BY JOHN LESHY
The Escalante River Canyons — a network of serpentine red-rock tributary canyons that feed into the river — are some of the most scenic and fragile lands on the Colorado Plateau — indeed, in the entire West. Previously little-known except to dedicated backcountry-desert enthusiasts, they began to attract considerable attention in 1996 when President Bill Clinton included them in the nearly 2 million acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument he established. Over the years since, they have become the most sought-out destination in the monument, drawing nearly 300,000 visits annually.
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This did not happen without a lot of hard work and financial investment by the Grand Canyon Trust and other conservation advocates.
The Trump administration has now put all that in jeopardy. At stake is not just the future of this lovely canyon region. Also on the line is one of the most hopeful solutions to longstanding conflicts between livestock operators and conservationists on some special places on public lands.
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The 1996 monument proclamation, which extolled the “spectacular array” of natural and cultural resources of the region, allowed livestock grazing to continue when consistent with existing laws and regulations. The Escalante canyons area was, however, a tough place to make a profit from cattle.
Not long after the national monument was established, ranchers holding permits to graze their livestock in that area decided they had had enough. One wanted to retire and needed money for medical expenses, another wanted to run his stock in less difficult terrain, and a third wanted to relocate his operation to another state.
Eventually, after negotiation with Bill Hedden of the Grand Canyon Trust, a deal was struck. In return for several hundred thousand dollars of cash provided by the Trust, these willing sellers relinquished their grazing privileges.
Read John Leshy's March 3, 2020 New York Times op-ed, "A Trump Plan Breaks a Great Deal for Ranchers and Park Lovers" ›
The term “privileges” is accurate. Permits to graze livestock on public lands are not property rights. The applicable law — the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act — explicitly provides that a grazing permit “shall not create any right, title, interest, or estate in or to the lands.” The U.S. government could, in other words, decide not to renew these grazing permits and instead to devote the public lands to non-grazing uses without having any obligation to compensate the permit holders. But instead of pursuing that more confrontational path, the Trust decided that a better resolution was to facilitate rancher cooperation with dollars.
Once the money was paid and the permits were relinquished, the U.S. government, with the support of state officials, formally retired those public lands from further grazing. The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources endorsed the idea, Utah Republican Governor Michael Leavitt signed off on it, and in 1999 the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) agreed, finding that removing cattle from the public lands in this area would restore a fragile and treasured gem to ecological health. 
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The purchase and retirement had no meaningful effect on the local economy that was tied to grazing; over 96 percent of the original national monument remained open to grazing at the same level as before.
Removal of domestic livestock worked wonders on the landscape, helped along by additional considerable philanthropic investment in on-the-ground restoration work. Cows have now been absent from the area for two decades, and the results are dramatic. Wildflowers, willows, fish, and wildlife, including beaver and otters, now flourish where there was once only fouled water and clouds of biting cow flies tormenting hikers.
What happened at Escalante was not unprecedented. Similar deals have taken place in several other parts of the West over the past few decades. They almost always involve places like the Escalante canyons region, where public lands are of marginal value for grazing yet highly valued for recreation and conservation. For these reasons the deals have, at most, a tiny impact on local grazing-related economic activity, especially compared to the positive effects they bring to the recreation, tourism, and service sectors. Altogether, such negotiated grazing retirements affect only a very small slice of public lands — at most a few million acres. This leaves well over a quarter of a billion acres of federal lands open to livestock grazing.
For all these reasons, it’s not surprising that such a good idea has attracted support all across the political spectrum. In 2001, for example, George W. Bush’s libertarian-minded Interior Secretary, Gale Norton, celebrated it as a “marketplace-oriented resolution for public land conflicts.”
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Sometimes these win-win buyouts and retirements have been approved by Congress, usually in a package that protects public lands over a wider area, such as Oregon’s Steens Mountain and Idaho’s Boulder-White Clouds and Owyhee River canyons.
But not always. In the Escalante canyons area and elsewhere, the BLM (and, in some places, the Forest Service) put the deals in effect by amending their land-use plans to retire the land from further grazing. Often, as at Escalante, they have the support of state agencies as well.
Until now, because the idea made so much sense and was so widely supported, those putting up the money to buy and retire the grazing privileges have generally been willing to trust that the federal land managers would honor the retirements as provided for in their management plans.
No longer. In a move that is anti-rancher as well as anti-environment, the Trump administration has dramatically increased the risk of entering such deals.
Read John Leshy's March 3, 2020 op-ed in the New York Times, "A Trump Plan Breaks a Great Deal for Ranchers and Park Lovers" ›
In February 2020, without bothering to offer reasons for its reversal, the Interior Department issued a new monument management plan that will reopen to livestock 87 percent of the lands protected by the original deal in the Escalante canyons region. This will doom the fragile flora and fauna in these magnificent canyonlands once again to be trampled and fouled by livestock, except for the narrow main river corridor itself. (Although President Trump shrank Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by half in December 2017, he kept the Escalante canyons region inside the monument, and left the grazing retirements intact at the time.)
The effect of the administration’s abrupt U-turn will ripple way beyond these magnificent canyonlands. In the future, it will take a very brave, or very foolish, conservation buyer to want to invest in such arrangements that are so easily undone by executive caprice.
This means ranchers — particularly those struggling to scratch out a living on hardscrabble desert lands where conservation buyers are often the only willing buyers of grazing privileges — will suffer alongside recreationists, wildlife advocates, and the environment.
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It now falls to Congress to fix the problem. Legislation introduced by Adam Smith, D-WA, and several co-sponsors, the Voluntary Grazing Permit Retirement Act, would protect negotiated buyouts and retirements from the executive branch’s political whims.
Unfortunately, even though Smith’s bill directly benefits individual ranchers by enlarging the pool of grazing-privilege buyers, it faces an uphill battle. The national trade association of public-land livestock grazers, the Public Lands Council — narrowly focused on preserving its membership and its influence — fiercely resists retiring even a single acre of public land from livestock grazing.
Blind ideology and trade association self-interest should not be allowed to thwart such win-win solutions. One can only hope that the recklessness of the Interior Department’s latest decision will spur more members of Congress to support this common-sense legislation that benefits individual ranchers while restoring public lands to health.
John Leshy, emeritus professor at U.C. Hastings College of the Law, was general counsel of the Interior Department from 1993 to 2001, and has been on the board of the Grand Canyon Trust since 2002, but was not involved in the transactions described here. His history of America’s public lands, “Our Common Ground,” is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The views expressed by Advocate contributors are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Grand Canyon Trust.
Also in this issue:
The fight to save Utah's pinyon and juniper forests. Read now ›