Governor Larry Rhoden, Senator Mike Rounds, and other tools of the ag-industrial complex tell us that farmers and ranchers are the true environmentalists. Just get rid of environmental reviews and regulations, and they’ll keep the land a green paradise, right?
In 2014, Congress ordered the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service to automatically renew grazing permits on public lands if they couldn’t complete environmental reviews on time. The public land permitted for grazing without environmental review has climbed significantly since then. How are those unsupervised true environmentalists doing at protecting the land?
On an allotment within Las Cienegas National Conservation Area, an expanse of desert grasslands and forested streams southeast of Tucson, the BLM lets up to 1,500 head of cattle graze across roughly 35,000 acres. These permits were recently reauthorized until 2035 using the exemption that allows environmental reviews to be skipped.
During a visit in late April, a grove of hearty cottonwoods stood against the afternoon sun, casting cool shadows over a narrow creek. This stretch of green sustains birds, frogs, snakes and ocelots. It’s also designated under federal law as critical habitat for five threatened or endangered species. Cattle are not allowed in the creekbed, but a thin barbed-wire fence meant to stop the animals lay crumpled in the dirt.
A native leopard frog broke the hot afternoon stillness as it leapt from the creek’s bank. Its launching pad was the hardened mud imprint of a cow hoof, and it landed with a plop in water fouled by cow feces and the partially submerged bones of a cow corpse. A half-dozen cattle crashed through the creek and up the steep embankment, tearing up plants that protected the soil from erosion and sending silt billowing into the water.
“Looks like a sewer,” Chris Bugbee, a wildlife ecologist with the environmental group the Center for Biological Diversity, remarked as he took in the destruction. “This one hurts. There is no excuse.”
…Over the past eight years, Bugbee and his team have annually surveyed grazing impacts on the banks of streams and rivers in the Southwest that are designated as critical habitat under the Endangered Species Act. Half of the 2,400 miles of streams they inspected “showed significant damage from livestock grazing,” according to their March report [Mark Olalde, Lucas Waldron, and Jimmy Tobias, “The Diminishing Oversight of Livestock Grazing on Public Lands,” Undark, 2025.12.09].
“True environmentalists” freed from regulation failing to protect the environment? How can that be?
Regulations generally don’t arise on whim. Regulations come about because we recognize that businesspeople sometimes struggle to put the long-term interests of the community and even of themselves above their scramble for short-term profits. The free market works for everybody only when we set and enforce rules that ensure ignorance and avarice don’t trample sustainability and the common good.
As of 2022 there were five vacant and two closed grazing allotments of 135 on the Black Hills National Forest because of violations. Cattle grazing on some 155 million acres leased on 21,000 allotments of the 245 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management in thirteen western states now outnumber horses thirty to one. Over 54 million of those acres have failed the BLM’s Land Health Assessment according to data released through the Freedom of Information Act to the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility or PEER. As of October, 2022 BLM has removed over 19,000 horses and burros from public land and holds over 64,000 in confinement although the data clearly show domestic and feral cattle or hogs are far more destructive.
Should I go on?