Have you seen the latest enviro attack on public lands grazing?
 
On June 4, 2010, Center for Bio Diversity, WWP, WildEarth Guardians and others sued the BLM and Forest Service over the federal lands grazing fee. Although the complaint is only based upon the failure of the BLM and FS to respond to a petition for rulemaking, what the environmental groups really want is for the agencies to do a NEPA document (EIS or EA) that would find that the grazing fee paid by public lands ranchers does not pay for the federal government’s program costs, so raise the fee to price ranchers out of business.

The facts in the complaint includes substantive comments such as (1) cattle produces methane gas, equilivant to CO2 emissions from over 7000,000 passenger vehicles, (2) cattle trample vegetation, stream banks, etc. (3) federal lands grazing only produces 3% of the beef produced in the US (4) cattle are an adverse factor for threatened or endangered species, (5) the current fee does not achieve the objective of recovering program costs nor provide an incentive for better management, and others.

The request for relief is that the FS and BLM respond to the enviros petition for rulemaking and do NEPA analysis prior to setting the grazing fee.

Click here for a copy of the complaint in case you haven’t seen it. Since I hadn’t seen much press on this, I wanted to be sure you had it.


Karen Budd Falen
Budd Falen Law Offices, L.L.C.
P.O. Box 346
300 East 18th Street
Cheyenne, WY 82001
Phone (307) 632-5105
Fax (307) 637-3891