Stop meddling with Colorado’s sage grouse

Regardless of partisanship and political persuasion, nearly everyone can agree that the Trump administration’s brief tenure has been an exercise in controversy, confusion, and chaos. This phenomenon hasn’t been limited to the White House. Indeed, the Department of Interior — which manages our national parks, monuments, and public lands — has repeatedly been at the center of controversy due to numerous actions instigated by Interior Sec. Ryan Zinke.

The most recent controversy occurred just last week, when Sec. Zinke went against the wishes of our Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat, and Wyoming’s Gov. Matt Mead, a Republican, in announcing that he is taking steps to unravel the collaborative plans put in place in 2015 to protect the Greater sage grouse, a bird that lives on northwestern Colorado’s sagebrush seas.

These plans involved years of Colorado-style hard work, in which ranchers, conservationists, land managers, and the oil and gas industry came together to create plans that saved the sage grouse from being listed on the Endangered Species Act. A listing would have indicated that the sage grouse was in grave peril and put more restrictions in place to save it. In addition to providing commonsense protections for the sage grouse, the plans also allowed plenty of opportunity for energy development on our public lands. As Gov. Mead said, we “found the skeleton key that opens the door to a better path on how to deal with endangered species.”

The sage grouse plans were also important because they functioned as an investment policy for elk, mule deer, and pronghorn that live in sagebrush habitat and hold huge cultural and economic importance to rural Western communities.

As a conservationist and sportsman who has spent decades working on sage grouse conservation, I can say with confidence that Zinke’s attempts to undermine the 2015 sage grouse plans are an affront to Westerners who value collaboration, counterproductive to the cause of saving sage grouse, and antithetical to established science.

First, Zinke’s decision undermines the voices and hard work of Westerners who came to the table to craft the plans and have worked to implement them. Ranchers, sportsmen, conservationists, oil and gas operators, local elected officials, and others worked together to mitigate the constant uncertainty that surrounded sage grouse management. We charted a course that could put the sage grouse on a path to recovery while ensuring that traditional uses like livestock grazing, energy development, and outdoor recreation could still take place at historically comparable levels.

Second, Zinke’s recommendations will likely result in the Greater sage grouse being listed as an endangered species because they eliminate key habitat protections necessary to avoid habitat loss from oil and gas development, one of the primary threats to the bird’s habitat.

Lastly, many of Zinke’s rollbacks are based on information that is antithetical to established science. This includes pushing states to substitute population targets in lieu of conservation goals, prioritizing oil and gas development in areas that are managed for their habitat value, and changes to the process that fundamentally undermine the prospects for short and long-term success of the plans.

The 2015 plans that many of us worked on were not and never will be perfect. There will always be interests that want more concessions for their side and refuse to compromise. But the plans incorporated the recommendations made by the scientists who identified conservation objectives for the species and the methods to achieve them.

Zinke has repeatedly referenced the need for America to be “energy dominant” as a justification for rolling back protections. But at what cost? The 2015 sage grouse plans represented the success of collaborative conservation, a process where not everyone may love the outcome, but the collective goal is achieved. Zinke is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by undermining all of our collective hard work and placing the bird back under the threat of the need of an Endangered Species Act

listing.