"Consultation, cooperation, and communication, all in the service of conservation."

This is the new slogan adopted by the Bureau of Land Management under the Bush Administration to justify changes to regulations that govern livestock grazing on 160 million acres of our public lands. It's another semantic twist typical of the Bush camp to justify an opposite aim: to support efforts by livestock interests to obtain ownership and control of our public-lands.

The proposed changes would eliminate most opportunities for public involvement in grazing decisions. Livestock producers would be given water rights on public lands streams and ownership in structural facilities such as fences, pipelines and water developments while grazing their livestock at 10 percent of market rates for private land.

The net result of these proposed changes would be to effectively hand over control of our public lands to livestock producers and tie the hands of the BLM. (See the proposed rule at http://www.blm.gov) Western Watersheds Project has submitted detailed comments and analysis opposing these proposed rule changes.

This scheme is not new. In a series of articles for Harper's magazine in the 1940s, Bernard DeVoto documented actions to eliminate funding of the Forest Service and Grazing Service, the latter of which was formed to assist public lands grazers and protect the public interest after passage of the Taylor Grazing Act.

"When [the Grazing Service] took the latter purpose seriously it was emasculated and this year has been killed by Western members of Congress, under the leadership of Senator McCarran of Nevada," DeVoto wrote.

The Grazing Service was merged with the General Land Office to form the BLM. McCarran then succeeded in getting the agency's appropriations reduced to the point where it could not perform the functions originally assigned to the Grazing Service, effectively preserving the monopoly of stockmen over public lands.

The American National Livestock Association, National Woolgrowers Association and their allies met in Salt Lake City in 1946 to develop a strategy to take over our public lands.

One goal of the group was the conversion of National Forest and Taylor Act (BLM) lands grazing privileges that were subject to regulation into a "vested right guaranteed them and subject to only such regulation as they may impose on themselves."

Another goal was the distribution of all potential National Forest and Taylor Act grazing lands to individual states before dispensing them to stockmen through private sales. The common price suggested for stockmen to purchase these lands was 10 cents an acre.

In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration was successful in doing away with the collection of scientific data on the biological communities of our public lands. As an ally of stockmen, the administration knew that this data could lead to a reduction in the numbers of sheep and cattle until they were in balance with the capacity of the land and needs of its wildlife.

Today we are subjected to BLM assessments of lands that claim streams and uplands are in properly functioning condition without a shred of scientific data to validate these claims. The damage to our lands, water and wildlife is documented by volumes of research, yet the BLM, on balance, continues to justify grazing practices that carry devastating consequences. As a defense against these pro-industry, anti-environment land managers and stockmen, quantitative monitoring data is essential.

The Reagan Administration also reorganized the BLM, decentralizing the agency's scientific capabilities and destroying its cohesion. The administration attempted to change Department of Interior regulations to institute Cooperative Management Agreements. These agreements would have allowed stockmen to graze livestock on the public lands as they deemed appropriate.

Environmental organizations sued the BLM, challenging the proposed rule changes. In 1 985, U.S. District Court Judge Raul Ramirez ruled that "...Permittees must be kept under a sufficiently real threat of cancellation or modification in order to adequately protect the public lands from overgrazing or other forms of mismanagement...it is the public policy of the United States that the Secretary and the BLM, not the ranchers, shall retain final control and decision-making authority over livestock grazing practices on the public land."

The grazing changes proposed by the Bush Administration are intended to further compromise the authority of the BLM and hand out more power to livestock producers.

In overturning the Reagan Administration's proposed changes to BLM rules, Ramirez also wrote: "From the mid-nineteenth century until 1934, when Congress first enacted comprehensive legislation regulating rangeland management, the key battles over the public lands were between ranchers, who sought to monopolize the range for their own uses, and homesteaders, nomadic herders and a few government officials, who struggled to keep the public lands open and available to all comers. The frontier attitudes of western ranchers made the western cattle industry firmly opposed to legal regulation."

Clearly, Ramirez understood the history of stockmen's attempts to control public lands for their own benefit. Meanwhile, back at the ranch 20 years later, the Bush Administration is pursuing the same course as the Reagan camp, with greater ferocity and wholesale disregard for the environment.

Given this scenario, with history to substantiate it, why should any reasonable American citizen be expected to go along with the new mantra in Washington, when these words are merely cover for turning back the clock to a time when stockmen ruled the land and conservation was considered a waste of forage?

With its proposed new grazing regulations, the Bush Administration wants to perpetuate the industrialization of our public lands, using failed techniques in an effort to deny the realities of excessive livestock grazing. If it succeeds, our public lands will be ravaged and our wildlife lost at an even greater rate - all "in the service of conservation."

John Carter is Utah director of WWP. He lives in Mendon, Utah.