The Bureau of Land Management’s draft Rock Springs Resource Management Plan is long on rules and full of government overreach but short on the type of dialog, collaboration and landscape-level vision that make for a viable regulatory scheme. That’s a real shame because, approached differently, it has the opportunity to be a meaningful win-win for conservation and ranching interests alike.
Opinion
Take, for example, the RMP’s approach to wildlife migration corridors. As a lifelong Wyoming rancher, I know from experience that designated migration corridors present both risks and opportunities for landowners. The Rock Springs RMP, however, doesn’t offer much in the way of reward for landowners. It is, instead, unfortunately heavy on prescription and light on flexibility. This is not a good combination.
The BLM cannot effectively protect or maintain functional corridors without the full participation of landowners because most, if not all, of the routes cross a mosaic of public and private lands. There is little use for a partial corridor. In the same sense, there is little room for a partial grazing permit. Both need an intact and functioning system to thrive and that takes cooperation, collaboration and execution. It’s not enough to mandate what happens on one side of the fence and hope for the best on the other. It’s likewise inadequate to say there is a plan and now the problem is solved, or to say grazing is still a permitted use and call it complete.
Much like a migration corridor, a ranch occupies a place on the landscape that is a collection of private and state and federal property. A fragmented landscape is no more a ranch than it is a corridor. The success of both ranch and corridor is dependent on a functioning landscape. This landscape scale can be measured and managed at an allotment level with specific actions, but those actions must be mutually beneficial to be successful. Yet, the Rock Springs RMP fails to recognize the role of landowners in accomplishing landscape-level aims or engage with ranchers in a mutually beneficial way.
Corridors can be and are a catalyst for action. Many ranches have big game corridors and parturition areas for some species or other. The level heads in the equation embrace change in the form of new and improved wildlife-friendly fences that contain livestock but let wildlife move freely and safely. The outliers are oblivious to the progress that has been made regarding how landowners make decisions and what is at stake at a larger landscape or corridor level.
Our ranch has been down the corridor road with mule deer and the changes we have made to the fences are a solid plus for our internal cattle management and certainly for the wildlife that occupies the same space. Next up is an antelope corridor and all indications are it will be manageable as well, provided we retain the flexibility needed to modify ranch operations in conjunction with the BLM permit.
Our ranch exists in 14 distinct parcels. We use all of the pieces as one to create a functional operation with summer and winter components. For us, the glue that holds the various pieces together under one form of common management with the federal government is the grazing permit. Our cattle spend the winter south of Lander and in May, after calving season, will make the annual trek to South Pass. Come late fall we’ll trail the cattle back down the highway to Lander and the cycle will start again.
Flexibility, cooperation, and mutual benefit are what will make the corridors resilient. The BLM’s Rock Springs plan, however, makes that difficult, if not impossible with its rigid prescriptiveness. From minutiae such as where salt can or cannot be placed, to utilization levels that will create conflict from the get-go, the Rock Springs plan needs some adjustment.
And corridors are just one example of the emerging communication and dialog between ranching interests and conservation interests. It would be unfortunate if the progress around corridors and larger-scale conservation activities was undermined by an uninformed plan.
Read the draft plan and comment on it through the BLM’s Rock Springs RMP Revision page. Public comment closes Wednesday, Jan. 17.
I agree totally with this article. BLM does not ever seem to recognize the need for one on one collaboration to accomplish mutual objectives. Wildlife and livestock can easily coexist and actually livestock can be used to improve conditions and diversity on lands. We should be approaching grazing management with this in mind
Great article that left out a huge on going and now devasting consequences of the rock springs under the table deals with blm, the wild horses. Why? The illegal and unethical deal is to zero out all wild horses so more grazing permits can be issued. Do y’all still have an overpopulation of elk and antelope due to them have no natural predators thanks to the grey wolf trophy hunts. Those same predators help keep wild horse numbers in check. Y’all want to micro manage every species to allow for more grazing permits, but what happens when you start removing whole species from ecosystems? It collapses on itself, even the holistic range management group knows this. I live at the foothills of huge national park and we are dealing with the fall out of just such short sighted, greed motivated moves. It doesn’t work, end of story. Then, we the tax payers, donate against our will to the billions of dollars to fix just such moves thank you blm
Until these proposed Landscape Scale conservation plans start removing a couple of million miles of barbed wire fences across the entire American West , not much will change for the positive but the fragmentation into the negative would worsen.
I’m not kidding when I say a million miles of fence need to go away. Then we start redrawing the maps to remove checkerboarding, inholdings, arbitrary and capricious boundary lines, federal-state-private territorial imperatives, ad absurdum.
Discuss.
Thank you Jim, your view represents most landowner views on this, and I hope conservation-minded people will take it to heart.
The more I read, the more worried I get and I live in Michigan. We may not have (currently) the same struggles you face but, the overreach of the Federal Gov’t knows no bounds. I don’t know what previous administrations did (or didn’t do) but the pace of articles, written by generational farming families, has certainly caught my attention and I discuss this with my friends. This type of issue will be coming to all of our neighborhoods if we all don’t assist you in your stand. Please let me know what I can do to assist in your struggle. Overreach for certain!
I appreciate the implied willingness on the part of this landowner to cooperate when there are mutually beneficial actions that can be taken by private landowners and public land managers. However, the very first sentence claims “government overreach.” The RMP is for public land. How can a plan put forth by the government agency responsible for managing the public land be considered overreach?
Good P.O.V. from a private landowner. Migration corridors will not work without private and government cooperation.
Thanks.
Appreciate the perspective, but it’s a bit unfair to lay a lack of cooperation between BLM and any local landowners at the feet of the Rock Springs RMP. Many landowners in Wyoming do not wish to partner with BLM on conservation measures and that is 100% their right as private landowners. Please also remember, migration corridors in Wyoming are designated by the State of Wyoming not the BLM.
If any landowner wishes to partner with the Bureau on a conservation effort to improve the landscape, the agency is ready to work with you. Just contact your local field office to start that conversation.
The work being done at Muddy Creek (project #17 in the below link) within the Rawlins Field Office is a great example of a private landowner, the BLM, conservation districts, and other state and local partners working together on a landscape scale. The BLM has invested $10 million in this project.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/6966af5d6f584f8b80f102d391671a3f
Thank you Mr. Hellyer for pointing out that migration corridors often transect private and public land. Certainly cooperation is needed to manage those corridors.
But as a wildlife advocate, I am frustrated that the governor’s executive order to protect corridors is moving much too slow. Given the slowness of the pace, I am in favor of BLM taking reasonable measures to protect the corridors on BLM land.
Just as BLM should not be able to tell you how to manage your land, you should not be able to tell BLM how to manage their land. If they want to prescribe the location of salt blocks, and have a good reason for it, that is their right and I support it.
I encourage people to comment on the BLM resource plan in favor of protecting wildlife and migration corridors. If some folks want a more collaborative process, they should also contact the governor and tell him to get moving on state driven corridor designations.
Not untill the federal government gives control back to the ranchers and farmers being the better caretakers of conservation to heal the land . A close qote of Edward Abbyy Desert Solitaire .
Well Mr. DeGroot, you are half right. The BLM cannot tell Mr. Helluer how to manage his land. On the other hand as an American citizen Mr. Hellyer has every right to give his opinion on how the BLM should manage OUR land. That was another mistake you made, it is not the BLM’s land it is our land they we as American citizens charge them to manage based on multiple use.
TOTALLY AGREE: Fragmented land ownership requires the various owners of both the surface estate and the mineral estate to communicate and cooperate on many natural resource issues. Wyoming’s ranchers must be an equal partner on any natural resource related proposal since they own some, but not all, of the surface estate and sometimes the mineral estate in the affected area. Wildlife migration corridors are just one of the potential usages of the fragmented land – other uses include pipelines crossing fragmented land, high voltage electrical transmission lines, access roads to MOG ( mineral, oil and gas ) production sites, access to mines such as coal and bentonite, etc. All of these types of development require cooperation with the affected surface owners. There is a difference though, the private land owners must be paid for surface disturbance and for permanent easements across their private surface – for pipelines, reimbursement of approximately $50,000 per mile is fairly normal. The reason being that an easement is normally a perpetual encumbrance on the private surface estate – not a legal matter to be taken lightly.
An example of the lack of cooperation which ranchers sometimes encounter is the matter of cleaning accumulated silt out of older stock dams on BLM surface – should be normal maintenance every 20-25 years – however, ranchers are usually denied access for their backhoes and small draglines to clean the reservoirs. Permission should be easily obtained with a simple phone call to the BLM’s District Office but that isn’t the way it works. Ranchers normally have to wait 5-15 years for the go ahead – and these are stock dams frequented by wildlife. Cooperation is a must in fragmented land of Wyoming.
And then, there are the wildlife migration corridors – cooperation with owners of the private surface estate must be included in all decision making – and, the private surface estate owners, should be compensated especially for perpetual wildlife migration corridors that become an encumbrance on their land – realizing that, the easements will probably take the form of conservation easements which restrict future developments such as subdivisions. That’s a big decision for private surface estate owners and requires significant monetary compensation.
RANCHERS ARE KEY PLAYERS AMONG THE VARIOUS PARTNERS AND HAVE A TRUE VESTED INTEREST VIA SURFACE OWNERSHIP IN FRAGMENTED LAND OWNERSHIP SITUATIONS.
Thank you for an excellent letter. Both animals and humans benefit from the farming/ranching families who produce our food. We would have huge problems surviving without them… if we could even. Wildlife would have a much harder time surviving without them also.