BLM Dumbing Down Reports on Livestock Range Conditions

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has come under scrutiny for omitting crucial data from its annual rangeland health reports. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has filed a complaint, urging BLM to reinstate the missing information that tracks the impact of overgrazing on federal lands. This data is essential for assessing the health of 150 million acres of rangelands across the western United States.

According to PEER, the BLM's 2013 Rangeland Inventory, Monitoring, and Evaluation (RIME) report, released on November 4, 2014, lacks several key data points:

• The number and land area of grazing allotments meeting and failing rangeland health standards;
• Information distinguishing between failures of the standards due to livestock and other causes; and
• Whether land conditions are improving or declining or whether BLM is taking any management steps to restore degraded rangeland.

This omission marks a significant departure from previous reports, which highlighted a troubling trend of increasing land degradation due to commercial livestock operations. Over the past decade, the number of damaged lands has doubled, exacerbated by severe drought conditions in the Sagebrush West.

“BLM is obscuring the very information Congress and the public need to gauge the success or failure of rangeland management,” said PEER Advocacy Director Kirsten Stade, criticizing the report as “RIME without reason.” Stade emphasized that BLM cannot avoid accountability by selectively editing its reports.

PEER's complaint, filed under the Data Quality Act, demands that BLM retract the 2013 RIME report and reissue it with comprehensive data. BLM has 60 days to respond to the complaint, after which PEER may appeal if the complaint is rejected.

“By law, BLM cannot seek to reduce the sum total of human knowledge,” added Stade, accusing BLM of manipulating statistics to obscure deteriorating range conditions. Stade noted that BLM previously claimed an inability to track grazing impacts due to insufficient data, yet now attempts to conceal the data it claimed not to have.

To provide transparency, PEER has launched a grazing website featuring an interactive map. This map combines BLM range health data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act with high-resolution satellite imagery, allowing users to compare visible on-the-ground conditions with BLM's claims.

Originally Posted By PEER