Newspaper column: How to save the West from devastating wildfires

As we enter another wildfire season — and each one seems to be more devastating than the previous one — the question lingers: Why?

According to The New York Times, The Washington Post and National Geographic it is unquestionably due to climate change.

Pay no heed to the fact that prior to 1980 less than 25,000 acres of wildfires occurred each year in Nevada. In each of the past two years, more than 1 million acres have burned. Coincidentally, since 1980 the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service have made massive cuts in the number of cattle and sheep allowed to graze federal land. The number of sheep has fallen 80 percent and the number of cattle has been cut in half.

This past week’s issue of Executive Intelligence Review magazine asks the question: “What Is Causing Massive Wildfires In the U.S. West: The Environment — Or Environmentalism?”

The article focuses on the largest fire in Nevada history — the July 2018 Martin Fire, which burned nearly half a million acres in Northeast Nevada and devastated the Ninety-Six Ranch, which has been run by the Stock and Stewart families for 155 years. The article includes an extensive interview with rancher Kris Stewart, who has been lobbying the federal land agencies and the president to allow historic levels of grazing to prevent such wildfires.

Stewart told the magazine’s editor the vegetative fuel levels on the rangeland that burned in the Martin Fire had been allowed to reach 1,000 percent of normal by the BLM’s own estimates, and, despite this, she said the ranch was denied permission for additional grazing time.

In the 1960s, she reported, “the modern environmental movement began to inform range management studies and policy, and environmental lawsuits caused a shift in grazing policies. Once considered engaged partners, ranchers were viewed as the enemy …”

This was political, not scientific. Stewart noted that range biologists such as Allan Savory have concluded that livestock grazing disturbs the soil in a healthy manner, “allowing rain and snow water, seeds and fertilizer to be absorbed throughout the soil. They obviously also deposit some of those seeds as well as a completely natural and healthy fertilizer to the soil.”

In the 2015 summer edition of Range magazine, under the headline “Cows can save the world,” Savory stated, “Over millions of years such grasslands — soil life, plants, grazing animals and their predators — developed together in an amazing symbiotic relationship. The grasses needed animals grazing, trampling, dunging and urinating just as much as the animals needed plants.”

In fact, livestock have actually transformed Nevada from a barren desert into land habitable by wildlife such as elk, deer and sage grouse — all of which are decimated by massive wildfires.

The late Elko County Commissioner Grant Gerber often charged that federal agents are in thrall of the radical environmentalists, whose mantra is that the land should be returned to the pristine state before ranchers ruined it by trampling it with sheep and cattle.

Gerber was fond of quoting from the diary of fur trapper Peter Skene Ogden who crossed Nevada circa 1828: “There were times when we tasted no food, and we were unable to discover water for several days together; without wood, we keenly felt the cold; wanting grass, our horses were reduced to great weakness, so that many of them died, on whose emaciated carcases we were constrained to satisfy the intolerable cravings of our hunger, and as a last resource, to quench our thirst with their blood.”

Only after the sheep and cattle came and trampled the earth and fertilized it, as Savory explained, and ranchers improved access to water, the region blossomed.

Whether that can continue is in jeopardy. Stewart estimates the fire cost the ranch $160,000 in out-of-pocket expenses for such things as hay. And since reseeding efforts have been largely unsuccessful those expenses are likely to occur for at least two or three years, exhausting savings and retirement accounts.

After the ranchers appealed to the White House, Stewart says President Trump responded with an executive order in December titled “Promoting Active Management of America’s Forests, Rangelands, and Other Federal Lands To Improve Conditions and Reduce Wildfire Risk.”

“Whether our family operation will survive this battle is unclear,” Stewart said, “but if we have a part in saving U.S. cattle ranching and our way of life, it will have been worth the time, expense and trouble for the next generation.”

The fires are destroying the one thing that could prevent them.

A version of this column appeared this week in many of the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel and the Lincoln County Record — and the Elko Daily Free Press.

Newspaper column: Federal bureaucrats ignored state and local input on land use plans

You have the right to remain silent.

No, you have the obligation to remain silent, because if you don’t you’ll be slapped with the very thing you’ve worked against for four years at the cost of millions of dollars and countless man-hours — listing of the greater sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) — and then be sent to bed without your supper.

Talk about being treated like the proverbial red-headed stepchild.

This essentially is what the U.S. Attorney for Nevada has said in reply to a federal lawsuit that seeks an injunction to stop draconian land use restrictions, which almost entirely ignore state and local input, despite repeated promises of cooperation, coordination and adherence to strict scientific standards.

U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden’s reply to the suit filed by Attorney General Adam Laxalt could be paraphrased thusly: Shut up, sit down, move to the back of the bus, or we’ll list the damn bird anyway.

Greater sage grouse (BLM photo)

“Finally, the government’s interest and the public interest weigh strongly against an injunction,” states Bogden’s reply. “Numerous stakeholders, including state and local governments, participated in a four-year process to create a landscape-level framework for protecting Sage-Grouse and avoiding the need to list the species under the ESA. That process was based on the best available science and on extensive good faith negotiations with interested parties. An injunction would diminish the protections for Sage-Grouse, undermine the collaborative effort that went into the Plan Amendments, and could have implications for FWS’ (Fish and Wildlife Service) recent decision not to list the species. Accordingly, the motion for a preliminary injunction should be denied.”

The part about participation is true — sort of like the condemned man participating in the firing squad — but the claims of best available science, good faith negotiations and collaborative effort are entirely bogus.

Bogden repeatedly tells the court the injunction should be denied because the claims are not “ripe.” Though the plans have been drafted and appeals have been denied, the plans have not yet been fully implemented.

Translation: No one may sue the federal bureaucracy until it has actually carried out its threat to put you out of business, making it impossible to afford to hire a stable of attorneys to fight the bottomless taxpayer well of cash for the next two or three generations.

Witness the saga of the Hage family ranchers who have been fighting in federal court since 1991 over water and grazing rights for their ranch near Tonopah. A judge awarded them $4 million but a federal appellate court in 2012 remanded the case to a lower court, saying it was not “ripe,” because the family had failed to “exhaust administrative remedies.”

With utter disregard for economic realities, Bogden also argues that the plaintiffs have failed to demonstrate “imminent irreparable injury,” providing merely speculation.

It is merely speculation that Elko County anticipates an annual loss of approximately $31 million of agricultural productivity.

It is merely speculation that the Ninety-Six Ranch owners say “restrictions threaten the survival of the ranching operation and devalue the ranch’s land and resources because, a reduction in or cancellation of its grazing permits will threaten the viability of its business and significantly reduce the saleable value of the Ranch.”

It is merely speculation that the “termination of Paragon’s (Paragon Precious Metals) rights under the General Mining Law to explore its only project creates such substantial, imminent, and irreparable harm that it will likely destroy Paragon’s business.”

It is merely speculation that for Quantum Minerals the “sudden termination of Quantum’s rights under the General Mining Law to explore its only project will destroy Quantum’s business.”

It is merely speculation that changes in land use plans will jeopardize Western Exploration’s $32 million investment.

Nothing to be concerned about. When those things happen the federal land agency bureaucrats will still have their jobs and pensions, and that’s not speculation.

The claim the federal government has been collaborative in reaching its decisions is a joke. Laxalt’s lawsuit uses a variant of the word “ignore” 22 times.

Before Laxalt filed suit, appeals by Gov. Brian Sandoval to both the head of the state BLM and the national BLM were summarily snubbed with cursory explanation.

A hearing on the request for an injunction is scheduled for Nov. 12 in Reno in front of U.S. District Judge Miranda Du.

This whole case is illustrative of the real problem with having 85 percent of Nevada land under the tight-fisted control of power-drunk Washington bureaucrats.

A version of this column appears this week in the Battle Born Media newspapers — The Ely Times, the Mesquite Local News, the Mineral County Independent-News, the Eureka Sentinel, the Lincoln County Record and the Sparks Tribune — and the Elko Daily Free Press.

The suit: Nevada v Dept of Interior Am Complaint

U.S. attorney’s reply to suit.

Branding at the Ninety-Six Ranch: