Roughly half of all rangelands leased by the Bureau of Land Management for livestock grazing do not meet baseline health standards, according to a new analysis by a government watchdog group.
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, analyzed BLM data covering assessments of about 108 million acres of land that has been leased for livestock grazing, and found that about 54 million acres — an area about the size of the state of Washington — failed so-called land health standards for basic physical and biological factors.
PEER today released an interactive map based on information it obtained via the Freedom of Information Act from BLM between 1997 and 2019.
