The Squaw Valley grazing decision by the Elko (Nevada) office of the Bureau of Land Management achieves a new level of senseless industrialization and fragmentation of public wild lands.

BLM plans to construct 118 miles of new fence -- at a conservatively estimated cost of more than $500,000 dollars - to be paid for largely by taxpayers. The agency also plans to treat sagebrush with herbicide in large crested wheatgrass seedings.

Sagebrush, you see, has had the audacity to move back into areas where the BLM wants to maintain sterile monocultures of crested wheatgrass for cattle food. The sagebrush spraying would occur in the midst of a northern Nevada landscape increasingly fragmented by large wildfires, rampant cheatgrass and weed invasion - a landscape suffering from sagebrush die-offs. Despite widespread damage documented in BLM's own reports, the agency continues to stock these areas at a high level with cattle.

The barbed-wire hazard to wildlife and the wild horse herd in the area is being constructed primarily so that Barrick Goldstrike and Ellison Ranches can graze cattle and sheep on public lands without pounding Lahontan cutthroat trout and redband trout streams to death. Riparian pastures (not exclosures, meaning they still will be grazed, and grazed hard after a period of rest) are being constructed around streams so that Barrick can continue grazing very large numbers of cattle and sheep across the allotments.

Part of this scheme is "mitigation" for the environmental ravages of cyanide heap-leach gold mining. Cyanide heapleach mining grinds up mountains and de-waters aquifers. Yes, mitigation: The mining company buys base property and the associated grazing permit, takes some measures to protect fish, and meanwhile stocks hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands to the maximum limit with cattle and sheep. The company even gets the BLM to spray sagebrush on public lands to grow more exotic grass for food for the mining company's livestock.

Sage grouse, loggerhead shrikes, Brewer's sparrows, pygmy rabbits and antelope are big losers here. Fences in open sagebrush country provide perches for nest predators of sage grouse and brown-headed cowbirds that parasitize songbird nests. They are hazards that kill or wound birds that fly into them.

Antelope have a hard time with fences no matter what the wire spacing. North of Eureka this summer, my vehicle surprised an antelope doe and two fawns ahead in the road. The antelope spooked. The doe knew about fences. The fawns didn't. Backing up, I watched as one fawn repeatedly slammed into the lower wire of the fence, hitting its neck and getting knocked down with each try. The fence had the "proper" BLM wildlife-friendly spacing that the agency vaunts as evidence of the great care it takes for wildlife on public lands.

Where is Squaw Valley country, and why should anyone care about these lands? It encompasses headwaters of the South Fork of the Owyhee River and Humboldt River tributaries. Trout streams that should be narrow and deep ribbons of cold, clean-flowing water are instead muddy mires of hoof tracks. The mud and bacteria in the brown water of the Owyhee River in Idaho and Oregon are partially caused by Squaw Valley cattle and sheep trampling the headwater steams and uplands. The sagebrush to be sliced with 118 miles of new fence is part of one of the larger, less fragmented sagebrushsteppe habitats left anywhere in the West.

WWP has appealed the Elko BLM decision.

Katie Fite is WWP's Biodiversity Director She lives in Boise, Idaho