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Enviro groups sue over grazing plan in southwestern Montana
-- Three environmental groups sued Tuesday to stop a U.S. Forest Service livestock grazing plan in southwest Montana, west of Yellowstone National Park.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court at Missoula by The Native Ecosystems Council, The Alliance for the Wild Rockies and The Ecology Center.
It refers to the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest's plans to manage about 48,000 acres in the Antelope Basin and Elk Lake area, north of the Redrocks Lake National Wildlife refuge. The groups contend the plan is skewed toward livestock at the expense of sage grouse and other wildlife dependent on sagebrush habitats.
Forest Service officials said 41 percent of the area won't be grazed by livestock during any given year under the new management plan, already in force. About 9,000 acres are rested each year under a rest-rotation grazing system, and another 5,500 acres have seen set aside to protect lands around lakes and sensitive streams.
The environmental groups contend too much emphasis has been placed on producing grass for livestock rather than creating a sagebrush habitat that could help re-establish sage grouse and protect grayling fish and other wildlife.
Sage grouse numbers have been dwindling throughout the West. The state is working toward developing a management plan in an effort to boost the population.
"The Forest Service has been converting the sagebrush-grassland habitat in Antelope Basin to grazing pasture since the 1960s by spraying herbicides and burning," said Sara Jane Johnson of the Native Ecosystems Council.
"The Forest Service eliminated nearly 75 percent of the sagebrush habitat in the area," said Johnson. "Without habitat the sage grouse is going to be driven to extinction."
Michael Garrity of The Alliance for the Wild Rockies said agency has chosen to make the allotment a livestock feed ground at the expense of other multiple use values.
"This is bad economics and bad public land management," he said in a statement. "The Forest Service is proposing to spend $600,000 of taxpayers' dollars transforming the critical sage grouse habitat of Antelope Basin into a stockyard."
Bob Sitz, a Harrison rancher who grazes cattle in Antelope Basin, said Garrity's reference to a stockyard was "a blatant lie" and so was the reference to $600,000.
Sitz said the Antelope Basin area was among the first areas in the country to establish guidelines to protect sensitive riparian areas and use rotation grazing systems that keep livestock off areas periodically.
"There is no middle ground for groups like these," said Sitz. "They just want to fight — they have an agenda to get livestock off public lands."
Efforts in the area to reduce sagebrush on a large scaled ended in the early 1970s, Sitz said. Since then, there have been smaller controlled burns to both create different age classes in sagebrush fields and to push back encroaching conifer trees. Some of the controlled burning also helped regenerate aspen stands, he said.
"There is a reason why people think the area is so beautiful," said Sitz. "We've cooperated with the Forest Service and worked together to make things better. Sure, there's still things that we can do. We're willing to make improvements."
Many family ranch operations depend on being able to take cattle onto public lands in the summer, said Sitz. Otherwise, more ranches would be sold and probably subdivided, he said.
"I wonder if these people would be happier seeing it with houses covering it. The choice is really theirs."
