In recent months, EPIC has acted to highlight and rein in inappropriate grazing on public lands along the North Coast. We've made real progress documenting and changing routine but destructive grazing practices on lands the public owns. These not only include our national forests, but also wildlife areas managed by the California Department of Fish and Game, and even State Parks.
Many land managers and ranchers, and some conservationists, defend grazing as a tool for protecting biodiversity, including rare plants as well as fish and wildlife habitat. Indeed, carefully-targeted, well-managed "conservation grazing" can create real benefits. Examples include short-rotation grazing with small numbers of animals to manage for rare plants and the butterflies that feed on them. However, the vast majority of livestock grazing on public lands continues to be unsustainable. This everyday livestock grazing creates unacceptable levels of damage to habitat, soils, and aquatic systems.
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A Small Victory--Trespassing Cattle Again Fenced Out of Tolowa Dunes State Park
Where cattle have been allowed to trespass repeatedly at Tolowa Dunes State Park, EPIC and our allies in Del Norte County have used "endless pressure, endlessly applied" to finally get the problem fixed.
Since 2001, when Tolowa Dunes State Park was officially designated a California State Park, cattle have been illegally grazing on a coastal meadow about 250 acres in size. The trespassing has been ignored not only by State Parks, but also by managers of the adjacent state wildlife area, where the cattle started. After EPIC's Wendell Wood and other Del Norte conservationists worked for ten weeks to stop the unauthorized grazing, the park superintendent finally assured us in late December 2007 that the cows would stay on the other side of the state park fence. Only three weeks later, the cows were back again.
Under California State Park policy, grazing is generally "incompatible with park purposes, including natural resource protection and providing a meaningful outdoor recreational experience." Nonetheless, grazing was "unofficially" permitted to continue at Tolowa Dunes, without benefit of management plans, California Environment Quality Act (CEQA) analysis, or the monitoring or enforcement necessary to ensure protection of park resources. Every year, local ranchers would truck their cattle to the 40-acre pasture on the adjacent Lake Earl Wildlife Area, managed by the Department of Fish and Game (DFG). Every year, the cattle would find their way into the State Park. When EPIC finally had had enough in 2007, heavy grazing had left meadow vegetation cropped close to the ground, with bare dirt exposed in many areas.
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Fourteen Hundred Goats Might Possibly Have Some Impacts, Yes
In November 2007, Del Norte conservationists were stunned to discover a herd of fourteen hundred goats grazing in the "peninsula" area of the Lake Earl Wildlife Area, between "lakes" Earl and Tolowa (the lakes are really two lobes of a single coastal lagoon). Researchers with the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) were using a small number of goats for a conservation grazing experiment meant to benefit rare plants and butterflies at the defunct Pacific Shores subdivision, on the northern shore of Lake Earl. The goat supplier needed a place to graze his large herd, so FWS sent him to DFG, which put the goats on the wildlife area.
As required by the Coastal Act, FWS applied for a coastal development permit for their project. EPIC asked the Coastal Commission to require FWS to document the cumulative impacts of the big goat herd on public land, not just the 5-acre experiment. It is unfortunate that FWS has denied their responsibility for the goat herd, and blamed conservationists for interrupting their experiment.
State Wildlife Areas--Grazing for Geese? Or Just for Cows?
The Department of Fish and Game allows grazing on many North Coast wildlife areas, ostensibly to benefit Aleutian Canada geese and other waterfowl. However, EPIC's investigation has shown that this grazing is often conducted without benefit of grazing plans, CEQA analysis, or the careful oversight necessary to insure that wildlife benefits are actually realized. Too often, these public lands are just being treated as private pastures.
In theory, by providing optimal goose habitat in wildlife areas, DFG could both provide good hunting opportunities, and save ranchers some of the forage they were losing to flocks of geese. Geese prefer to graze in meadows where the grass is short enough that it doesn't provide cover for predators, but long enough to provide decent eating. The wildlife area grazing agreements specify that the grass should be between two and four inches in length during goose season.
In practice, however, the wildlife area pastures are often grazed down to nubbins. In several areas, we found average grass heights far below those required. Particularly around Lake Earl, the focus on grazing management seems to have taken priority over all other public uses, including recreational access or the many forms of wildlife that do not benefit from overgrazed cow pastures.
Rather than actually monitor and enforce agreements with local ranchers, the state DFG has passed that responsibility on to local Resource Conservation Districts (RCD). In turn, the RCDs use staff from the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to actually manage the areas. In practice, no one in any agency has adequate answers to our questions about whether a grazing agreement exists for a given part of a wildlife area, who's going to enforce one if it does exist, and whether CEQA analysis has ever been conducted on such an agreement. In other words, cows are sure getting to graze, but no one is in charge.
Forest Service Rubberstamps National Forest Grazing Permits
In a pattern repeated across the West, the US Forest Service has approved renewal of grazing permits on the Six Rivers, Shasta-Trinity, and Mendocino national forests under a Congressional budget rider. The provision allows grazing permits to be renewed without environmental review if they merely continue "existing management." Though many of the permits thus renewed don't actually meet those terms, the Forest Service has refused to allow appeals of these decisions. In March of 2008, EPIC joined a host of groups around the West and sued the Forest Service in San Francisco Federal District Court to challenge those decisions.
For more information visit www.wildcalifornia.org
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TOC for Forest & River News, Spring 2008