John Tierney has a mind-numbing story [registration required] of needless government involvement to protect the environment.

Mr. [Dell] LeFevre wants the ranchers to win this range war against the
lawyers and politicians trying to restrict grazing on the plateau north
of the Grand Canyon. He fought unsuccessfully to stop the Clinton
administration from declaring it the Grand Staircase-Escalante National
Monument because he knew the designation would mean more regulations,
more hikers and fewer cows.

“I don’t even know what the Grand Staircase is – nobody around
here’s ever called this place by that name,” he said as he drove me
around in his pickup truck, showing me hillsides and canyons where his
cows no longer graze. “We’ve got Easterners who don’t know the land
telling us what to do with it. I’m a bitter old cowboy.”

But he is not bitter when he talks about the deal he made with an
environmentalist named Bill Hedden, the executive director of the Grand
Canyon Trust. Mr. Hedden’s group doesn’t use lobbyists or lawsuits (or
guns) to drive out ranchers. These environmentalists get land the
old-fashioned way. They buy it.

No government money or eminent domain needed, although the threat
from the Bureau of Land Management prompted some of Mr. LeFevre’s
willingness to sell. 

Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story.

Even though Mr. LeFevre and other ranchers along the Escalante
willingly sold their grazing permits, local and state politicians are
fighting to put cows back on those lands. They say their communities
and the ranching way of life will be destroyed if grazing lands are
allowed to revert to nature, and they’ve found sympathetic ears in the
Bush administration.

The Interior Department has decided that environmentalists can no
longer simply buy grazing permits and retire them. Under its reading of
the law – not wholly shared by predecessors in the Clinton
administration – land currently being used by ranchers has already been
determined to be “chiefly valuable for grazing” and can be opened to
herds at any time if the B.L.M.’s “land use planning process” deems it
necessary.

But why should a federal bureaucrat decide what’s “chiefly valuable”
about a piece of land? Mr. Hedden and Mr. LeFevre have discovered a
“land use planning process” of their own: see who will pay the most for
it. If an environmentalist offers enough to induce a rancher to sell,
that’s the best indication the land is more valuable for hiking than
for grazing.