High Country News

Alsup used nearly the same language Thursday morning. Ahead of the hearing, the plaintiffs had sought an injunction against an expanded list of defendants that included all 23 federal agencies that dismissed probationary staff. Alsup applied his ruling to the departments of Veteran Affairs ...

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 ...

The Bureau of Land Management oversees 246 million acres of land — scrubby sagebrush, rolling deserts and dense forests — mostly in the Western U.S. It’s home to all sorts of things, from sage grouse, pronghorn and ponderosa pines to dirt bikers, cows and drilling infrastructure. But ...

ULTIMATELY, HOWEVER, all the protections in the world don’t mean a whole lot if they aren’t enforced. Just as he has for more than three decades, Cliven Bundy continues to run his cattle illegally on public lands in southern Nevada, where they gnaw on sparse vegetation and trample ...

Low fees are only one of the places the feds have dropped the ball on grazing. The data shows that the BLM fails to meet its own standards for rangeland health. Agency-managed national monuments — including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah and Canyon ...