It’s too bad for conservationists and all Americans, but Tracy Stone-Manning, Biden’s new Bureau of Land Management (BLM) director, is continuing the Trump administration’s policy of destructive public land grazing. The BLM administers 246 million acres of public land, mainly in the intermountain west, with the mission is to “sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”
To find out if the BLM was achieving its mission of “sustaining the health of public lands, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) sent Freedom of Information Act requests to gather data on 21,000 grazing allotments covering 155 million acres of public lands administered by the BLM.
Although BLM has yet to even assess the health of 41 million acres, about half of all the assessed grazing allotments in the American west – 54 million acres – are severely degraded, finding livestock grazing as “the significant cause” on 72% of those lands. The results are contained on a very interesting interactive map.