New federal rules for grazing on public lands face backlash

The Trump administration is looking to make changes to the federal rules overseeing grazing on public lands.

The comment period for the new rules ended in July, and The Show's next guest says the Bureau of Land Management got many thousands of comments. The agency is expected to respond to those comments at some point, and a lawsuit challenging them is possible.

Mark Olalde, environment reporter at ProPublica, has written about this, and joined The Show to talk more about it.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Mark, there’s a lot in these new rules, so what stands out to you as some of the most impactful changes that could be coming?

MARK OLALDE: Absolutely. Like you said, lots of things in the regs, but really two things stand out, I think, above everything else. The first is a move to really cut down on the instances and the types of ways in which the public can comment, can litigate, can really be involved in the approval process for grazing on public lands. So really just cutting the public in many ways out of overseeing livestock grazing.

And the other is ensuring that the maximum number of cattle, sheep, other livestock are on public lands at all times. Whether that’s putting more out there, incentivizing them more, or just making it more difficult for government rangeland managers to mandate a smaller number of animals on the land.

MARK BRODIE: What is bringing on these changes? Like, why do folks think they’re needed?

MARK OLALDE: Like everything these days, it’s political, of course. And, you know, Republicans have been trying to redo the BLM grazing regulations for several decades. The regs haven’t been fully rewritten since 1995. There was an attempt under the Bush administration that the courts threw out.

And there’s kind of this perceived victimization from the ranching industry that the 1995 regulations that are still in place kind of came out of a time of aggressive environmentalism of the late ’80s and early ’90s. And so they kind of see these regulations as being stacked against them and have been pushing for many, many years to kind of, I guess, in their view, restore balance.

MARK BRODIE: What about the current rules, or soon-to-be-done-away-with rules, do ranchers think are unfair?

MARK OLALDE: Of everything in the fight over public lands ranching, perhaps the biggest is the litigious fights between ranchers and a few select green groups over the ways that the Bureau of Land Management permits or renews or doesn’t renew grazing permits. And so a lot of this seems to be focused on cutting out green groups and their litigation, to kind of really get rid of what ranchers see as a nuisance there.

And I would say the other thing that’s happening here is we’re seeing the Trump administration really take aim at the idea of using grazing as a way of large-scale conservation. And so there is a change in these regulations that redefines grazing as needing to be quote, “production-oriented.” And depending on where you sit on this issue, you kind of see that as a major red flag that really, really tips the scale towards, you know, kind of who we would think of as a traditional rancher as opposed to conservation groups doing ranching, or tribes, Native American tribes doing ranching.

MARK BRODIE: Yeah, what do these new rules potentially mean for Native American tribes?

MARK OLALDE: One allowable use of public lands for grazing is bison, which can happen for a number of reasons. But there are a number of Native American tribes that graze bison on public lands for local ecological restoration, for food for the tribes, to protect and preserve cultural practices that go back many, many, many, many years.

And it might be difficult to define some of these as this quote “production-oriented” metric. And so tribes have a lot of concern about potentially being caught in the Trump administration’s kind of war on green groups, and potentially losing their permits, which then becomes really a sovereignty issue.

MARK BRODIE: Is there a concern among some of those environmental groups that all of this will lead, in addition to them having maybe less say in what happens, that it will lead to more overgrazing?

MARK OLALDE: I think that’s kind of always their concern when you pull back regulations on public lands. You know, if you look at the Bureau of Land Management stats, I mean, they do acknowledge that at least 38 million acres of land in the West has been degraded due to livestock grazing, and that’s with tens of millions of other acres that haven’t been studied recently. So the numbers are almost certainly higher.

So, you know, they have some footing to make that argument. And, you know, in Arizona specifically, my team in reporting on this over the past few years with ProPublica and High Country News, you know, we’ve toured grazing allotments in Arizona in desert ecosystems. And the riparian areas right down in the creeks and streambeds where so much of the biodiversity in Arizona is centered, those often have cattle in them, and those areas just really can’t support that many animals of that size.

So in certain ecosystems in particular, the argument that this could lead to more overgrazing and that could lead to more biodiversity harm, certainly carries some water.

MARK BRODIE: What is the Trump administration saying about all this?

MARK OLALDE: You know, the Trump administration didn’t answer our questions for this story as we sought comment on what certain definitions mean and those sorts of things. But, you know, they do talk about onerous regulations. They do talk about environmentally focused regulations from a different era.

And one of the things that both the administration as well as trade groups talk about is the need to allow more flexibility for positive reasons, right? The need to allow more grazing flexibility so management of the rangeland and the relationship between BLM range managers and ranchers can just be more fluid, can be more efficient, and can better protect the land.

So a lot of their argument also centers on kind of this idea of flexibility in ranching practices to be better stewards of the land.

MARK BRODIE: I mean, on the surface, it would seem like that would be kind of a tough thing to argue with, right? Like to have some amount of flexibility so if conditions change or if ranching situations change or the situation on the ground changes, that you have some flexibility to adjust to that.

MARK OLALDE: Absolutely. There certainly are pieces of regulation that have kind of locked certain things in place and have made it difficult to adapt and to change, especially in a time and place where climate change is very much changing the reality on the ground.

And I spoke to several BLM folks in reporting this article, and they pointed to — I asked them, "Hey, what are the good pieces of this?" And they pointed to the flexibility as certainly one of the good pieces.

Now, the question is, the BLM doesn’t have enough staff to oversee all the land that they have to. We have lots of proof of political interference on all sorts of individual kind of cases where the BLM has tried to enforce something and members of Congress have come in and said, "Hey, not this time."

So flexibility is great if it happens in good faith. Flexibility with political intervention, that just means less transparency for the public, is not so good. So, you know, we kind of need to see how it’s going to play out on the ground.

MARK BRODIE: Sure. Are ranchers generally happy with this? Like, does this address the concerns they’ve had for a few decades?

MARK OLALDE: Ranchers are absolutely happy. The Public Lands Council, one of their larger kind of industry groups, called this quote “a massive step forward.” So they’re very happy to see the Trump administration’s actions, at least specifically on these regulations.

MARK BRODIE: All right, that is Mark Olalde, environment reporter with ProPublica. Mark, thanks so much. I appreciate it.

MARK OLALDE: Of course, thanks for your interest.

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