The Interior Department released plans Thursday designed to stave off an endangered listing for the greater sage grouse, an issue that has sparked a battle over conservation and development in 10 of the 11 Western states where the bird lives.
“This has been an unprecedented collaborative effort across the West,” Interior Secretary Sally Jewell said at an event in Cheyenne, Wyo., where she was joined by Republican Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead.
The move comes after Interior earlier this month signaled it would elevate states’ roles in rehabilitating populations of endangered species. The Obama administration has come under criticism from Republican lawmakers who say the White House uses the Endangered Species Act too broadly.
The Interior Department has until Sept. 30 to decide whether to list the greater sage grouse as endangered. The bird’s habitat — about two-thirds of which exists on federal land — has dropped to 156 million acres, a decline of 56 percent, due to rangeland fire, habitat fragmentation caused by energy production and invasive species, according to Interior. Its population is less than 200,000, down from 16 million, the American Bird Conservancy said.
Some have seen the intended changes to promote state action combined with the new management plans and a decision last month against listing the bi-state sage grouse, a subspecies of the greater sage grouse, as an indication the department won’t list the bird. But it’s also considered an “indicator species” that underscores the broader health of the Western ecosystem, so it has received special attention from Interior.
“It was over a decade ago that a petition was filed [to consider listing the bird],” Jewell said. “That effort has been working along until in 2010, Fish and Wildlife Service said we’ve evaluated the greater ecosystem and the greater sage grouse is in trouble. … It was a wake-up call.”
The bird has drawn attention from Western lawmakers on Capitol Hill who see an endangered species distinction as anathema to oil and gas drilling, wind turbine installation, mining and other activity. A rider included in the fiscal 2015 spending bill blocked Interior from listing the bird, though the department said that doesn’t prevent it from concluding whether protection is warranted.
The management plans include limits on how much space energy production could occupy, buffer zones for areas critical for sage grouse habitats and capping “surface disturbance.” They also seek to reduce fire risk by removing cheatgrass and other invasive species, restoring fire-prone areas to native grasses and sagebrush, and better positioning fire management resources.
The plans, issued by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, are developed by state-based Interior offices. They now face a 30-day protest period and a 60-day review for state governors to ensure consistency. A record of decision on the plans is expected late this summer.
“We’ve come a long way, baby,” Mead said of the collaboration among state governors and federal agencies who worked on the conservation plans. The effort, called the Sage-Grouse Task Force, began in 2011.
While the sage grouse effort relied on broad federal and state cooperation, conservatives in the past have attacked the Obama administration’s use of resource management plans. They contend the plans have grown in scope with the intent of limiting energy production.
“How you design the criteria for the resource management plan or what things your plan has to look at, that’s the first stage. And you can write that in such a way that it prohibits you from even going forward. And that’s one of the areas in which we have to push back and will definitely be an area of oversight,” House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop, R-Utah, said in a recent interview with the Washington Examiner.
The oil and gas industry slammed the conservation plan, as the Independent Petroleum Association of America said it failed to strike a “balance.”
Independent Petroleum Association of America Senior Vice President of Government Relations and Political Affairs Dan Naatz:
“While we support conservation efforts to protect the greater sage-grouse, at first glance, these plans, with their significant new limitations on land use, appear to fly in the face of the meaningful conservation efforts already underway within the range states to protect this important species,” said Dan Naatz, the trade group’s senior vice president of government relations.
An October 2014 study by the Western Values Project, though, said claims that sage grouse conservation efforts would strangle energy production were overblown. It found a 13 percent overlap between priority areas of conservation and rights-of-way for coal, oil, natural gas, solar and wind production on federal land.
Environmental groups largely praised the plans announced Thursday for emphasizing that any activity on federal land must provide a net conservation benefit for the greater sage grouse.
A key part of reaching that goal includes allowing habitat exchanges as a formal option for easing land disturbances. The plan allows energy companies and other developers to buy credits to offset environmental disruption. The companies then would use those credits to pay for conservation efforts elsewhere.
“In places like Nevada where habitat exchanges are the preferred mitigation option, we will soon see mitigation dollars driving faster, stronger conservation than ever before,” said Eric Holst, senior director of working lands with the Environmental Defense Fund.
But the American Bird Conservancy said the plans don’t go far enough to restore the greater sage grouse. It said the plans do too little to address the effects mining and grazing have on the bird’s habitat.
“We have lost over half of all sage grouse in just the last seven years,” said Steve Holmer, the group’s senior policy adviser. “Following some of the conservation measures indicated as necessary by scientists but ignoring others isn’t enough to reverse this trend.”
