“Progress,” According to the Public Lands Council
How the livestock industry defines success on your public lands—and why we see it differently.
It’s always revealing to hear how the livestock industry defines “progress.”
This week, the Public Lands Council—the national lobbying arm of the public lands ranching industry—sent a mid-year victory lap to its members. Their executive director proudly laid out what they’ve accomplished in just six months: rolling back environmental protections, gutting habitat safeguards, and reshaping federal land policy to better serve private livestock interests.
All on our public lands. All on the public dime.
Let’s be clear: this is the playbook. The ranching lobby doesn’t just want to graze cattle across the arid West—they want to rewrite the rules of engagement. And in 2025, with a compliant Congress and an Interior Department bending to industry pressure, they’re doing exactly that.
What they call “burdens,” we call protections
According to the PLC, one of their proudest achievements so far this year is helping to dismantle protections that “burdened landowners” and “reduced opportunities for voluntary conservation.”
Translation: they’re celebrating the proposed rollback of landmark safeguards like the 2001 Roadless Rule, Endangered Species Act regulations, and NEPA processes that allow the public to weigh in on major environmental decisions. They cheered the death of the BLM’s Landscape Health Rule and the Forest Service’s effort to retain old-growth trees. These aren't tweaks—they're takedowns of the most basic guardrails we have to protect native species, clean water, and the last functioning wild ecosystems in the American West.
To them, conservation is a threat. Regulations are nothing but inconvenience. Oversight is government overreach.
The myth of the “good steward”
Public lands ranchers love to call themselves “good stewards.” They invoke tradition, legacy, and local knowledge. They insist that no one cares more for the land than they do.
Their definition of “care” is very different from ours, because we don’t think caring for the land means stripping it of biodiversity. It doesn’t mean converting native plant communities into invasive cheatgrass monocultures, pushing sage grouse to the brink, killing off predators, and demanding taxpayer-funded subsidies when forage runs out. Real stewardship means putting ecosystem health first—not squeezing more beef products out of a collapsing range.
And yet the PLC continues to frame any critique of grazing as a “false narrative,” claiming—on the back of a new University of Idaho study—that cattle are actually helping sage grouse. What they don’t mention is that the study was bankrolled in part by the Public Lands Council itself, alongside the Idaho Cattle Association and other livestock interests.
This wasn’t neutral science—it was industry-funded messaging dressed up as research.
Never mind the overwhelming body of independent studies showing that overgrazing is one of the primary drivers of habitat fragmentation and sage grouse decline across the West. In the hands of the livestock lobby, science isn’t a tool for truth—it’s a tool for marketing. A means to manufacture doubt, reframe degradation as stewardship, and defend a broken system that rewards the destruction of public lands under the guise of care.
The war on wildness
The Council’s midyear list of wins reads like a checklist of everything threatening the wild character of the West.
They’re celebrating signals from the Interior Department to “reduce on-range populations of wild horses and burros”—a sanitized phrase for mass removals to benefit their operations. They back efforts to expand grazing into areas once set aside for wildlife. And they cheer the end of “the decades-long pendulum over BLM sage grouse management”—code for eliminating meaningful protections for a species they see as a regulatory nuisance.
Predator protections are under siege. The Council praised recent steps to “correct ill-advised policy on depredation confirmations in Arizona and New Mexico”—a reference to policies that had required proof before the endangered Mexican wolf could be killed or removed for allegedly eating livestock. Now, under industry pressure, even that small barrier is falling.
The livestock industry wants wolves gone. Grizzlies gone. Plans to protect sage grouse stripped off the books. Forests opened. Watersheds grazed. And every environmental law that stands in their way—NEPA, ESA, FLPMA—weakened or ignored.
A land grab in plain sight
Also in the PLC’s update is a revealing section titled “Commentary on Public Lands,” where they unpack their disappointment over the collapse of Senator Mike Lee’s plan to force the sale of federal lands through this year’s GOP reconciliation bill—the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
Senator Lee’s original proposal would have mandated the sale of up to 1.75% of federal land in the West. It was struck down by the Senate Parliamentarian, but he returned with a scaled-back version that still would have liquidated more than a million acres. That version was ultimately withdrawn—but not before triggering a tidal wave of public opposition.
The Council claims it had no hand in shaping the legislation, but it’s not the content they object to—it’s the backlash. They write, almost wistfully, that opposition to Lee’s proposal “seems to be edging closer to a widespread opposition to disposal of any acres… and that’s a problem for all of us.”
For the Public Lands Council, the problem isn’t selling off public land. It’s the fact that people are starting to fight back.
They don’t just want more access. They want to redefine what public lands are for. And whether it’s under federal ownership or transferred to private hands, one thing is clear: grazing must continue. As they put it, PLC “will continue to protect grazing at every turn, regardless of land ownership.”
That’s not conservation. It’s entitlement.
Monopoly, not “multiple use”
The Council claims to support “true multiple use” of public lands. But their vision of multiple use always ends the same way: with cattle.
They oppose wilderness designations. They oppose national monuments. They oppose endangered species listings. They oppose environmental review. They oppose public oversight. And they demand more subsidies and fewer restrictions at every turn.
And the public pays the price: in eroded streambanks, collapsed sagebrush ecosystems, poisoned water, lost wildlife, and firefighting costs on degraded, cheatgrass-choked lands.
A different kind of legacy
The Public Lands Council sees 2025 as a banner year. We see it as a warning.
At Western Watersheds Project, we believe public lands should serve the public interest: protecting native wildlife, clean water, biodiversity, and the wild integrity of the American West. Not subsidizing an unsustainable industry at the expense of everything else.
Grace Kuhn is the Digital Director for Western Watersheds Project. grace@westernwatersheds.org
Infuriating how the privatizers are never satisfied. In this dark era only litigation can slow them down.