RIVERSIDE — An administrative law judge, in a convoluted, 111-page decision, has ordered the federal government and a group of ranchers back to the table to hammer out a plan to remove cattle from fragile desert land occupied by a threatened tortoise.
But what did he mean? That--in a dispute that is endemic of the Bush administration's standoff with environmental advocates--depends on whom you ask.
As environmentalists press the government to proceed with plans to relocate the cattle by Friday, federal officials said the judge's decision effectively eliminated that deadline. Environmentalists are threatening to go to court as early as Monday in an attempt to hold the government, if it doesn't start removing the cattle, in contempt of court.
According to the environmentalists, federal officials, especially Interior Secretary Gale Norton, are using the judge's Aug. 24 decision to weaken a desert protection settlement signed in January. Once again, the environmentalists charge, the Bush administration is allowing the interests of private enterprise to trump ecological concerns.
The impact: A key grazing season for the desert tortoise, a threatened species, begins shortly. Cattle eat most of the tortoises' food, trample the rest and import nonnative plants on their fur and hooves, said Daniel Patterson, desert ecologist with the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity. At that point, Patterson said, the tortoises are reduced to a dangerous "junk food diet" that could bring them to the brink of extinction.
"The tortoise needs protection now," Patterson said. "It can't afford to be whittled away by political stalling. [The government] cannot squirm out of this."
Federal officials said they are trying to follow the judge's orders to coordinate the removal of cattle with the ranchers who have traditionally used public land for grazing. The decision, they said, makes the Friday deadline impossible to meet.
"Getting new decisions enacted and in place by the 7th isn't very realistic," said Jan Bedrosian, a U.S. Bureau of Land Management congressional and legislative affairs specialist in Sacramento. "But we also don't want to say that we're ignoring that deadline. We're going to do our best to meet it as rapidly as we can."
In January, two days before President Bush's inauguration, the Bureau of Land Management and several environmental groups reached what was billed as a landmark agreement to protect millions of acres between the eastern Sierra and the Mexican border. Most of the land was inside the California Desert Conservation Area, created in 1976.
