In December, we met with the Utah Department of Environmental Quality and several other environmental organizations to preview the State’s new “Biological Indicators” program for assessing water quality. This program is intended to include assessment of the potential biological community, particularly invertebrates, along with chemical and physical data to determine whether water quality is impaired by point and non-point sources. The approach offers hope that finally, the water quality and habitat degradation from non-point sources such as livestock grazing will be addressed by the State, BLM and Forest Service. A serious challenge to such an objective approach will be the politics involved in codifying this approach into regulations.

A talented scientist who has already spent many years assessing streams and habitat conditions throughout the Northwest as part of a team led by Fisheries research scientists at Utah State University, is leading the development of the system. The goal is to have the program in place by 2009. In the interim, over 100 reference streams have been identified. Habitat, water quality and biological data from each stream have been collected for to establish a baseline. Our major concern is whether these data can predict streams that actually provide healthy fisheries habitat.

Our water quality work in Idaho, Utah and Wyoming on 60 streams that are potential cutthroat and bull trout habitat has shown that almost none meet the most minimal of criteria for spawning of these species due to sedimentation and high temperatures.

Because of this experience, WWP proposed to DEQ that we would visit a portion of the selected reference streams to conduct an assessment of spawning habitat conditions using the sediment coring apparatus donated by Gene Bray and water quality apparatus donated by the Hach Corporation. This study will help validate whether the criteria being developed by the State can be used to evaluate the ability of these streams to support spawning cutthroat trout. We are grateful to the Wilburforce Foundation and Patagonia for providing funding for this effort. We are also working with a Patagonia employee who wishes to do an internship. We are hopeful her interest in fly fishing will encourage her to spend her two month internship helping Jonathan Ratner and myself in this effort. We will be meeting with DEQ in the near future to obtain data and begin to select our sample sites for verification.

Duck Creek Case Study

During the past several years, we have been collecting data and photographs on allotments in Rich County, northern Utah. This area is a crucial link in the wildlife corridor that connects the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to the southern Rockies and important sage grouse habitat. Wolves and lynx have moved thru this corridor in Utah. As a result of our lawsuit against BLM in 2001, which we settled in 2005, Rich County began a Cooperative Resource Management program and initiated a new land use planning effort encompassing private, State and Federal lands. We fear this process is another version of the usual collaborative effort in which lip service is paid to the ecological needs of the land, science and requirements of law, while providing cover for maintaining the status quo of failures to address the impacts of livestock grazing and the associated water developments and seedings of non-native grasses. These have not been demonstrated to improve conditions in the past 40 years across the west, and probably have resulted in worsening conditions by expanding upland grazing, dewatering streams and springs and destroying wetlands. These CRM programs rely on the support of ill-informed participants and those with vested financial interests in maintaining the current way of doing business which has lead to widespread destruction of ecosystems across the West.

In a 2004 Environmental Assessment to divide the Duck Creek allotment into six pastures and construct 40 water developments, BLM asserted that productivity was at potential in order to validate the stocking rates for livestock, which would remain the same as in the past. We defeated that proposal in an attempt to protect sage grouse and riparian habitats including the many springs, streams and wetlands that have been almost destroyed by livestock and water developments.

In 2005, the Wild Utah Project provided utilization cages and together we collected nearly 400 samples in the Duck Creek allotment and the nearby North Rich allotment in the Bear River Range. The goal was to determine the current productivity of the grass and flowering plants on the allotments relative to their potential. We also established riparian stubble height transects to assess whether the livestock permittees were meeting the required 5” standard. What we found was not surprising to those of us who have observed the lack of monitoring by agencies, while methods that are used appear to be designed to avoid detecting overuse and other impacts from livestock grazing.

Our results showed that the current production of grasses on the Duck Creek allotment is at about 20% of potential, or one-fifth of the level BLM claimed was there, calling into question BLM’s Rangeland Health evaluations which claimed production was at or near potential. Utilization criteria established by BLM are for grazing use to not exceed 50% use of upland vegetation. This standard was met for grasses, but with only about 20% of the permitted cattle grazing the allotment, while flowering plants were consumed to nearly 70%, most likely by early summer sheep grazing. While we await BLM’s monitoring data from 2005 so we can compare their utilization measures to ours, we have made that comparison with their 2004 utilization data. It indicates that the method used by BLM, the Key Forage Plant Height vs Weight Method, underestimates actual use when residual vegetation is harvested in order to compare grazed plots to ungrazed plots. The flowering plants and grasses found during our study are grazing-tolerant species rather than the more desirable native bunchgrasses grasses and flowers. The riparian stubble height standard was not met along Duck Creek. Our samples of riparian grasses and flowering plants showed that nearly 90% of these plants are eaten by livestock even when the standard is met.

In January, BLM and the permittees met behind closed doors during the CRM meeting without involving the full CRM membership. They came back into the CRM meeting and announced they would implement a four pasture rotation grazing system on the Duck Creek allotment with additional water developments on private land. They do not plan to announce the project to the public, nor engage in any analysis under NEPA. This, of course, betrays the very principles intended to guide the CRM. This planned project is nearly as egregious as the one we defeated in 2005. Here we have a case where BLM and livestock permittees have exposed their true motives – exclusion of the public, while catering to livestock interests. This is nothing new to those of us who have engaged in efforts to protect public lands over the decades and consistently have to confront these back door tactics by administrators, senators and representatives to avoid public lands protections.

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