Help end livestock damage to Wilderness

Wilderness Watch applauds Representative Adam Smith of Washington State for reintroducing the Voluntary Grazing Permit Retirement Act (VGPRA). The legislation will expand the successful model of voluntary federal livestock grazing permit retirement across the western U.S., including in Wilderness. Wilderness Watch has supported similar legislation in previous Congresses.

Incredibly, permitted livestock grazing is authorized on over 200 million acres of federal public lands, including on over 13 million acres of the 52 million acres of protected Wilderness in the lower 48 states. ​​​​​Taxpayers heavily subsidize privately-owned livestock to trample and eat native vegetation on public lands as ranching corporations pay just $1.35 per month for the privilege of grazing a cow and her calf, or five sheep, on our public lands, including in Wilderness.

Wilderness Watch strongly supports the VGPRA as it offers a solution toward ending livestock damage in Wilderness. This bill will work to bolster protection of public lands and Wilderness areas, allotment-by-allotment, fairly and permanently.

Please urge your representative to co-sponsor and pass this critical piece of legislation to protect Wilderness and its wildlife.

Specifically, the VGPRA:

• Authorizes ranchers in 16 Western states to voluntarily waive federal grazing permits or leases with the intent to permanently end livestock grazing on an allotment, including those in Wilderness.
• Ensures that any retired allotment cannot be re-leased for new grazing permits.
• Helps restore wildlife corridors, protect water quality, and reduce the costs of administering grazing programs.

Livestock grazing damages Wilderness and our public lands in a number of ways—including harming water quality, spreading invasive weeds, trampling riparian vegetation, and displacing wildlife.

Yet at 0.1 percent of all forage fed to livestock in the United States, grazing in Wilderness hardly contributes to the U.S. livestock industry. However, due to the grazing language in the 1964 Wilderness Act and its 1980s-era corollary, the Congressional Grazing Guidelines, livestock grazing has been occurring in otherwise undomesticated Wilderness areas for over half a century.

Domestic cattle and sheep grazing are fundamentally at odds with the ideals of the Wilderness Act. Livestock grazing in Wilderness creates conflict with native species, including bighorn sheep, grizzly bears, wolves, sage-grouse, fish, amphibians, and rare plants. Livestock grazing also contributes to a “de-wilding” of the landscape for visitors, many of whom head to Wilderness areas to escape reminders of human influence.

Representative Smith’s VGPRA stands in stark contrast to current administrative and legislative efforts to stock every vacant allotment—including in Wilderness—with livestock or increase grazing by reducing environmental review.