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The Bureau of Land Management released an ambitious plan for removing flammable vegetation on public lands used by livestock ranchers. The plan aims to limit the potential for disastrous wildfires on 350,000 square miles of sagebrush across Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada and Utah.
The plan to protect sagebrush from devastating wildfire originated during the Obama administration and is also intended to protect sage-grouse habitat and recreation activities. In recent decades, massive rangeland wildfires in sagebrush-steppe ecosystems driven by the proliferation of highly flammable invasive annual grasses like cheatgrass have swept across the Great Basin states, threatening sage-grouse and 350 other species that depend on the region for survival.
The plan released last Friday does not authorize any specific projects, though it could be used to green-light the approval of fuel breaks and other treatments including mechanical removal of vegetation, prescribed fire, targeted grazing by cattle, and revegetation efforts.
Erik Molvar with the Western Watersheds Project criticized the BLM's new plan, saying, “With this project, the BLM is clearly trying to write itself a blank check to do large and damaging vegetation removal without any further input or detailed analysis. This is an agency whose track record of vegetation manipulation has overwhelmingly resulted in habitat destruction.”
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There’s that big push to address climate change because we’re feeling the effects more so than other places. We’ve always been taught and are still being told we have to preserve for the future generations."
