A Look Back on 30 Years of Battling Public Land and Livestock Injustices

How one Idaho resident's frustration with trespassing cattle launched a 30-year battle for the public lands.

Photo by Chris Kofoed on Unsplash

This article was originally featured in the Fall 2023 Watersheds Messenger.

Jon Marvel moved to Stanley, Idaho in 1969. Cattle from the National Forest grazed the area from early June until the November snows. By the first of September, the cattle had grazed off all the grass on National Forest lands, and would then break through fences onto private property to pillage the grass found there. The ranchers were from Challis; they weren’t even locals. “The ranchers didn’t even care,” Marvel reminisces. “The typical response was, ‘You’d better keep your dog away from our cows, Jon. I’m going to have to shoot him if I see him,’ one said. Another response was, ‘That’s your problem, it’s not my problem.’” Another rancher, caught trespassing on Marvel’s property, had the hubris to say, “We’ve been here from the beginning of time.”

When the Sawtooth National Recreation Area was established in 1972, the Forest Service put Marvel on a grazing committee. Cattle crowded the creeks, damaging the salmon and steelhead habitat, and the new committee met for the next 15 years to address the issue. But ultimately it made no progress in correcting the problem. “It became clear to me that the Forest Service was complicit with ranching, and that basically they were not interested in changing much of anything,” Marvel observes. A 1993 EIS on the Stanley Basin allotments reduced the area grazed significantly, but left the door open for ungrazed lands to be reopened later to livestock. “And that was only because we had one of the very few very good area rangers, of which there have been only two in the last 50 years,” says Marvel.

That District Ranger was later promoted to Deputy Forest Supervisor on the Chugach National Forest in Alaska. “She called me up once from Alaska,” says Marvel, “and said, ‘Jon you can’t believe how great the streams look up here.’” They didn’t have a single cattle permit on the Chugach National Forest.

“I think that it’s still, to this day, critically important that Western Watersheds exists because it is influential, in ways that nobody in the West had any influence,” says Marvel. “Even when Johanna Wald [of Natural Resources Defense Council] forced the BLM to initiate NEPA analysis of grazing, that all had to be adjudicated too, because the BLM acted like grazing was just an ongoing activity that didn’t need any analysis, but just went on forever because it was part of the fabric of the West.” That seminal lawsuit was filed in 1976, forcing agencies to consider environmental effects before renewing cattle and sheep grazing.

“The very first EIS on grazing was in Challis, Idaho,” Marvel observes. “And that caused a lot of dismay, because ranchers didn’t want any regulatory structure that told them what to do. And that’s what a land-use plan is all about.”

The widespread destruction of public lands by the livestock industry was becoming a more prominent environmental issue. “[Famed environmental author] Ed Abbey had come out against ranchers in 1986, at a meeting in Missoula, where he was booed by the audience there,” says Marvel. “He gave a great talk about what ranchers were, and what was wrong with them, and what they were destroying. So, there were plenty of people who knew what was wrong, but I don’t think it ever captured enough attention at a national level, as a problem – public lands ranching.”

“About that time Lynn Jacobs’ book was self-published … it’s called Waste of the West,” Marvel recalls. “It also has a chapter called ‘The Benefits of Public Lands Ranching.’ It’s one page long. And the main benefit is that it makes some people feel important.”

By 1988, Marvel had become what was then called an “affected interest” on Bureau of Land Management grazing allotments around Hailey, Idaho. The District Manager, a fellow named David Kohler, tried to dissuade him, saying, “You know, Jon, I don’t really see that you’re going to have the time to do this.” That turned out to be the wrong thing to say, and Marvel was undeterred. Ultimately Kohler would approve him as an “affected interest.”

At about this time, environmental groups began to rally around the slogan, “Cattle Free by ‘93.” But internal squabbling and fear of political backlash undermined the nascent movement. “Even having a catchy phrase like Cattle Free by ‘93 was insufficient when you have entrenched bureaucracies,” Marvel wistfully observes. “It went away because ‘93 came and went.”

In the fall of 1993, Marvel took a field tour to Lake Creek, up on the Herd Creek allotment together with Linn Kincannon of the Idaho Conservation League, and Lynne Stone, founder of the Boulder-White Clouds Council. Lake Creek was beaten down to dust by cattle, with erosion and cutbanks, and all the classic signs of overgrazing.

Marvel noticed that there was a one-square-mile parcel of state land, and decided to call the state Department of Lands and find out what the leasing policy was. There, a very helpful official told him that anyone could apply for a state grazing lease, that it was settled by an Idaho Supreme Court decision in 1921. And the Lake Creek lease was set to expire two weeks later. So Marvel ginned up a name for a new organization, which he named “Idaho Watersheds Project,” and applied to participate in the lease auction.

In December, this acquisition by an environmentalist was brought to the attention of the Idaho Secretary of State, Pete Cenarrusa, a sheep rancher and State Land Board member. Cenarrusa took exception to a grazing lease being purchased by an environmentalist, and he raised a public ruckus in the newspapers. But the lease auction went forward nonetheless, and Marvel traveled to Idaho Falls for the auction. He opened the bidding for $30, and Will Ingram, the rancher who held the lease, expressed his consternation. Marvel heard the rancher say, “No, I’m not bidding. That’s too goddamn much.” So Idaho Watersheds Project won the bid and became the proud leaseholder of the Lake Creek allotment, which WWP still holds to this day.

But the lease wouldn’t be officially conveyed to Idaho Watersheds Project for many years. The Land Board voted to overturn the auction three weeks later, and gave the lease back to the original rancher. That kicked off a series of court cases that went all the way to the Idaho Supreme Court, which ultimately – eight years later – ruled that the state Department of Lands has an obligation to lease the state lands to the highest bidder in order to maximize income to the state School Trust fund. “We won three Idaho Supreme Court decisions on one day, all by unanimous opinions, in regard to the administration of state lands in Idaho,” Marvel crows. “And that really broke the back of the opposition to competition.”

Many years later, in 2021, Western Watersheds Project once again went head-to-head with a state grazing lessee, and won the right to lease the 640-acre Champion Creek lease in the Sawtooth Valley. It would never have happened without that early court battle.

Just as Idaho Watersheds was winning its first state grazing lease, newly-appointed Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt was initiating a grazing reform package. “In the grazing regulation rewrite, Bruce Babbitt proposed an increase in the grazing fee. And within, I think, three weeks, that was gone completely from the proposal. Since Babbitt has left office, he has publicly stated, ‘We should end public lands ranching.’ … But look at where we are. It’s thirty years later, and we’re still dealing with the same formula, and the same $1.35 a month.”

“Something that is completely uneconomic, and just sustains certain people so they can buy a new truck every third year, and is very deleterious for ecological health and wildlife and fisheries, that all those things should come together and promote change,” Marvel continues. “And yet we can’t even get new grazing regulations proposed out of the Biden administration. Seems to me quite possible that they may proclaim this Conservation Rule for the BLM, but it’s basically a meaningless thing from my perspective.”

The Clinton grazing regulations did improve the situation, although perhaps falling short of their ‘Rangeland Reform’ billing. “They did change the game because they created ‘Interested Public’ status for anyone who requested it,” says Marvel. “I think they were initiated because Bruce Babbitt, as a rancher himself from near Flagstaff, Arizona, knew that change was needed. And if you read the Draft EIS for Range Reform, it has some of the best analysis of existing conditions on BLM lands in the American West. They really got it right. But when it came to actually completing the regulations to follow up on the NEPA analysis, it was better but it was kind of a letdown. It didn’t accomplish sufficient change.”

By the end of the 1990s, it was becoming apparent that acquiring state leases took a lot of work and money, and the return on investment was relatively limited. Marvel’s outfit then turned to working on Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands, because federal decisions affected a much larger area. “So that’s when we changed the name to Western Watersheds Project,” says Marvel. “And started a healthy dose of litigation against the Forest Service and the BLM in ways that they had not seen before. Because, as you know, ranching is one of those sacrosanct little arenas of the West where, because ranchers are iconic, and of course they’re all white males, and they wear big hats.” Marvel gives a sardonic grin and adds, “And they represent the finest part of the American Dream.”

Western Watersheds Project went on to win many, many lawsuits. “And that has been very beneficial,” asserts Marvel. “Because we know that the Forest Service and the BLM hate litigation, because it sucks up their time.”

Western Watersheds would eventually head to court in 2006 to defend the Clinton-era grazing regulations when the George W. Bush administration attempted to replace them with regulations giving much greater control of public lands to the livestock industry. “The overturning of the George W. Bush grazing regulation rewrite, and that was finally cleared through Idaho Federal District Judge B. Lynn Winmill and then the 9th Circuit by 2011,” says Marvel. “But those Bush regulations, they were very bad. It was like a recidivist attempt to re-establish the 1960s. And we stopped that.”

Western Watersheds Project would go on to win a lawsuit overturning the denial of Endangered Species protections for sage grouse in 2009, a victory that gave impetus to West-wide sage grouse plan amendments to boost habitat protections on federal lands. These new plans set grass-height objectives that should have seriously decreased cattle and sheep grazing in sage grouse habitats, but thus far the agencies have dragged their feet in requiring compliance.

After retiring from WWP in 2023, Marvel became a key leader of the Sagebrush Habitat Conservation Fund, established to manage WWP settlement dollars to buy out and retire federal grazing permits, and to support WWP’s efforts to reform livestock grazing. It has met with considerable success, buying out over half a million acres of grazing permits on federal land so far.

“Just north of Ketchum, the old North Fork Boulder allotment, free of sheep for the first time in 130 years, is just bouncing back in ways that are unexpected.” In northwestern Nevada, the Sagebrush Fund bought the Vya Ranch and its federal grazing leases, hoping to create a larger cattle-free core of public lands incorporating Hart Mountain and Sheldon National Wildlife Refuges. “We already have more wildlife there,” Marvel notes, referencing camera traps that have captured increasing numbers of bears, elk and deer, large numbers of pronghorns, even bighorn sheep. “That’s only going to get better over time.”

There is a well-known phenomenon called ‘shifting baseline syndrome,’ in which people believe that present conditions represent the way things always were, or ought to be. Many Americans look at the vast tracts of overgrazed public land, and think that’s normal, because they don’t know any different. “In the American West, we’ve all internalized the landscape as it is now,” Marvel points out. “That’s why it’s so important to have areas that don’t have livestock, so you can compare them. Whether that’s Yellowstone National Park, or the allotments north of Ketchum, that we retired here, 90,000 acres. People notice differences. They may not fully understand why there are differences, but they do notice.”

“Maybe the best legacy we have organizationally is successfully creating, long-term, areas with no livestock at all,” Marvel concludes.

The pace of livestock reforms in the West has been disappointingly slow, and Marvel points to a built-in culture of acquiescence within the land management agencies that is too strong to overcome even by insiders, even under Democratic administrations. Of the current group of agency officials, Marvel observes, “We’re dealing with people who set priorities based on political perceptions, not based on the health of the landscape, or concern for wildlife, or even recreation.”

“I don’t know the answer to the politics, and the entrenched mythology,” Marvel adds, with conviction. “But I’d say that Western Watersheds Project has done more to undermine that than anybody else. And that’s pretty clear.”

Erik Molvar is the executive director for Western Watersheds Project. This article was originally featured in the Fall 2023 Watersheds Messenger.