BLM Grazing Permits Get a ‘Human Dimension’

A federal agency in New Mexico has agreed to look beyond damaged range land--to the nearby ranch house, the local feed store, even the county courthouse--when it makes decisions about livestock grazing.

New Mexico is the only state in the West with a “human dimension” provision in its grazing standards, which are awaiting approval by U. S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.

The provision says the Bureau of Land Management will consider economic, social and cultural factors when making decisions about grazing permits on the 13.5 million acres of public lands it oversees in the state.

Although it’s not clear just how the broadly worded “Sustainable Communities and Human Dimension Standard” would be implemented, it already has ranchers and government officials touting its virtues--and environmentalists in a tizzy.

“I think we’ve kind of set the pace, set the tone, for listening to our communities--and that’s not just ranchers,” said Michelle Chavez, BLM state director, who approved the standards. “My sense is, the more information we have about the impact of our decisions, the better decisions we can make.”

Environmentalists fear that the standards will encourage the federal agency to sacrifice range land improvements to ranchers’ interests--for example, by not reducing the cattle in a problem area if the permittee pleads economic hardship.

The provision “runs completely contrary to the intent of range land reform,” said Cathy Carlson, grasslands specialist for the National Wildlife Federation.

“It’s not the job of the BLM to try and protect the economic interests of one user group on the public lands,” said Carlson, who is based in Boulder, Colo.

The new standards--agreed to last month by the BLM and the state over environmentalists’ protests--mark some muscle-flexing by state government.

Conservative Lt. Gov. Walter Bradley, a states’ rights advocate, took a strong role in developing the grazing -management guidelines. His office chaired the 15-member Resource Advisory Council that came up with them.

Unlike other Western states, New Mexico took a “joint lead” with the BLM--an approach allowed under federal law--in the long process of analyzing various proposals for the standards.

Bradley says New Mexico will do the same thing with other agencies on other environmental issues.

“No state can any longer sit back and allow federal agencies to just dictate,” said Bradley, who is Republican Gov. Gary Johnson’s point man on environmental policy. “We’re at the very tip of this iceberg.”

Bradley and nine counties that participated in the process pushed for even stronger human dimension language than ended up in the final recommendation.

They say that when ranchers suffer economic harm, it destabilizes families, hurts small businesses in rural communities and cuts into counties’ tax bases.

Bradley says the new standard will force the BLM to look at a variety of alternatives as it grapples with how to “protect the land but still keep the rancher in business, so we can have the economic growth.”

Chaves County rancher Bud Eppers agrees. Determining that a rancher doesn’t have the money to put up $50,000 worth of fencing, he says, could encourage the BLM to find other sources of funding.

“Whatever his economic conditions are, then the BLM can put that into their planning process,” said Eppers, president of the New Mexico Public Lands Council. “I just think ours is a superior way of approaching the problem.”

Environmentalists contend that the new standards are too vague.

“No one can figure out whether they’re meaningful or implementable,” said John Horning, of Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians. “Bradley’s efforts have won out. They’ve so watered down the standards that they’re functionally meaningless.”

New Mexico is the last of 11 Western states to adopt grazing management guidelines, which Babbitt ordered six years ago as part of his range land reform initiative. States could use standards developed at the federal level or come up with their own.

California is the only other state still awaiting approval of its standards, which were submitted to the Interior Department nine months ago.

Other Western states also considered some sort of human dimension language, but none inserted it into their standards.

“I will venture to say that just about all Resource Advisory Councils and state [BLM] directors discussed that particular option,” said Buddy Arvizo, a senior range land management specialist who recently moved to Denver from the agency’s Washington, D.C., headquarters.

Arvizo was working in Wyoming when that state developed its guidelines, finishing in 1997. He remembers the questions that arose about how such a standard could be measured or implemented.

“I think New Mexico was the one state that was bold enough to . . . describe and define it,” he said.

In Colorado, the three panels that worked on standards discussed human dimension language, agreeing on its importance but not on its practical application, recalled Mark Stiles.

“They found out that it really got muddy quickly. . . . We just couldn’t find a way to quite make it fit,” said Stiles, the BLM’s southwest center manager in Colorado, based in Montrose.

Although no inventory has been done, the BLM estimates that public range land on about 20% of New Mexico ranches may not meet the new standards--goals, really--for the health of soils, vegetation and stream-side areas.

John W. Whitney, the BLM’s leader for the standards project in New Mexico, says the human dimension language will prompt the BLM to seek the input of state agencies, county governments, academic types, environmentalists and ranchers when deciding what to do to improve those lands.

“This is just a way to get more of a balanced approach,” he said.