Ranching in the arid west has always been suffused with mythological beliefs:

There is the myth that grazing and trampling by a lumbering exotic behemoth that spreads weeds in its wake is good for the land.

There is the myth that building more contraptions or conducting more "treatments" like fences, pipelines, spring projects, and burning that shift livestock impacts to less used areas is good for the land. Scarcely a BLM livestock grazing decision is ever issued that does not propose building more livestock facilities that fragment wild landscapes, without any accounting of the impacts or effectiveness of these manipulations.

There is the myth that damage to the land was done by "historical" grazing but now everything is getting better. Unfortunately growing headcuts along Coleman Creek in the Soldier Meadows area or the remains of willows and old beaver dams stranded 40 feet above the current water level of Trout Creek in the Salmon River allotment near Jackpot, Nevada belie this myth.

There is the myth that public lands ranching is the economic cornerstone of rural communities when it is the taxes of American city dwellers that finance the smooth gravel roads to ranches in the middle of nowhere and all other rancher hand-outs. Ranch families are almost always dependent on jobs in rural towns to support their ranching business and not the other way around.

In the late 1990's these myths began to break down; and, albeit with legal prodding from conservationists, changes began to seep into BLM decision-making. Threads of ecological science began to influence the land management agencies. Emerging among these was the novel idea that leaving residual grass cover or stubble height on stream banks would help to protect the banks of the stream from the erosive force of the water and keep the soil in place during spring runoff. Slowly BLM and Forest Service offices began requiring stubble heights so that the protective cover of grasses and sedges remained on streams.

But now, in the anti-science, myth-based world of the current U.S. Department of the Interior, the BLM and the Forest Service are abandoning these protections. Range "scientists" at the University of Idaho, long known for their pro-livestock bias, are producing papers saying there is no need for protective stubble heights and cover on stream banks.

Purposeful deception and misrepresentation by the BLM to support the myths of the livestock industry and unsustainable levels of livestock have returned in force. These are readily exposed when one goes out and looks at the land. When WWP Board member Gene Bray and I examined livestock projects that were supposed to exist to help "manage" cows across Vale, Oregon BLM's Louse Canyon area (the lovely sagebrush country of Oregon's West Little Owyhee River near the Nevada and Idaho borders) we found fences, spring projects, even windmills in dilapidated and unusable condition. Large sums of taxpayer dollars were squandered to build projects to try to sustain unsustainable numbers of cattle in the 60s and 70s, and most have fallen apart from lack of maintenance.

Another good example of the return to the bad-old-days is the petty quibbling used as an attempt to undermine public involvement. When WWP surprisingly received a Stay in our appeal of a grazing decision for Barrick Goldstrike and Ellison Ranches on the 500,000 acre Squaw Valley and Spanish Ranch allotments in Elko County, Nevada, the Elko BLM tried in an absurd reading of their own regulations to get WWP's appeal and the stay thrown out.

BLM claimed that WWP had not commented during the protracted decision-making process, so we had no standing to appeal. BLM also said that our comments had been submitted under the name of Idaho Watersheds Project, which was not the same as Western Watersheds Project. Indeed, in 1997 when we first commented on this project, WWP was Idaho Watersheds Project. The Elko BLM knows full well that it is the same organization. It certainly was not WWP's fault that BLM had taken forever 7 years to issue a final decision. Fortunately, the Appeals Judge denied BLM's request.

Perhaps the most Orwellian change under the Bush administration is that collaborative efforts are now used to promote and sustain the myths, delusions and deceptions of the public lands livestock industry. A major goal of the collaboration-based Owyhee Initiative in Owyhee County, Idaho is based on a false premise that livestock grazing is an economic engine in Owyhee County, and that it is an economically viable and benign use of public lands.

As stated in its mission statement the Owyhee Initiative aims to: "provide for economic stability by preserving livestock grazing as an economically viable use". Amazingly there are only about 80 public lands ranchers in all of Owyhee County with a population of over 11,000 people. Public lands ranching is so minor an economic impact in Owyhee County that it doesn't even rate a separate break-down in the Idaho Agriculture jobs statistics, and public lands livestock grazing in Owyhee County could not exist without massive taxpayer subsidies. BLM management costs to administer grazing permits in Owyhee County alone average 15 to 20 times the amount the agency receives in grazing fees. Unfortunately for ranchers there is no such thing as economically viable public lands ranching.

In the face of these rollbacks of better ways to manage public lands the work of Western Watersheds Project takes on even more importance to raise the voice of restoration of damaged watersheds across the west.

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