The condition of a grazing allotment in southern
Wyoming is at the center of a dispute between the National Wildlife
Federation and the Bureau of Land Management.
The
wildlife group’s attorney, Tom Lustig, is protesting the agency’s
temporary extension of a grazing permit to rancher Wright
Dickenson. Lustig says the impact of 1,000 cows on the 227,000-acre
Pine Mountain Allotment is severe and has never been seriously
analyzed.
“BLM admits what was going on and how
discouraged the agency was,” Lustig says. “Back in the early 1990s,
BLM was saying, “This place is a mess.” They made some efforts to
change the management but couldn’t get the permittee to agree and
lacked the backbone to do it themselves.”
In one
of a series of seesawing administrative decisions this spring, BLM
officials in Rock Springs, Wyo., told Dickenson that his 10-year
grazing lease could not be extended when it ended May 1. Cows were
immediately ordered off. Then on May 5, the BLM reversed itself and
proposed an extension of grazing privileges that would last until
next March. After unsuccessfully protesting that plan, Lustig said
he is considering filing suit in federal
court.
In his protest, Lustig argued that the
rancher had refused to cooperate with the agency. According to
Lustig, Wright Dickenson, at a meeting in 1994, told the BLM: “We
can work together, but if you (the BLM) just want to regulate, it
won’t work. Some areas aren’t pretty, and we’re not proud of them.
But we’re not going to lay down and just let you run over us. We’ve
got a stubborn streak a mile long.”
BLM
documents show that in 1997, agency officials allowed Dickenson to
hire his own range consultant – Ranges West Consulting of Idaho –
to draw up an allotment management plan for BLM
approval.
Lustig blasts the resulting 1998 plan
as “little more than facade,” prepared by a private consultant to
tell the rancher what he is “willing to accept.”
In issuing the 10-month temporary permit to
Dickenson, BLM legal experts cited the federal Administrative
Procedures Act. It provides that when a licensee “has made timely
and sufficient application for a renewal in accordance with agency
rules, a license with reference to an activity of a continuing
nature does not expire until the application has been finally
determined by the agency.”
If Lustig objects to
the permit in federal court, he says he will cite the
precedent-setting Comb Wash, Utah, decision (HCN, 1/24/94). In that
case, Lustig said, the Interior Board of Land Appeals affirmed that
“you have to focus on site-specific impacts when you put cows on
public land.” Lustig says that means “it gets down to a spring or a
little canyon that is important to people and wildlife.”
A Rock Springs, Wyo., resident, Craig Thompson,
who owns a cabin on five acres within the Pine Mountain allotment,
says for years he has talked to the BLM about problems resulting
from overgrazing. “I’m the shrill peasant,” he
says.
“It’s been awfully discouraging,” he adds,
“because land stewards aren’t doing their job. Everyone resents my
involvement except the range scientists on the ground, which gives
me some encouragement … When you have scientifically documented
evidence of resource damage, there has to be a plan to clean it
up.”
T. Wright Dickenson, Wright Dickenson’s son
and a Moffat County, Colo., commissioner, said his family will have
no comment on its management of the public land or the legal
battles it faces. BLM officials also declined to
comment.
* Katharine
Collins
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Rancher stonewalls an agency.
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