Opening the Range: Reforms to Allow Markets for Voluntary Conservation on Federal Grazing Lands

For nearly a century, the federal government has authorized ranchers to graze livestock on large areas of federal lands in the western United States. Federal-land grazing has generated substantial conflict in recent decades, as conservation interests and others have lobbied and litigated against what they view as inappropriate and destructive use of federal lands. This has produced a predictable backlash among ranching interests, including efforts to roll back the regulations relied on by environmental litigants and aggressive confrontations with federal regulators. But such conflict is not inevitable. Competing demands on these lands can be resolved through voluntary means and positive incentives for conservation practices, as they often are on private lands. On public lands, however, federal law erects substantial barriers to this market approach by imposing use-it-or-lose-it rules on federal grazing permits. In this Article, we discuss those barriers and offer statutory and regulatory reforms that would overcome them while facilitating markets for conservation on federal grazing lands

Collaboration Through NEPA: Achieving a Social License to Operate On Federal Public Lands

As demand and consumption of natural gas increases, so will drilling operations to extract the natural gas on federal public lands. Fueled by the shale gas revolution, natural gas drilling operations are now frequently taking place, not only in the highly documented urban settings, but also on federal public lands with high conservation value. The phenomenon of increased drilling in sensitive locations, both urban and remote, has sparked increased public opposition, requiring oil and gas producers to reconsider how they engage the public. Oil and gas producers have increasingly deployed the concept of a social license to operate to gain support from the public and the communities in which they operate. A social license to operate is a voluntary license granted by communities, obligating companies to go above and beyond the requirements of their legal license to operate. While natural gas developers have increasingly sought to achieve a social license to operate in urban settings, such as the Colorado Front Range, there has been little use of this approach by operators drilling on federal public land. We advocate for the use of increased collaboration with affected stakeholders and communities through the NEPA process as a means to achieve a social license to operate on federal public land

Collaboration Through NEPA: Achieving a Social License to Operate On Federal Public Lands

As demand and consumption of natural gas increases, so will drilling operations to extract the natural gas on federal public lands. Fueled by the shale gas revolution, natural gas drilling operations are now frequently taking place, not only in the highly documented urban settings, but also on federal public lands with high conservation value. The phenomenon of increased drilling in sensitive locations, both urban and remote, has sparked increased public opposition, requiring oil and gas producers to reconsider how they engage the public. Oil and gas producers have increasingly deployed the concept of a social license to operate to gain support from the public and the communities in which they operate. A social license to operate is a voluntary license granted by communities, obligating companies to go above and beyond the requirements of their legal license to operate. While natural gas developers have increasingly sought to achieve a social license to operate in urban settings, such as the Colorado Front Range, there has been little use of this approach by operators drilling on federal public land. We advocate for the use of increased collaboration with affected stakeholders and communities through the NEPA process as a means to achieve a social license to operate on federal public land

Where the Deer and The Antelope Play:Conserving Big Game Migrations As an Endangered Phenomena

In the American West, high-profile big game species including mule deer, antelope, elk, moose, bison and bighorn sheep use large landscapes to migrate between winter and summer habitats to obtain the resources they need to survive. The big game species are a vital part of the West’s ecology, economy, and culture and are valued by local, national, and international stakeholders. Thanks to large parcels of private and public land and a low human population, many parts of the American West still provide some of the best big game habitats in the world. But these vast, intact landscapes are under threat by ongoing habitat loss and disturbances to seasonal and migratory habitats that result in declines in big game population and the disappearance of migrations. Addressing the challenge of conserving big game populations and the endangered phenomena of seasonal migration across large landscapes in the American West will require dynamic, innovative, and flexible legal approaches. Those legal approaches should recognize the biological needs of the species themselves and reflect economic policy analysis of conservation in landscapes with multiple land managers. Considering both integrated biological and economic decision frameworks and incentive-based tools to define and implement legal and policy structures can produce migratory species conservation more efficiently than less integrated approaches. Conservation of big game migrations is now a growing priority and initial conservation efforts are beginning to emerge, including the Department of Interior Secretarial Order 3362 “Improving Habitat Quality in Western Big-Game Winter Range and Migration Corridors” and state policies including the Wyoming Game and Fish Department Ungulate Migration Corridor Strategy. This interdisciplinary paper evaluates those emerging policies and finds that the policies miss opportunities to provide higher levels of conservation of migratory species by failing to address key ecological characteristics of migratory species and to incorporate economically efficient hierarchies of management and policy. We conclude by offering thoughts on how future conservation polices might be designed to incorporate both ecology and economics to better conserve migrations

Opening the Range: Reforms to Allow Markets for Voluntary Conservation on Federal Grazing Lands

For nearly a century, the federal government has authorized ranchers to graze livestock on large areas of federal lands in the western United States. Federal-land grazing has generated substantial conflict in recent decades, as conservation interests and others have lobbied and litigated against what they view as inappropriate and destructive use of federal lands. This has produced a predictable backlash among ranching interests, including efforts to roll back the regulations relied on by environmental litigants and aggressive confrontations with federal regulators. But such conflict is not inevitable. Competing demands on these lands can be resolved through voluntary means and positive incentives for conservation practices, as they often are on private lands. On public lands, however, federal law erects substantial barriers to this market approach by imposing use-it-or-lose-it rules on federal grazing permits. In this Article, we discuss those barriers and offer statutory and regulatory reforms that would overcome them while facilitating markets for conservation on federal grazing lands

Harnessing visitors' enthusiasm for national parks to fund cooperative large-landscape conservation

Spillover impacts pose challenges for the management of protected areas (PAs). The issue of external threats encroaching on PAs has long been recognized, but a corollary—that PA conservation can increase costs borne by neighboring governments or landowners—is less well appreciated. In some contexts, basic principles of fairness and cooperation suggest that PA users should help pay these costs. Several countries have developed mechanisms for distributing the costs of spillover impacts to PA users, but not the United States. Here, we investigate whether and how US park visitors could help address one type of spillover, the need for wildlife conservation efforts beyond park boundaries, using a case study of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem (GYE). We examine a “conservation fee” recently proposed in the Wyoming legislature, along with tax-based alternatives. After exploring some costs of wildlife conservation in GYE, we estimate that a fee of up to $10 per vehicle could generate up to$13 million annually, and tax-based approaches considerably more. We consider legal, political, and governance challenges, and ways to mitigate them. The GYE could serve as a demonstration site for visitor funding of cooperative, large-landscape conservation, for potential future expansion in the US and beyond