Why ranchers have never been the original conservationists
The historical record behind a slogan now being used to dismantle sage grouse protections across the West.
Last week, the Bureau of Land Management finalized sweeping amendments to greater sage grouse management plans across Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, and the Dakotas. The plans revise Environmental Impact Statements left unfinished by the previous administration. The livestock industry immediately declared victory.
In statements circulated by the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Public Lands Council, industry leaders praised the plans for recognizing ranchers as “the original conservationists” and for elevating livestock grazing as a tool for habitat protection, wildfire prevention, and sage grouse recovery. “These plans unleash the conservation prowess of federal lands ranchers,” they claimed, follow the “best available science” and reflect a bottom-up approach driven by commercial operators who “manage this species every day.”
This framing of cattlemen as mythic ecological heroes is not new. It is one of the most durable propaganda tropes in western land politics. And like most durable myths, it is repeated not because it is true, but because it is useful.
American conservation did not emerge from ranching culture. It emerged in reaction to ecological collapse caused in part by overgrazing by domestic, non-native cattle. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unregulated grazing, logging, mining, and land speculation were degrading Western landscapes at a scale that threatened watersheds, soils, and wildlife. Open-range grazing stripped native vegetation, destabilized soils, and pushed entire ecosystems to the Dust Bowl.
The steady and ongoing decline of sage grouse, cataloged in a recent federal report, is in significant measure the livestock industry’s handiwork. Sage grouse didn’t just decline near mines and in industrial oil and gas fields. They declined on public lands where the only departure from pre-settlement conditions was the addition of domestic cattle and sheep, grazing off 50 to 65 percent of the grasses that grow every year. Today the native grasses are grazed to oblivion, replaced by flammable weeds, and fire—once rare—sweeps frequently through the high-desert basins to wipe out the sagebrush that sage grouse need to survive.
National Forests were created largely in part to protect watersheds from overgrazing and timber abuse, and grazing itself soon required federal control. The Taylor Grazing Act was passed in 1934 after decades of damage, amid the rangeland collapse of the Dust Bowl. It imposed permits, stocking limits, and seasons because unregulated livestock use had proven ecologically destructive. Ultimately, the Bureau of Land Management was created to administer those limits, not to promote grazing as conservation, but to prevent “unnecessary and undue degradation” of the public lands.
The same dynamic shaped wildlife policy. Ranching interests pushed aggressively for predator eradication, and state and federal governments responded with bounties, poisons, and coordinated extermination campaigns that eliminated wolves, grizzlies, and mountain lions across most of the West. Those efforts shattered ecological relationships that true conservationists are still struggling to repair today, in direct opposition to the same industry now falsely claiming the mantle of conservation.
This is the historical context missing from claims that ranchers were “the original conservationists.” Conservation, as a movement and a legal framework, arose because restraint was absent, not because it was already being practiced.
That history matters, because the Trump administration’s sage grouse plan amendments, the ones the livestock industry is congratulating, do not strengthen conservation. They dismantle it.
Let’s take the brand-new Wyoming plan amendment as Exhibit A in the dismantling of sage grouse conservation. Wyoming is the state where a so-called “collaborative committee” generated a state sage grouse plan built on concessions to industrial interests offering the appearance of conservation without its substance. The governor’s Executive Order codifying the state plan treats livestock operations as a “de minimis” activity, exempt from any regulation to benefit sage grouse.
As we warned when the plans were released, the amendments are designed to strip away habitat protections that might interfere with industrial-scale exploitation of sagebrush ecosystems, whether by oil and gas corporations or the livestock industry, even as sage grouse populations continue to decline. Safeguards that once functioned as enforceable standards have been downgraded into optional considerations, buried in appendices and stripped of legal force.
One of the clearest examples is the removal of the seven-inch grass-height standard across nearly all plan areas. This benchmark, grounded in peer-reviewed science, was incorporated into the 2015 sage grouse plans to provide essential hiding cover for nesting sage grouse and protection against excessive livestock grazing. Under the new amendments, it remains in place only in Montana and the Dakotas. Elsewhere, habitat objectives have been demoted from required thresholds to discretionary targets that can be exceeded without violating the plan.
The livestock industry got many other concessions as well, with eleven standards reduced to just six, and those remaining six watered down to become a sick joke. The measurable and enforceable numeric standards for vegetation objectives were replaced by vague,aspirational language specifically devised to be unenforceable.
Under the original plans, if land health standards were not met in Priority Habitats, and livestock were at fault, ‘the use will be adjusted’, and that course-correction could happen in any given year.
The Trump revisions instead defer changes until grazing permit renewal– an event that, more often than not, occurs under a legislative rider requiring the new permit to carry the same terms and conditions as the old one. This effectively blocks corrective action and the implementation of sage grouse habitat protections. Put more plainly, the sage grouse plans entirely eliminated the former requirement that grazing permit renewals be evaluated by prioritizing sage grouse habitat from the most important areas downward.
The plans eliminate requirements to maintain forbs in nesting and streamside chick-rearing habitats essential to the success of every succeeding generation of sage grouse. They also eliminate an option to consider whether new grazing leases should be issued when an existing permit is relinquished in sage grouse habitat. Not only do the new plan amendments strike the requirement to create a drought plan for each allotment to address forage scarcity and post-drought recovery, but also the word “drought” is entirely expunged from the plan’s standards and objectives. Finally, the requirement that livestock infrastructure contribute to rangeland health and maintain grouse habitats has been replaced by the vague objectives of such as “enhancing livestock distribution” or “controlling grazing.”
This was the wish-list the livestock lobby sought, and the Trump administration gave them everything they wanted. Conservation or the best interests of the declining sage grouse population never entered into it.
The same pattern appears in how the plans treat energy development. In designated Priority Habitats, firm No Surface Occupancy requirements have been replaced with a menu of weaker options, including Controlled Surface Use and seasonal timing limitations. In practice, this opens the door to drilling, roads, pipelines, and infrastructure in areas once considered too ecologically sensitive to industrialize. These changes fundamentally alter how much damage is legally permissible on public lands that sage grouse depend on.
In Wyoming, even areas that qualified for heightened protection were denied designation as Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, including the well-known Golden Triangle near South Pass. Across the West, habitat protections that also benefited mule deer, elk, pygmy rabbits, sage thrashers, and other sagebrush-dependent species are being rolled back in tandem.
The livestock industry leaders have described the new plans as a way to “unleash the conservation prowess of federal lands ranchers.”
It is worth pausing on that claim.
This same model of public lands ranching has coincided with the collapse of sage grouse populations from an estimated 16 million birds historically to perhaps 250,000 today. If this is what “conservation prowess” looks like, the record is unequivocal. The steady erosion of sagebrush habitat, the fragmentation of intact landscapes, and the degradation of nesting and brood-rearing areas did not happen in spite of livestock grazing. They happened alongside it, often because of it, under a system that consistently prioritized private forage over public wildlife.
This is where the “original conservationist” myth does its real propaganda work. It reframes long-term ecological decline as stewardship. It casts deregulation as science-based flexibility. It suggests that land protected from intensive use is somehow being “tied up” and allowed to degrade, while continuous grazing and expanded industrial access are recast as ecological necessities.
But sage grouse did not evolve in landscapes shaped by year-round livestock pressure, fragmented by roads, or perforated by oil and gas wells. They evolved in intact sagebrush ecosystems governed by native herbivores, fire regimes, and seasonal rhythms. The science on this is not ambiguous. Grazing removes nesting cover, degrades wet meadows used for brood-rearing, eliminates forbs that are key foods for brood-rearing sage grouse, and facilitates invasive grasses that increase fire frequency and acreage. These impacts are cumulative, measurable, and well documented.
In addition, more than a million kilometers (620,000 miles) of fencing has been strung across the West for the benefit of the livestock industry. Fences are deadly to low-flying grouse; a single stretch of fence less than 5 miles long killed 146 sage grouse over the course of a year and a half, according to a Wyoming Game and Fish Department report. Even after marking the fences with plastic tabs so they are more visible to flying grouse, collision mortalities continued at 39% of the unmarked fences, a still-astronomical killing rate.
Calling ranchers the “original conservationists” does not change these realities. It hides them.
None of this is to say that individual ranchers never care for land. Some do. But conservation is not defined by intent. It is defined by outcomes, accountability, and limits. It can be measured by the vast acreages of grazing allotments that federal agencies themselves admit are failing Land Health standards. Historically and structurally, public lands ranching has been organized around maximizing forage extraction, with ecological costs borne by wildlife, waterways, tribes, and the public swept under the carpet.
The Trump administration’s sage grouse plans make one thing painfully clear. The myth of the rancher-as-conservationist is not just inaccurate. It is actively being used to justify the dismantling of the very protections that sage grouse and sagebrush ecosystems need to survive. And as those protections disappear, the question will not be who managed the land best, but whether the bird was ever given a fair chance at all.
Erik Molvar is the executive director and Grace Kuhn is the digital director for Western Watersheds Project.
Reading this just makes me want to vomit. Cattle grazing as conservation is a total fraud but what truly makes me sick is that most Americans either don’t know about it or don’t care.