San Pedro Riparian Area is at risk
JOHN WELCH AND BILL D O E LLE
Special to the Arizona Daily Star
The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
It's déjà vu all over, again. … Last week the Center for Biological Diversity and Maricopa Audubon Society notified Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and other federal officials of intentions to sue over U.S. Bureau of Land Management failures to maintain fences that protect designated Critical Habitat for Arizona Eryngo — a rare, elegant, and endangered native plant — from under-regulated grazing in BLM's San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area ('SPRNCA'). The SPRNCA exists to safeguard the extraordinary natural and cultural resource embedded in its 57,000 acres and 43 miles of river corridor. We've lost track of how many times the Bureau of Land Management has been sued over SPRNCA, but not of how many times that agency has won: zero.
What we, at the Tucson-based Archaeology Southwest, have also kept track of is the collateral damages of poorly managed livestock grazing on cultural resources at SPRNCA and elsewhere. Fragile, generally irreplaceable, and too often abused or ignored, cultural resources are vital links across human generations and among people and landscapes at multiple spatial and social scales. BLM has done a lot of good work to protect some of SPRNCA's most significant cultural resources, including the Murray Springs Paleoindian mammoth kill site, ancestral O'odham villages, the Spanish Presidio Santa Cruz de Terrenate, and the Fairbank mine and townsite. But BLM has reauthorized grazing in four allotments partially within the SPRNCA without first identifying and assessing the cultural resources that will be damaged by the grazing.
Public Law 100-696, which created and still governs the SPRNCA, is remarkably clear in directing federal land managers 'to protect the riparian area and the aquatic, wildlife, archaeological, paleontological, scientific, cultural, educational, and recreational resources of the public lands surrounding the San Pedro River.' That 1988 bipartisan act of Congress, signed by President Reagan, thrust southern Arizona into the global conservation spotlight by establishing the first-ever, river-focused conservation area.
The law codified recognition of the San Pedro as what Life Magazine called one of 'America's last great places.' What neither P.L.
100-696 nor any other policy does is require livestock grazing within this nationally and internationally significant riverscape; indeed, the law requires that all permitted uses with the SPRNCA 'further the primary purposes for which the conservation area is established.'
The relevant science regarding conflicts between grazing and cultural resources is at least equally clear and compelling. All available evidence, including multiple BLM-authored reports, indicate that livestock cause damage to most types of cultural resource sites. Harmful effects from grazing include displacement, mixing, and breakage of wooden, ceramic, glass, and metal artifacts and degradation of plant communities valued by local and Indigenous communities.
Here's the kicker: common sense aligns perfectly with law and science as regards livestock use in the SPRNCA. None of the tens of thousands of local, national, or international visitors who come to SPRNCA each year and leave millions of dollars behind in Cochise County and nearby areas are there to experience livestock grazing. Only a tiny percentage of the public comments to BLM in response to SPRNCA's 2018 Draft Resource Management Plan/Environmental Impact Statement and the 2022 Draft Environmental Assessment for four SPRNCA grazing allotment lease renewals supported livestock in SPRNCA.
It makes zero sense for sensitive cultural and ecological resources to bear the brunt of cattle grazing in SPRNCA, or for taxpayers to foot the bill for easily avoided lawsuits.
Law, science, and common sense seldom converge to provide such clear decision-making directives for public land, but they do in mandating protection for the cultural and natural resources of the San Pedro National Riparian Conservation Area. Please join Archaeology Southwest in ensuring that the Bureau of Land Management follows the law, heeds the science, and uses common sense without further attempts to accommodate livestock grazing at the expense of irreplaceable resources.
Bill Doelle is the president and CEO of Archaeology Southwest and John Welch is the Landscape and Site Preservation Program director and a professor at Simon Fraser University
BILL D O E LLE
