM STAKEHOLDERS’
The BLM’s Rapid Ecoregional Assessments, financed with stimulus money, are looking at the impacts of fire, invasive species, urban sprawl, climate change and even rock-collecting in each of the six main regions of the sagebrush West.
BLM managers told scientists at an August 2010 workshop to exclude cattle grazing because of “anxiety from stakeholders,” fear of litigation and lack of available data on grazing impacts, PEER said in its complaint.
“We will be laughed out of the room if we don’t use grazing,” said Tom Edwards, a Utah State University and U.S. Geological Survey ecologist reviewing the assessments, according to the minutes of the workshop. “If you have the other range of disturbances, you have to include grazing.”
Grazing on public lands is an especially sensitive topic, having pitted ranchers vs. environmentalists in Congress, state legislatures and the courts since the 1950s over the impacts to water and wildlife.
The assessments did ultimately include cattle grazing as an impact, along with grazing by other livestock and wild animals.
The problem is that after 76 years of managing livestock grazing on 157 million of its acres, the BLM still doesn’t have much data about its effects.
“We were surprised this data wasn’t available,” Edwards told the Statesman Wednesday.
Edwards, who is in charge of reviewing the Northern Plains ecoregional assessment, said he considers measuring the combined grazing impacts of all species scientifically valid. Edwards said, overall, the assessments are the best big-picture look at the ecosystems since the early 1990s.
But he acknowledged that the lack of data on grazing is a significant problem.
Because cattle move on and off public land, the BLM doesn’t count the number of cattle that graze on public land but rather how much grass they eat. In 2010, it counted 8.2 million animal-unit months (an AUM is the amount of feed necessary to feed one cow and her calf for one month).
Some estimate as many as 30 million cattle graze on BLM land sometime during the year. The agency does count wild horses that graze on its land — a total of 33,014, according to the BLM’s website.
SELECTIVE CRITERIA
Lumping all grazing together “is one of the screwiest things I have ever heard of,” said PEER Executive Director Jeff Ruch.
Even if it’s limited, the BLM has far more data on grazing than it does on other change agents — such as climate change or urban sprawl — that it did choose to follow in the assessments, Ruch said.
“Grazing is one of the few change agents within the agency’s mandate to manage,” he said, “suggesting that BLM only wants analysis on what it cannot control.”
Rocky Barker: 377-6484
