Sage Grouse restoration – Western conservation politics under ESA gun

By Ron Moody

A feather storm of emails about sage grouse has passed through the Inbox over the past month or so.

With so much virtual clamor, and with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) taking comments on Sage Grouse management plans in administrative districts across the Rocky Mountain West, and with Rocky Mountain states scurrying to come up with their own Sage Grouse plans, a person could be forgiven for thinking something good is about to happen for the dowdy ‘Sage Hen.’

Don’t count on it.

This once-cherished game bird is, first slowly and now more quickly, losing its grip on existence as formerly wide-open sage prairies are sliced and diced by human exploiters. Nothing visible so far in all the proposed ‘management plans’ is likely to change the bird’s fall into “endangered species” purgatory.

The ESA (Endangered Species Act) is intended to be the last resort before extinction.  Sometimes ESA has worked to restore a healthy population to a species (bald eagle, alligator), sometimes it hasn’t (spotted owl, various amphibians).  Where we stand today, we can only speculate as to the end result of an ESA listing for the sage grouse.

What is certain, however, is that resorting to the ESA to save the Sage Grouse will be the most protracted, toilsome, divisive and costly of all the choices people could make. All the human interests connected to the legal status of the sage grouse will be harmed by an Endangered Species listing by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), and they all know it.

With predictable perversity, however, those speaking for the various economics interests active on the western landscape are going into the management decision-making process with myopic focus on their own wallets. Just as predictably, environmental and conservation voices (they are not the same) are asking for monumental shifts of land use policy with no substantive means of making their vision materialize.

So both BLM and State Sage Grouse plans eventually will constitute the lowest common denominator of what’s left after oil and gas companies, ag and livestock interests, local electric co-ops, transmission companies, etc. have fully employed their political pull to shape their share of the management burden to their own liking.  Over on the green side, management plans will deliver just enough ecological discipline so wildlife advocates can make faint claims of victory in fund-raising letters.

This low-ball outcome may be enough to save the Sage Grouse from actual extinction. But I see no hope that it will put the species back as it was when the game stock could support a three-bird daily bag limit – or even support a hunting season for that matter.

Indeed, the first scapegoat offered up by the industry crowd is the upland bird hunter. “It makes no sense to be hunting a bird that is in danger of being listed,” they say.

Well, yes it does make sense. 

In their zeal to make somebody else pay the piper for sage grouse restoration, industry people are adamant that state fish and wildlife agencies carry the leadership burden. They do this for two reasons: first, it is thus the sportsmans’ wallet that is flattened, not theirs; and second, they know state agencies are even more vulnerable to political manipulation by “job-creating” industries than is the federal BLM.

Bird hunters probably have more to give than they have offered to date in terms of bag limit and season reductions. But zero should not be an option. Once a hunting relationship is severed by ESA, or by the state, only long, costly, chancy litigation will ever bring it back. 

More importantly, ending hunting entirely means that society as a whole thinks hunters should continue to pay for sage grouse management via game agency activity while they are simultaneously elbowed away from the resource table.  That might have worked in past decades. Today, however, a shrinking hunter population and economic factors are strangling state agency budgets.  Unless agency revenue sources broaden, species that don’t produce enough license dollars will fall into that non-game species black hole obscurely listed in every department budget.

There is one judgment, however, that hunters cannot escape. ESA listing of a game species is, by its very fact, an indictment of failure on the part of the North American System of Wildlife Management. 

The methods by which sportsmen restored waterfowl, for example, by demanding passage of federal and state laws then funding habitat via duck stamps and Ducks Unlimited have not been offered to the sage grouse.  Prairie species as a group have not enjoyed the attention of an ‘unlimited’ or ‘forever’ sportsman support group.

One persistent criticism of the North American System is that it plays favorites among species.  The wildlife species that wins the hunter popularity contest get the support it needs to prosper. Other species languish on a scale proportional to sportsman interest.

Like the grizzly that once shared its prairie domain, sage grouse require large-scale habitats. As always habitat is the key to survival. But habitat restoration on any scale is costly. On a large scale it is dauntingly expensive.  So somebody is going to have to pay the piper’s price or the sage grouse is doomed to that eternally endangered limbo that is the most common product of the ESA.

All of the folks, both public and private, who make money off the western landscape, and folks like hunters and bird watchers who take their reward in barter with nature, could come together and agree to a cost-share plan offered in a positive ‘can-do’ spirit.

No sign of that happening yet. We’re still in the eye-gouging, don’t-look-at-me phase of the democratic decision-making process. Given our western tradition of never moving beyond this phase I’m not predicting anything good for the Sage Grouse.

WHAT TO DO?
BLM Lewistown District plans open houses Dec. 10 at the Yogo Inn in Lewistown and Dec. 18 at the Petroleum County Courthouse in Winnett. Both meetings are 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. The Greater Sage-Grouse Draft RMP Amendment/Draft EIS is available at http://blm.gov/f9kd.

The Montana Sage-grouse Advisory Council is seeking comments on the DRAFT Greater Sage-grouse Habitat Conservation Strategy. Deadline is Dec. 4, 5 p.m.  The strategy details a state-led effort to address threats to the species as identified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and to preclude the need for listing the sage-grouse as a federally threatened or endangered species.

http://fwp.mt.gov/fishAndWildlife/publicComments/sageGrouseAC.html

Triumph over Tragedy - PUBLIC PROPERTY RIGHTS AND THE AMERICAN COMMONS

By Ron Moody

     Most people of this country own private property in some form. Few American citizens realize, however, that they also are equal co-shareholders in a vast, complex and immensely valuable PUBLIC property estate. 

     The parcels of this estate are called by a number of names: national park, national forest, national wildlife refuge, state wildlife management area, monuments, etc. The largest single public landholding is that administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – some 276 million acres by this one federal agency alone.

     Parcels of the public estate are managed for the citizen-owners by every level of government, national, state and local.

     Sadly, because people don’t know about their public property portfolio, they don’t realize that the value of their national public estate is in great and continuous jeopardy from private interests who would profit at public expense. 

     Everyone is familiar with the old parable titled “The TRAGEDY of the Commons.” That story tells a tale of a village public pasture which is owned in common by everybody in the community. The pasture is overgrazed – the story goes - into a desert waste because nobody has a reason to conserve the resource because nobody has an ownership motivation.

     American history does indeed record stories of just such tragedies – the whole Industrial Revolution is punctuated with them. Certainly, the early years of cattle grazing on the northern plains, before land management laws were enacted, is one such tale.

     Another parable – one that is actual USA history – is seldom or never told. That parable is of the “TRIUMPH of the Commons.” This tale is the actual history of the invention of conservation and its development and leadership by the American people. This triumph of the national will has produced the wild-life, wild-waters and wild-land miracle that anybody can go out and see around us today. 

     The American triumph of the commons was an act of deliberate, intelligent, forceful citizenship exercised across a half dozen generations and always against continuing, powerful political opposition  – yet, too many Americans today think it just happened by chance and ‘those wild critters have just always been there.’ 

 

     We call this democratically inspired miracle ‘conservation’ -- a new word invented for the English language because the North American resource management system it represents had no precedent in human history and thus no label that could be extended to our new way of governing resource use. or, ‘wise use.’ 

     We Americans are champion problem solvers. When confronted with the “tragedy of the commons” on the American frontier, we solved the problem by inventing the “public trustee” to take authority over the people’s property and manage it wisely so that we can use it and conserve it at the same time. The “trustee” appointed by the people for the management task is our government – local, state and federal.

     Indeed, what loss of value of our public resources that does occur typically comes via the influence and effect of converting our state and national public properties into private hands – ‘unwise use.’ 

     A major reason the parable of the ‘Triumph of the Commons’ is less often told than that of the ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ is simply because people who want to take personal profit from our public resources use the negative parable as propaganda to persuade the American people to surrender part or all of their public ownership rights.

     Tragedy is a persuasive parable when you meet it in the context of our national obsession, spanning two centuries, to seize, occupy and exploit the North American continent. Manifest Destiny has been our brightest cultural light from pilgrim days to the present, and expanding private property rights always was a hallmark of the national idea of Manifest Destiny.

     A key difference from the Old World Order that our American forefathers made in their time was to assert that all people, even the most ordinary, have rights of private ownership that can’t be legally taken away without just compensation. 

     In feudal Europe, the King owned everything and the people were merely tenants. The American Revolution and the establishment of the U.S. Constitution changed all that in the United States. 'We The People' became our own sovereign. And we set out at the very beginning to protect our individual rights from any future kings or despots. There is no more strongly held value today among the American people than that of ‘private property rights.’

     As long as there was more public property available than there were Americans to exploit it nobody paid much attention to preserving some of the public resource for the future. About the time that we realized that we had seized, occupied and were in the process of exploiting everything from sea-to-sea, a few people began to speak out for holding back parts of the continent from private ownership in order to preserve it unspoiled for future generations. And that is just what ‘We The People’ did. Every time you set foot on a national park or forest, or wildlife refuge, state management area or any of several other public trust properties you are receiving the gift of foresight from citizens who came before you – we are the ‘future generation’ they saved for.

     From this 19^th Century public outcry came the National Parks, National Forests, National Monuments, Wildlife Refuges, BLM lands, state lands and other elements of the public estate that we continue to own in common today as a nation of people equal before our laws.

     One important part of our American Conservation Movement has lagged behind, however. And the lagging of that part leaves the door open to actual tragedy on the American commons. 

     That ‘part’ is the education of the American people to the fact that they are responsible as owners of public property - even though its held in common under direct supervision of hired help we call a trustee. Yes, it’s true, in addition to being the owners of their personal private property; American citizens have to participate in the management of their public estate. 

     One thing that private property and public property have in common is that: "if you want to keep it you had better keep your eye on it." Pickpockets are everywhere.

     Preserving the value of our public property demands the same diligence as does preserving the value of private property. Just because the people have created a ‘trustee’ in the form of laws and government agencies to administer the laws does not mean the people don’t have to constantly keep a sharp eye out for those who would take unjust value from us - including the occasional wayward trustee. 

     Turn your back for an instant and the private ‘Takers’ start telling the public Trustee

what to do. The economic interests I call ‘Takers’ will slice a piece of value such as unsustainable resource extraction off here and block an ownership right such as access by locking you out there. And they will try to persuade you, Jane and John Public, to believe their taking is for your own good so that the alleged “tragedy of the commons” doesn’t occur – even as they are leading you directly down the path away from triumph and toward tragedy.

     Assertion of public property rights in our national conversation is the effort to wake people up to the value of their public land, water, wildlife, wilderness, air and mineral property birthright – and to act on their responsibility as citizen-owners of the public estate.

     Ownership without owner engagement inevitably leads to property (and rights) lost.

     The great irony is that resistance to recognition of public property rights comes entirely from ostensible champions of private property rights. Proper, lawful enjoyment by the people of their public property rights does not subtract one iota of lawful value from the private property nearby but you would never know that from listening to the incendiary rhetoric of ‘land grabs’ and ‘socialism’ thrown at every exercise of public rights.

     In reality, the only ‘value’ the private property owner stands to lose is any public property value they have previously taken from the public when he or she has encroached, ‘borrowed’, diverted, locked off or otherwise claimed until challenged by outraged members of the public. On the other hand, enhancing value of one property in a neighborhood also enhances the value of adjacent properties. Public and private property rights are mutually complimentary where people are intent on being good neighbors rather than becoming value competitors.

     The creation of public property and the assertion by the people of their authority to appoint a trustee and control their property is the genesis of our National Triumph of the Commons. The people should not surrender their public property rights with less regret than they would feel for loss for all other personal rights civil and inalienable.