For Immediate Release: 1/10/2025
Contact:
Laura Welp, Southern Utah Director, Western Watersheds Project laura@westernwatersheds.org 435-899-0204
WASHINGTON – The Bureau of Land Management has released its new Resource Management Plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, a place world-renowned for its extraordinary archeology, geology, and wildlife habitat and which contains the ancestral homelands for many Tribal Nations.
The new plan maintains grazing closures in the Escalante Canyons and limits future grazing in areas that have been heavily battered by livestock for decades. It also allows for permanent retirement of allotments for conservation use when a rancher voluntarily relinquishes their permit. In addition, there is direction for scheduling timely rangeland health assessments on all allotments, something lacking on most Bureau units. The new plan also closes areas to grazing where it conflicts with recreation, such as the world-renowned Lower Calf Creek Falls and the Muley Twist canyon.
“We are disappointed that livestock grazing continues at all on the monument, but the two-year deadline for land health assessments on key fragile lands is a step forward,” said Laura Welp, Southern Utah Director for Western Watersheds Project and former botanist for the monument. “We are pleased that the plan contains several forward-looking provisions on grazing management, keeping the fragile desert waterways and world-class recreation destinations of the Escalante Canyons closed to domestic livestock. We remain committed to additional grazing reforms and will stay focused on the Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument in the years to come.”
Conservationists also raised concerns over the plan’s approach to vegetation treatments. Legal battles have raged in recent decades over projects to bulldoze or chain down ecologically important pinyon-juniper woodlands, key habitats for declining species of birds.
“These are deforestation projects where management violently rips native trees and shrubs out of the ground to make way for forage plants,” said Welp. “This risks infestation by cheatgrass and other weeds, and has in the past reduced habitat for plants, birds, wildlife, and pollinators. It also destroys biological soil crust that takes decades to recover.”
While the Bureau claims such treatments help reduce fire risk and restore habitat, they rarely have this result. Western Watersheds Project had advocated for the Monument to restore native functioning ecosystems by prohibiting the use of non-native seed in its treatments. The plan still allows for non-native seeds.
Background:
Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was the first unit designated in the National Conservation Lands System, with an emphasis on science-based protection for landscape-scale functioning native ecosystems. Management has emphasized higher protections for geology, paleontology, wildlife, plant communities, and cultural sites to preserve the exceptional values that led to monument designation. Local communities have benefited economically from Monument establishment. As we face the challenges of climate change and drought, the science-based management on Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument is our best hope for the preservation of these ecosystems in southern Utah.
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