scholarly journals Agricultural Effects on Streams and Rivers: A Western USA Focus

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 1901
Author(s):  
Robert M. Hughes ◽  
Robert L. Vadas
Keyword(s):  
Fish Assemblage ◽  
Riparian Zone ◽  
Fish Habitat ◽  
Public Lands ◽  
Point Sources ◽  
Livestock Grazing ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
Streams And Rivers ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Federal Land

Globally, croplands and rangelands are major land uses and they have altered lands and waters for millennia. This continues to be the case throughout the USA, despite substantial improvements in treating wastewaters from point sources—versus non-point (diffuse) sources. Poor macroinvertebrate assemblage condition occurs in 30% of conterminous USA streams and rivers; poor fish assemblage condition occurs in 26%. The risk of poor fish assemblage condition was most strongly associated with excess nutrients, salinity and sedimentation and impaired riparian woody vegetation. Although the Clean Water Act was passed to restore and maintain the integrity of USA waters, that will be impossible without controlling agricultural pollution. Likewise, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act was enacted to protect the natural condition of public lands and waters, including fish habitat, but it has failed to curtail the sacred cows of livestock grazing. Although progress has been slow and spotty, promising results have been obtained from basin and watershed planning and riparian zone protections.

Agency Legitimacy: A Reputational Power Analysis of the Bureau of Land Management

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-374
Author(s):  
Joshua Malay ◽  
Mathew Fairholm
Keyword(s):  
Land Management ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
Legal Aspect ◽  
Public Lands ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
Bureau Of Land Management ◽  
The Public ◽  
Large Scope ◽  
Federal Land

This article examines the organizational reputation of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) using Daniel Carpenter’s reputation and power theory as a theoretical and methodological base. Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) is utilized to guide and organize case selection, as it is the legal mandate behind BLM authority and represents the fullest extent of the agency’s activities. The findings of this case study indicate that the BLM has a negative reputation in all but the legal-procedural dimension. Three implications are identified: (a) FLPMA serves only to define the procedural-legal aspect of public planning process, (b) the inability of FLPMA to define a purpose to public lands management has its root in the large scope of activity required of the BLM by FLPMA, and (c) finally, retention has placed the BLM and the federal government in a precarious position of an owner rather than custodian of the public lands.

Use of Public Rangelands in the American West

1979 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-62
Author(s):  
Thomas R. Vale
Keyword(s):  
Land Management ◽  
American West ◽  
Recent Trend ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
Multiple Use ◽  
Bureau Of Land Management ◽  
The Public ◽  
Poor Condition ◽  
Federal Land ◽  
Land Policies

The Bureau of Land Management, the land agency that administers much of the federal rangeland in the American West, has frequently been characterized as excessively responsive to the desires of ranchers, with resulting land deterioration and loss of resource values. Both the generally poor condition of the public domain, and the Bureau's attempt to maintain stocking levels while improving the range, support this characterization.Several policies and programmes over the last decade, however, suggest that the Bureau today is less strongly tied to the livestock industry, and certainly its lands are being increasingly coveted by groups other than grazers. This recent trend towards a more ‘multiple use’ agency has been strengthened by Congressional passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act in 1976. Whether or not diversification of land policies will continue into the future is, however, at present unclear.

Property Rights, Nineteenth-Century Federal Timber Policy, and the Conservation Movement

1979 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary D. Libecap ◽  
Ronald N. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Economies Of Scale ◽  
Forest Products ◽  
The United States ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Government Control ◽  
Federal Land

In campaigning for the establishment of the National Forests in the late nineteenth century, conservationists pointed to fraud and timber theft in the Pacific Northwest. In this paper we argue that the conservationists were misdirected; that it was a costly Federal land policy that encouraged fraud and theft. In the face of restrictive land laws, fraud was necessary if lumber companies were to acquire large tracts of land to take advantage of economies of scale in logging. Since fraud used real resources, it raised the actual cost of acquiring land and thus delayed the establishment of property rights. Such delays led to theft. The paper examines the public land laws, explains their selection by claimants, and calculates the added transaction costs or rent dissipation that resulted from circumventing the law.“Government control of cutting on all timberland, private as well as public, is still today, as it was then, the one most indispensable step toward assuring a supply of forest products for the future in the United States.”

Tragedy of the Playground

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard G. Wilshire ◽  
Richard W. Hazlett ◽  
Jane E. Nielson
Keyword(s):  
Land Management ◽  
Public Lands ◽  
Bureau Of Land Management ◽  
Mass Gatherings ◽  
Erosion Rates ◽  
Federal Land ◽  
Desert Areas ◽  
Natural Settings ◽  
Federal Land Management ◽  
Grazing Pressures

“Recreation” connotes revitalization, the re-creation of spirit. In an increasingly urbanized culture, people recreate in natural settings to lift their spirits and revitalize their outlook and motivation. Public lands in the western United States, which embrace much of the nation’s remaining natural and wild areas, are especially attractive—and most are open for recreation. We authors certainly have found solace from camping, hiking, climbing, and skiing in backcountry areas. But latetwentieth- century American affluence has created a massive and unprecedented invasion of these lands, and particularly an invasion of motorized recreation. All human uses of natural areas can, and generally do, degrade soils, kill plants, and increase erosion rates, with resultant water pollution and ecosystem damage. In small numbers, and spread out widely, recreational disturbances can be minor, but millions of people regularly play on western public lands in mass gatherings that have large cumulative impacts. More now drive vehicles across forested or desert areas than pursue the less-damaging activities of hiking and small-group camping. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service (USFS) oversee the largest amount of western land available for recreation. By law, the agencies must manage public lands for multiple uses and “sustained yield.” Instead, federal land-management agencies are partitioning them to separate incompatible pursuits, including many that consume land. For example, as logging, mining, and grazing pressures ease, recreational pressures are exploding in Colorado’s White River National Forest, a short 50 miles west of Denver on Interstate Highway 70. Along with Denver’s increasing population, snowmobile registrations jumped 70% in Colorado since 1985. Off-road vehicles (ORVs) are everywhere, and mountain bike use has jumped more than 200%. Between 1990 and 2004, all ORV registrations in Colorado increased more than 650%. Ski facilities also burgeoned, along with hiker and equestrian demands for greater backcountry access. The USFS’s efforts to bring the conflicting uses under control is losing ground rapidly.

Raiding the Range

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard G. Wilshire ◽  
Richard W. Hazlett ◽  
Jane E. Nielson
Keyword(s):  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Great Basin ◽  
Sonoran Desert ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Public Lands ◽  
Livestock Grazing ◽  
Human Land Use ◽  
European Settlement ◽  
Animal Populations ◽  
Severe Erosion

“Home on the Range” evokes a western landscape “where the deer and the antelope play.” But even at the song’s debut in the 1870s, deer and antelope were declining in numbers and cattle grazing was degrading rangelands across the American west. In their natural state, arid North American lands are robust and productive, but they recover exceedingly slowly from heavy grazing. By 1860, more than 3.5 million domesticated grazing animals were trampling arid western soils, causing severe erosion and lowering both water quality and water supplies in a water-poor region. The early start and persistence of grazing over such a long period of time invaded every nook and cranny of the public lands, making livestock grazing the most pervasively damaging human land use across all western ecosystems. Today, grazing affects approximately 260 million acres of publicly owned forest and rangelands, mostly in the 11 western states—about equivalent to the combined area of California, Arizona, and Colorado. Those acres include Pacific Northwest - r and ponderosa forests; Great Basin big sagebrush lands; the richly H oral Sonoran Desert; magni- cent high-desert Joshua tree forests; varied shrub associations in the low-elevation Mojave, Great Basin, Chihuahuan, and other southwestern deserts; and extensive Colorado Plateau pinyon–juniper forests stretching from northern Arizona and New Mexico to southern Colorado and Utah and decorating the arid inland plateaus of Washington, Oregon, and northeastern California. Proponents of public lands grazing argue that cattle have not changed anything. They just replace the immense herds of hooved native herbivores—bison, deer, antelope, and elk—that once dominated western ranges. But in pre-European settlement times, natural forces, including unlimited predators and limited fodder, effectively controlled the native animal populations. Unlike cattle, the herds of deer, antelope, and elk wintered in generally snow-free lowland areas and used much less than their full range each year. And those animals were easier on the land, especially the rivers. Immense bison herds ranged over vast areas, never staying very long on any range. Bison rarely visited the sites of today’s major livestock grazing problems in Great Basin and southwestern deserts, however. On northern ranges, bison obtained winter moisture from eating snow and did not cling to creeks and streams the way cattle do.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 231-242
Author(s):  
Gregory Ablavsky
Keyword(s):  
Federal Government ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
Federal Law ◽  
Federal Lands ◽  
Land System ◽  
New States ◽  
Federal Land ◽  
Indian Affairs ◽  
The Moment

Three federal systems coalesced from the ad hoc practices of governance in the Northwest and Southwest Territories—over land, Indian affairs, and the territories themselves. The foundations for the federal land system laid in these early struggles persisted and survived through the Civil War and beyond, as federal adjudication of land rights expanded. The federal government also codified its earlier experiments in compensation, formalizing its payments to Natives and whites even as it also continued to pay for brutal, even genocidal violence against Native peoples from the federal treasury. Finally, even Congress continued to use conditional admission to try to control newly admitted states, the territorial system entrenched the expectation that the plural sovereignty and ownership of the borderlands was temporary; statehood represented the moment when these preexisting claims supposedly passed away. Statehood also helped doom the flawed vision that the federal government would serve as a neutral arbiter between Natives and whites. Rather, statehood gave the former territories perhaps the most effective way yet to make claims on the federal government. As these new states increasingly became the federal government—in Congress, in the cabinet, and in the presidency—they turned their goals into federal law. This result occurred within the federal lands, where states successfully bent federal land policy to serve their expansionist aims, and in Indian affairs, where state representatives successfully persuaded the federal government to back their assertions of sovereignty against the compelling sovereignty claims of the Cherokee and Native Nations in the struggle known as Removal. This effectiveness at exploiting federal power allowed these former territories to rapidly remake these former borderlands to satisfy their long-standing settler colonial aspirations.

Landscape Influences on Stream Habitats and Biological Assemblages

2006 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Fish Assemblage ◽  
Fish Assemblages ◽  
Spatial Scales ◽  
Fish Habitat ◽  
Assemblage Structure ◽  
Fish Distribution ◽  
Crossover Point ◽  
Ecological Patterns ◽  
Longitudinal Profiles ◽  
Context Specific

<em>Abstract.</em>—Longitudinal analysis of the distribution and abundance of river fishes provides a context-specific characterization of species responses to riverscape heterogeneity. We examined spatially continuous longitudinal profiles (35–70 km) of fish distribution and aquatic habitat (channel gradient, depth, temperature, and water velocity) for three northeastern Oregon rivers. We evaluated spatial patterns of river fishes and habitat using multivariate analysis to compare gradients in fish assemblage structure among rivers and at multiple spatial scales. Spatial structuring of fish assemblages exhibited a generalized pattern of cold- and coolwater fish assemblage zones but was variable within thermal zones, particularly in the warmest river. Landscape context (geographic setting and thermal condition) influenced the observed relationship between species distribution and channel gradient. To evaluate the effect of spatial extent and geographical context on observed assemblage patterns and fish–habitat relationships, we performed multiple ordinations on subsets of our data from varying lengths of each river and compared gradients in assemblage structure within and among rivers. The relative associations of water temperature increased and channel morphology decreased as the spatial scale of analysis increased. The crossover point where both variables explained equal amounts of variation was useful for identifying transitions between cool- and coldwater fish assemblages. Spatially continuous analysis of river fishes and their habitats revealed unexpected ecological patterns and provided a unique perspective on fish distribution that emphasized the importance of habitat heterogeneity and spatial variability in fish–habitat relationships.

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