Middle ground on sage grouse
If you relied solely on press reports of the Interior Department’s decision to reconsider protection plans for the greater sage grouse, you’d think the Trump administration was once again doing its best imitation of a bull in a china shop.
The stock story line goes as follows: The Obama-era plans were the culmination of a careful compromise representing years of negotiations that satisfied a national task force of stakeholders from government, conservation, sporting and extraction interests. What possible reason could Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have for reopening the process other than to kowtow to energy, mining and agricultural lobbies?
As it happens, the truth is more complicated. Many state and local officials throughout the West who did indeed collaborate with federal officials in devising sage-grouse protection plans were profoundly dismayed by last-minute additions made in 2015 by federal officials. Even those now warning against wholesale changes to the Bureau of Land Management plans, such as Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, weren’t happy.
“We fought back on a couple of things,” says John Swartout, who coordinates Colorado’s efforts on behalf of the sage grouse. “One was this idea of ‘no surface occupancy’ (in priority habitat regions). It may make sense to limit surface occupation but in the Piceance Basin, for example, there are deep ravines, so if an oil or gas rig is down in the ravine and the birds are off on the plateau you’re actually not disturbing the birds at all. We drew up our plan to accommodate terrain features; the idea was to avoid disturbing sage grouse habitat, but to be smart about it.
“There is state, private land and federal land and all of us need to work together to make sure that if we push activities off federal land we aren’t pushing them onto private land where they could do more damage to sage grouse habitat,” he said. “We tried to look at it holistically and our plan reflected that. So it got to D.C. and they made a bunch of changes and they took some of that flexibility away from us.”
In Colorado, it’s important to note, the BLM manages slightly less than half of sage grouse habitat.
Another issue for Colorado, Swartout told me, “was that U.S. Fish & Wildlife was given veto power over exceptions to no surface occupancy. But if the bird is under the jurisdiction of the state of Colorado” — as it technically is — “why would you give Fish & Wildlife a veto when it’s our bird?”
Other states felt blindsided by other late additions and the regulatory shortcuts used to put them in place. A federal judge in Nevada ruled earlier this year, for example, that the BLM failed to comply with environmental law when designating sagebrush “focal areas” in that state.
So critics of the BLM plans do have legitimate beefs. Believe it or not, not every regulatory initiative under the Obama administration was brought down from Mount Sinai.
To be sure, Zinke stumbled out of the gate this year when he suggested a shift from protecting habitat to simply concentrating on bird numbers — when the former is a key to the latter. But recent signals suggest he is backing off that position, according to Swartout. And we won’t know exactly what Interior has in mind until after Nov. 27, which is when the official public comment period on revising the plans ends.
Green activists meanwhile have resorted to their usual careful rhetoric. “Zinke might as well have formed a shotgun posse to kill off the sage grouse directly,” a representative the Center for Biological Diversity told The New York Times in a typical bout of hyperbole. Still, Zinke is indeed walking a fine line. However justified some revisions might be, there is risk in going too far, as Hickenlooper and Republican Gov. Matt Mead of Wyoming have repeatedly warned.
“We want to make sure we have durable plans in place that can survive the pendulum swings in politics,” Swartout says, not to mention litigation. “The governor’s position is that if there are changes to the plans that are reasonable, and don’t weaken protections for the grouse, let’s do them. But let’s not do anything that opens the door to an official listing of this bird (as threatened or endangered)” — with the draconian restrictions that would imply for landowners.
The good news is that the various stakeholders in Colorado appear close to a unified recommendation on how to adjust Colorado’s sage grouse plan, Swartout reports. Whether other states can replicate Colorado’s success remains to be seen.
The greater sage grouse population is significantly smaller than it once was, but hundreds of thousands of the birds still reside in 11 states and, what is more important, those states in the past decade have poured unprecedented resources into preserving habitat and tackling problems such as invasive plant species, fire and encroaching development. And with noticeable effect, too. The overall 2017 sage grouse count in Colorado, for example, was up 28 percent above the 10-year average (although favorable weather is clearly a factor).
Meanwhile, for those who relish the ironies of public policy, consider this: The sage grouse remains a legal game bird. Hundreds are “harvested” every year in Colorado, while Wyoming last year authorized nearly 5,000 hunters to slaughter 10,526 sage grouse.
If the sage grouse were truly facing extinction now or the foreseeable future — which the federal government in 2015 concluded was not the case — you’d think hunting would be one of the first things to go.
Vincent Carroll is a former Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News editorial page editor.