Western lands under the supervision of the Bureau of Land Management, specifically the 26 million-acre National Landscape Conservation System, are suffering from a lack of federal funding and staffing, according to a report released last month by the Wilderness Society and World Resources Institute.
The Conservation System was established five years ago to protect and restore the BLM's most cherished lands and water systems, including national monuments, wilderness, wilderness-study areas and historic trails. Locally, that includes Craters of the Moon National Monument, east of Carey, and the Snake River Birds of Prey Conservation Area, located about 30 miles south of Boise.
But the restoration and conservation of those lands appears to be headed backwards, according to Lahsha Johnston, of the Wilderness Society's Idaho office.
The Birds of Prey area, which is home to North America's largest concentration of birds of prey, including bald and golden eagles, owls, peregrine falcons, prairie falcons and more, was designated by Congress as a conservation area in 1993. But in recent years it has become overgrown with noxious weeds, mainly cheat grass—a result of large wildfires in the 1980s and 1990s that killed much of the existing native vegetation. Cheat grass is highly flammable and, with its increasing coverage, has changed the natural fire cycle in the area from every 50 to 80 years to about every five years, according to the Wilderness Society.
Craters of the Moon suffers primarily from a lack of live bodies on the ground, particularly law enforcement, and cultural and natural resources have been vandalized, according to Johnston.
But she doesn't blame the local BLM offices. "(The) BLM staff is doing a good job with the limited resources they have," she said.
Instead, Johnston points to the federal government, which isn't forking out the necessary funds.
According to the report, BLM lands lumped into the Conservation System represent 10 percent of the agency's 261 million-acres. But the Conservation System receives just 2.5 percent of the BLM's $1.8 billion budget.
"They need to better distribute funds and prioritize activities within the state," Johnston said. "The bulk of it still needs to be additional funds from Washington, D.C."
In essence, Johnston feels the Conservation System is actually working against itself, succeeding in doing the exact opposite of what it had intended to accomplish, which was to restore and conserve the land. "The reason we point out (the problems) is because that was the whole point behind setting up the system," Johnston added.
Cecil Andrus, a former U.S. Secretary of Interior and governor of Idaho, said "the findings of this report show that the Bureau of Land Management still has a long way to go. We have a tendency to talk a better story than we execute."
As a result of the lagging funds, Johnston said biologists are currently debating whether some of the areas in the conservation system have passed the point of recovery.
"There's a question from scientists of whether we are at the threshold or past the threshold—have we reached the standpoint where we can't do it anymore?" Johnston said, adding that as a result, an effort to boost BLM funding "needs to be done quickly."
The report, which focused on individual Conservation Systems in nine Western states, has been endorsed by two former secretaries of the Interior and the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment.
"We will share it with the (BLM), with all the managers of the units, and people who make decisions about the budget," Johnston said. "It certainly is a tool that can be used in a variety of arenas, and we hope it has a positive impact highlighting the fact that (the Conservation System) has not received the added benefits it should have."
