This is the second of a two-part Public Lands Blog post. Part 1 examined the specifics of legislation that is an existential threat to more than four million acres of federal public lands in Oregon’s Malheur County. Part 2 provides backstory and analysis pertaining to the legislation.
Figure 1. The Wyden bill fails to protect many striking, gorgeous, and unique geologic features in Malheur County, including the Pillars of Rome. Source: Gary Halvorson, Oregon Archives.
In case you’ve forgotten from Part 1, malheur means adversity, misfortunate, and/or tragedy, and I believe Senator Ron Wyden’s proposed Malheur Community Empowerment for the Owyhee Act (S.2828) can indeed be characterized as such. Here I shine a light on the 800-pound bovine in the room as I lay out the many facets of why I see the bill as a misfortune and a tragedy.
S.2828 Cowtows to Public Lands Ranchers
In Malheur Count, the old guard power elite worships (cowtows to) public lands ranchers even though they take up a lot of space but contribute little to the county economy. All agriculture in Malheur County accounted for only 3.4 percent of the county's labor income in 2017, and federal livestock grazing accounted for only a hundredth of this, or 0.034 percent of total labor income in Malheur County. Federal farm subsidies in 2017 to Malheur County farmers were $13,529,740 (aka $0.014 billion).
S.2828 cowtows to local public lands ranchers, and the bill’s supporters cowtow to Senator Wyden. From the senator’s press release:
“Last winter OBSC asked Senator Wyden to lead a process that would result in legislation that focused on land health in Malheur County,” Owyhee Basin Stewardship Council [Coalition] Chair Steve Russell said. “We hoped for resolution of land designations and a unique BLM management model that protects grazing and other traditional land uses while providing for local guidance. We also hoped to create economic opportunities for Malheur County. OBSC spent many hours negotiating the details of this bill. The final result accomplishes what we set out to do and we sincerely appreciate the dedication of everyone involved. We especially appreciate the time and dedication Senator Wyden and his staff have given to develop this legislation which is a win-win.”
“Thanks to Senator Wyden’s leadership, we now have a breakthrough proposal to protect Oregon’s Owyhee Canyonlands while supporting local communities over the long term,” Oregon Natural Desert Association Executive Director Ryan Houston said. “It’s remarkable to see how Senator Wyden’s collaborative process enabled us to make so much progress in such a short period of time. The introduction of this legislation to preserve a wild Owyhee is a tremendously exciting milestone and we look forward to the next steps.”
“After decades of conflict, Senator Wyden’s leadership has brought together ranchers, conservationists and the Burns Paiute Tribe to craft a conservation vision for the Owyhee River canyon country and the millions of acres of public land in southeastern Oregon,” David Moryc, of American Rivers, said. “We look forward to working with the senator to improve protections in the bill for the rivers and springs that are the lifeblood of this incredible landscape.”
Is the bill really a praiseworthy “conservation vision for the Owyhee River canyon country”? Decide for yourself. At least American Rivers “looks forward” to “improv[ing] protections in the bill.”
Figure 2. Most of Malheur County is on Mountain time. Oregonians traveling there need to set their watch ahead one hour and their calendar back a half-century.
The Bill Continues to Bail Out Welfare Ranchers
Most of the 4.6 million acres of federal public lands in Malheur County are grazed by domestic livestock at the expense of native wildlife. The Malheur Field Office of the BLM’s Vale District has issued grazing permits authorizing 419,874 animal unit months (AUMs, the amount of forage that will sustain one cow and one calf for one month) of livestock use—enough forage for 34,989.5 (but who’s counting?) cows. While the average size of the 167 BLM grazing permits in Malheur County is 2,514 AUMs, 7 of these grazing permits allow AUMs in the low five figures—an extraordinarily large number for such a permit.
It takes an average of 132 acres of federal public lands in Malheur County to keep alive one average cow and calf for one year. Perhaps it doesn’t sound like much, but a cattle operation measured in acres per cow rather than cows per acre is a marginal economic operation and disproportionately harmful to native wildlife. Any forage that goes through a domestic bovine is lost to deer, elk, pronghorn, bighorn sheep, sage grouse, and butterflies. Complicating matters further, in the last two decades, livestock weights (and appetites) have increased by nearly one fifth. There has been no corresponding reduction in the grazing pressure on federal public lands.
In 2012, 163,486 cattle and calves called Malheur County home. Assuming the same number of livestock today, only 21 percent of the livestock forage in Malheur County is on federal public lands. In other words, must of the forage is on the more productive, generally lower-elevation, and deeper-soil private lands. The BLM receives $1.35/AUM from ranchers who graze their livestock on federal public lands. (It costs more to feed a house cat than a 1,390-pound cow.) Other Oregon ranchers paid an average of $17.50/AUM in 2018 for non-irrigated private forage.
In the 1960s, a little-known welfare program of President Johnson’s Great Society called the Vale Project was undertaken in response to severe overgrazing of public lands in Malheur County. Millions of dollars (back when a million dollars was a lot of money) were spent on installing water pipelines and troughs, planting hundreds of thousands of acres of nonnative crested wheatgrass monocultures on the public lands, and adding thousands of miles of fences and hundreds of reservoirs—all of which are of benefit only to domestic livestock.
Biologist Katie Fite, the public lands director at Wildlands Defense, has published “A Cattle Industry and Local Control Power Grab: Inside the Malheur Owyhee Public Lands Bill” in CounterPunch. She calls S.2828 “an astonishingly awful public lands and wilderness bill” and goes on to say:
It is aimed at enriching ranchers and other local interests. It is the Vale Project reborn from the weed wastelands and wildlife deserts that were generated by that boondoggle project decades ago. The Vale Project was a massive 1960s–1980s federal bailout of these very same Malheur County welfare ranchers. They had rapaciously depleted the “range” and were facing major grazing cuts. Now they’ve done it again. Cheatgrass, medusahead and other weeds caused by their cattle are overrunning public lands and desertification is growing.
Ecologist and writer George Wuerthner writes in “Oregon Owyhee Wilderness Legislation Benefits Ranchers,” published in The Wildlife News:
Livestock production is the single greatest source of species endangerment of species in the West including numerous fish, amphibians, birds and mammals, and the well known sage grouse.
Livestock is the reason that the majority of riparian areas (green areas along waterway) are impaired and not functioning. These riparian areas are used by 70-80% of all wildlife species at some time in their life cycle, so their loss or degradation has serious ecological consequences.
Livestock is the greatest source of water pollution on federal lands.
Livestock grazing is the single biggest factor in the spread of weeds, and the establishment of cheatgrass, an exotic annual that is prone to fires.
Livestock is the reason we are killing native wildlife like coyotes and wolves—on public lands.
Livestock hay production is the reason many rivers are annually dewatered much to the detriment of our fisheries and aquatic ecosystem.
There is compelling scientific evidence to back up each and every one of Wuerthner’s statements.
Because of past horrendous overgrazing, the BLM “suspended” 39,598 AUMs of livestock grazing. S.2828 provides that as more forage results from the restoration of “ecological health,” these AUMs will again become available. Restoring these suspended AUMs would be the full-time equivalent of adding 3,300 cows and 3,300 calves on federal public lands.
The Western Watersheds Project has this to say about the bill in “Proposed Malheur Legislation Sacrifices Land Health, Elevates Livestock Above Other Land Uses”:
Only 6% public land in the BLM Vale Resource Area meets basic land health standards, while 94% of the BLM acres assessed are failing to meet standards because of current livestock grazing practices. What’s more, BLM has never even checked more than 60% of grazing leases in the area to see if they were meeting or failing land health standards. The proposed legislation, however, would put the livestock industry squarely at the center of land management decisions by creating a rancher-dominated advisory council to develop and implement public lands policy.
The Bill Would Worsen the Spread of Troublesome Species
Under the guise of restoring land health in Malheur County, the bill would actually worsen the spread of troublesome species: nonnative grasses and native western juniper.
Nonnative Grasses
A major reason local ranching interests favor S.2828 is that it promises to address a major threat to their operations: the invasive species—cheatgrass, medusahead, and ventenata—that are outcompeting the native bunchgrasses and other native species, which their bovines prefer. It promises to do this by allowing increases in livestock grazing in the early spring, purportedly to cow-bomb the exotics with early grazing.
Ranchers believe—with all their heart—that livestock grazing can be used to fight nonnative species invasions. They want to turn their cows out earlier on the public lands so the cows will eat cheatgrass, which is only palatable for a short time in the spring. (Then their cows, already there, can move on to again eating the native forage.)
Belief is not evidence. However, it is very difficult get someone to understand something when their profits, wages, lifestyle, election, and/or sex life depend on their not understanding something.
Nonetheless, the major cause of the spread of these invasive species is livestock themselves.
• Livestock prefer to eat native species, weakening the ability of these species to resist displacement by exotic species.
• Livestock transfer the seeds of exotic species in their coats and feces.
• Livestock trample and destroy the native biological crusts that cover soil in arid environments, facilitating the establishment of invasive species.
To paraphrase that great pseudo-cowboy Ronald Reagan, “Livestock is not the solution to our problem, livestock is the problem.” For a snark-free analysis of this cheatgrass-and-bovines summary (chock full of scientific citations), see “Livestock Grazing Exacerbates Rather Than Reduces the Invasion of Alien Cheatgrass.”
If you don’t want to go deep, here is the latest scientific paper on the subject: “Fire, Livestock Grazing, Topography, and Precipitation Affect Occurrence and Prevalence of Cheatgrass (Bromus tectorum) in the Central Great Basin, USA,” published in the journal Biological Invasions. Here is the last sentence of the abstract:
Our novel time-series data and results indicate that grazing corresponds with increased cheatgrass occurrence and prevalence regardless of variation in climate, topography, or community composition, and provide no support for the notion that contemporary grazing regimes or grazing in conjunction with fire can suppress cheatgrass.
There is belief, and then there is science.
Rather than advocating for this science-free Malheur County legislation, Senator Wyden could do more for the cow-bombed deserts and grasslands of southeast Oregon by cosponsoring S.2384, the Botanical Sciences and Native Plant Materials Research, Restoration, and Promotion Act, proposed by Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI). The bill would, among other things, require land management agencies to give preference to “locally adapted plant materials of native plant species” in land management and restoration activities. Senator Merkley has cosponsored.
Native Western Juniper
Western juniper, a native species, is spreading rapidly in the Owyhee country. Ranchers, and most important the BLM, make no distinction between natural (and generally old!) stands and individuals and the younger specimens invading the Sagebrush Sea. S.2828 would result in whole lot of juniper eradication, including very old-growth trees.
The primary cause of the spread of younger specimens is livestock grazing. The expansion began in the 1860s when livestock first arrived and ate the grass that carried periodic ground fires that burned the juniper seedlings before they could become established. Now the grazing is coming back to haunt livestock ranchers as large portions of their “range” are being converted to western juniper woodlands, which are not useful for livestock grazing. More important, the unnatural spread of western juniper is creating new perches for predators of greater sage-grouse, thereby causing the grouse to not use the sagebrush steppe.
The rancher solution is to destroy the juniper, often under the guise of helping greater sage-grouse but really to help themselves and their livestock.
I’m actually in favor of limiting the spread of western juniper beyond its natural range. (See “Managing Western Juniper to Restore Sagebrush Steppe and Quaking Aspen Stands.”) The natural range of western juniper is generally limited to rocky areas along rims and cliffs and in sand-dominated “soils” that naturally prevent fire from reaching western juniper trees. The truly magnificent old-growth specimens that occur in this natural range should not be destroyed.
Figure 3. Succor Creek State Park is arguably Oregon’s least known, and therefore least appreciated, state park. Source: Gary Halvorson, Oregon Archives.
The Bill Does Not Address Real Conservation Needs
As striking as what S.2828 does have is what it does not have, including but not limited to
• a provision facilitating voluntary retirement of federal grazing permits, something Senator Wyden and ONDA have long and successfully championed elsewhere;
• an overarching national conservation area or national recreation area designation, something Senator Wyden has championed elsewhere and has provided in skeletal form in earlier legislation;
• a voiding of the leases for oil and gas exploitation (which will further the climate emergency that is an existential threat to the atmosphere that we have long known and loved) of 172,259 acres of BLM land in Malheur County, which I believe are the only acres of federal public land leased to oil and gas interests in the state of Oregon;
• a permanent mineral withdrawal for all areas of critical environmental concern;
• an abundance of designated wilderness, especially in relation to giving up interim protection for other de facto wilderness lands; and
• an abundance of designated wild and scenic rivers.
During the last year of the Obama administration, there was quite a campaign to establish a national monument in Oregon’s Owyhee Canyonlands. ONDA, Pew, and other interests (including outdoor recreation businesses) busted their collective butts, but to no avail. Under normal circumstances, conservation interests would have been successful. However, national monument opponents were aided by the fact that Malheur County rhymes with Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.
The winter 2016 occupation of the Malheur refuge in Harney County by radical anti-government anti-public lands crazies (see Public Lands Blog #21) led by the infamous Bundy Gang (PLB #82, #83, #84, and #85) was far from the Obama administration’s finest hour. The occupation went on far too long and was aided and abetted by incompetent and timid leadership in the Obama administration. This leadership had no stomach for establishing an Owyhee Canyonlands National Monument in Malheur County even though the Malheur refuge isn’t in that county but in the one adjacent. (From inside the Beltway, it looks like the same little dot on the public lands map.)
S.2828 does nothing to revisit the question of a national monument in the Owyhee Canyonlands, a question that deserves to be revisited. This would be a true—in the words of ONDA—“breakthrough proposal to protect Oregon’s Owyhee Canyonlands.”
The Bill Would Throw Other Laws Under the Bus
Tellingly, the legislation provides that the BLM “shall ensure that each programmatic environmental impact statement . . . takes consideration of, and is consistent with” statutes pertaining to archeological resource protection, Native American grave protection, national historic preservation, and an executive order pertaining to Indian sacred sites. Not included in this list are laws pertaining to endangered species, clean air, clean water, etcetera.
While S.2828 does not statutorily amend the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), it nonetheless eviscerates NEPA, as the bill would disembowel NEPA’s implementing regulations, the heart and guts (and soul) of the act. One of the four statutory pillars of open government, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, would not apply here. The Wilderness Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act would be thrown under the bus.
Was anyone paying attention?
The Bill Would Likely Never Be Fully Funded
In my estimation, this legislation is a cruel hoax to anyone who is supporting it because the money that will supposedly rain down from Washington, DC, will very likely never arrive in full. Littered throughout the bill are multi-million-dollar authorizations for appropriations to carry out the aggressive legislative directive. In all, $1,744,000,000 (let’s just say $1.744 billion). The $1.744 billion authorized would actually need to be appropriated to be spent. This would not be coming out of any dedicated pool of federal money but out of the cash flow of the treasury of a nation that is hopelessly in debt and might have other priorities than the fortunes of a couple hundred ranchers in a county that contains 0.01 percent of the current US population.
In the convention of Acts of Congress, an “authorizing bill” authorizes money to be spent by Congress, but the money isn’t actually made available from the federal treasury to spend unless it is included in an “appropriations bill” that becomes law. I don’t think anyone has ever added up the dollar amount, but the gap between what Congress has authorized and what Congress has actually appropriated is massive. Authorizing money is politically easy, while appropriating money is politically difficult—and often ends up taking decades if it ever happens at all.
Here are a few relevant examples.
In 1986, Congress enacted the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act, which authorized, in total, $74.8 million (aka $0.0748 billion). According to the Friends of the Columbia River Gorge, a third of a century later, the authorized amounts have mostly been appropriated. In some cases, more money has been appropriated than was ever authorized, evidence of the congressional disconnect between fancifully authorizing and actually appropriating money. The Columbia Gorge legislation was a favorite of then Senator Mark Hatfield (R-OR), who had to work mightily to get any funds, even though he was on the Senate Appropriations Committee and was its chair for several years.
In 2000, Congress enacted the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protection Act, which authorized a total of $30 million dollars ($25 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund for land acquisition and $5 million for a Western Juniper Management Area). Most of the $0.03 billion of authorized funds for Steens has yet to be appropriated and is not likely to be, if nearly two decades of history is any guide.
The Steens bill is somewhat analogous to the Malheur bill in that both were/are grand bargains brokered by Senator Wyden, bringing together conservation and cattle interests. The Steens bill is by far and away a better bill for public lands conservation. (For the record, I was one of two conservation negotiators on the Steens bill, so my opinion is not objective on this point. However, I’m happy to debate anyone anytime anywhere on just how good the Steens bill was and how bad this Malheur bill is.)
In 2008, a group of special interests agreed to the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, which was introduced as legislation in Congress. The KBRA bill authorized an additional funding of $40 million per year in perpetuity. This grand bargain rested on the fact that much larger sums of money were already being regularly appropriated to be diverted to the KBRA. The only thing harder than appropriating money in Congress is ending or diverting existing appropriations. The KBRA bill failed for several reasons, but one of the major reasons was the price tag of $40 million per year (or $0.04 billion per year).
Let’s put the $1.744 billion promised in the Malheur bill into some additional perspective.
A new bridge over the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver is estimated to cost $3.4 billion. In 2013 the Washington legislature refused to match Oregon’s commitment of $0.45 billion ($450 million). The feds were to be good for the remaining $2.5 billion, money that would very likely be available because it would come from a pot of congressional money regularly refilled by federal fuel taxes. The 2017 population of Clackamas, Columbia, Multnomah, Washington, and Yamhill Counties in Oregon, and Clark and Skamania Counties in Washington was 2.7 million. (Alas, it has grown since then and is approaching 3 million.) The population of Malheur County in 2018 was 31,925 (or in similar units, 0.03 million people), a decline of about 1 percent from its peak population in 2000. Resurfacing the Oregon side of the I-84 bridge across the Snake River at Ontario is costing ~$2.3 million, again from money that comes from dedicated fuel taxes.
In 1928 Congress spent $18 million for the entire Owyhee “Reclamation” Project (one third of which was for the dam itself). Adjusted for inflation, that would be $267 million ($0.267 billion) in today’s dollars. S.2828 authorizes Congress to spend on propping up a minor local industry nearly seven times what it spent on the entire irrigation regime that defines Malheur County. (Before the completion of Owyhee Dam, Pacific salmon used to return to Nevada to spawn.)
Figure 3. The US Bureau of Reclamation’s Owyhee Reservoir has the largest ecological and hydrological footprint in Malheur County. Source: Gary Halvorson, Oregon Archives.
The assessed value of all the private real property taxed in Malheur County is $2.1 billion. The total personal income of everyone in Malheur County in 2017 was $943.6 million ($0.9 billion).
Figure 4. The water comes from the Owyhee Reservoir. Intensive row agriculture on relatively few acres is far more economically significant in Malheur County than extensive livestock grazing across most of the landscape. Source: Gary Halvorson, Oregon Archives.
As of last October, the annual federal deficit (spending in excess of taxes) was $134 billion, and the expected federal debt (accumulated deficits) in 2020 is projected at $1,008 billion (aka $1.008 trillion). While the $1.744 billion authorized in the Malheur bill would be spread out over eleven years, annually it would claim 0.12 percent of the current federal deficit.
Senator Jeff Merkley is a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He’s in for quite a lift to fulfill the promise in the Malheur bill that he cosponsored. Even if Merkley used every ounce of his political capital to fund the Malheur bill, he would in all likelihood be unsuccessful. If he were fully successful, he would have to be fully successful in each of the eleven annual appropriations cycles (assuming he is in office that long). By the way, Senator Merkley has never won in Malheur County, but even if he ever did, it would not likely make any statistical difference in his bid for re-election.
If the money were fully appropriated, it would work out to $55,567 for every resident of Malheur County. Might not this amount be better spent to, for instance, aid Portland’s poor, aid distressed Oregon coast commercial fishers, address the student loan debt crisis, reduce the national debt, address climate change, clean up Superfund sites, subsidize row crops, or . . . ?
I will give any odds to anyone who will wager that the money authorized will be appropriated in the bill’s specified timeframe. While I am not a gambling man, such a bet would not be a gamble on my part but a sure thing.
My Suggestion to Senator Wyden
Senator Wyden has successfully stood for election as US senator from Oregon five times (Table 1). The only county Wyden has never won—even once—is Malheur County.
You’ll have to ask Senator Wyden and the conservation interests at the negotiating table, especially the Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA), why they believe this legislation is in the public interest, is fair to federal taxpayers, and is a net gain for conservation. Time will tell if the rest of the public land conservation community goes along with the Malheur bill or sees it as an existential threat to the nation’s public lands. To date the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity have expressed opposition to the bill.
Grand bargains can be a net gain for conservation and in the public interest. Senator Wyden passed one into law in the form of the Steens Act of 2000. He facilitated a grand bargain for Oregon’s eastside federal forests that would have become law had the timber industry not reneged on their commitment.
For the record, I was a key player in both the Steens and eastside deals. Does the fact that I was at those two tables set by Senator Wyden but not at his Malheur table taint my assessment of this bill? While I don’t think so, it’s a fair question—and perhaps a convenient way to dismiss my concerns if one has a mind to.
My hope is that Senator Wyden will start over. His first bill that attempted to develop a grand bargain for the O&C forestlands of western Oregon was quite horrible. However, the senator and his staff improved the bill over time to the point where I could support it (though not enthusiastically) as it was a net gain for conservation. Fortunately in a macropolitical sense (and unfortunately in a micropolitical sense) an uncompromising timber industry wouldn’t take the deal.
Permit me to close by repeating myself from the beginning of Part 1 of this two-part Public Lands Blog post:
S.2828 is an appalling piece of public lands legislation that uses a very small fig leaf of faux wilderness designations (and a small wild and scenic river designation) to legitimize an effective handover of millions of acres of federal public lands to local livestock and development interests.
Was anyone paying attention?
Figure 6. A monument to the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, dedicated in the Orwellian year of 1984 and appropriately in Malheur County. “The Taylor Grazing Act marked the beginning of an era of management of livestock grazing on the western public rangelands. Prior to the act, competition for forage had sparked conflicts among stockmen and led to severe soil and vegetation damage through overgrazing. This act was an early national conservation law designed to prevent overgrazing and soil deterioration, to bring orderly use, improvement and development, and to stabilize the livestock industry dependent upon the public range. Today’s well-managed rangeland is a tribute to the vision and dedication of those who worked for the enactment of this historic legislation.” The TGA was and is a failure that the Malheur County legislation seeks to double-down on. Source: Bureau of Land Management.