Melissa Shawcroft spent more than 30 years managing 250,000 acres of publicly owned grazing lands in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. A veteran employee of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Shawcroft retired earlier this month after years of working to reform the agency from within. She can now share her concerns in public without fear of reprisal, and her assessment of the agency is not pretty. The BLM, she believes, is failing to protect America’s public lands. She saw it in San Luis, she said: Despite her best efforts, many of the region’s rangelands are in a bad state — their springs running dry, native grasses depleted, and allotment boundaries relentlessly violated by trespassing ranchers who graze livestock without permission.
The troubled state of BLM grazing lands is not confined to Shawcroft’s corner of Colorado. According to data released today by the nonpartisan Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), 56.7 million acres of BLM rangeland fail to meet the agency’s land health standards, primarily owing to livestock grazing. Particularly hard-hit are the high, cold deserts of Nevada, Wyoming and southern Idaho; In Nevada alone, approximately 22 million acres of public grazing land do not meet health standards.