While the lawsuit concerns the desert tortoise, Molvar said the problem extends far beyond this sliver of Nevada. BLM is generally mandated by federal law to assess the environmental health of grazing land before it renews ranchers permits, but Molvar said the agency often fails to do so, resulting in widespread environmental degradation (WWP sued BLM and other agencies last month on this issue, too).
The environmental nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), which is involved in the second WWP lawsuit, analyzed decades of BLM data and found that about half of the acreage it oversees that has been assessed fails to meet the agencys own land health standards (in Nevada, its an alarming 83 percent). PEER points to livestock grazing as the primary source of land degradation.