OK. Subject to some serious stylistic and logical revisions. Here's meadows:
******************
Protect Specific Iconic Meadows
Manage Grazing According to Ecological and Aesthetic Criteria, Not Zones
Meadows are the heart and soul of the Sierra. Along with granite peaks, the huge meadows that occur along rivers in canyon bottoms are iconic and vital to both the ecology of watersheds and the aesthetic experience of wilderness travelers. With only one exception, in all of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, every major meadow on a popular trail corridor is subject to grazing. A person hiking the John Muir Trail will have only one opportunity in over 100 miles of travel to experience a large meadow free of grazing impacts – Vidette Meadow. This is unacceptable and a glaring failure of the Park Service to truly provide for the enjoyment of visitors and leave park areas in as unimpaired condition as possible.
Managing meadows and watershed-level meadow ecologies cannot be done according to the zones proposed. Those zones are based almost entirely on social criteria – where use has, historically, been concentrated or not. They are not in any way based on the ecological relationships of the requirements and relationships of meadows or the watersheds they are a part of. The draft says that, if allowed, grazing will be "managed to protect ecological functions...”. It appears, though, that such management will be based on, among other criteria, the zones the grazing takes place in. That's a contradiction. Grazing must be entirely managed on ecological and scenic criteria, irrespective of the zone the grazing takes place in or the previous history of grazing in individual meadows or watersheds.
Although the USE of stock is, unquestionably, "a primitive type of recreation appropriate to fulfill the recreational purpose of wilderness...” the stock themselves have absolutely no intrinsic right to graze Sierra meadows. Stock and meadow management has morphed into recognizing stock as a user group equal to people. Stock numbers are looked at independent of the number of people they carry into the wilderness. The essential question when stock is regulated – whether for grazing or party size – is: Is the ecological, aesthetic and social impact of stock justified by the number of people they support on any given trip?
In LeConte Canyon this year, I witnessed a meadow that was made aesthetically offensive for about three weeks following a stay of 6 head for three nights. The grasses were trampled, soil churned up, two new 10' X 3' roll pits eroded through meadow sod, stream banks collapsed by hoofs and the entire area smelling strongly of horse urine and manure. Those 6 animals supported a multi-day trip of only two visitors. Two park visitors essentially wrecked the visitor experience of anyone who wanted to camp at that site and meadow for at least the next three weeks. It was perfectly acceptable under current regulations and meadow management criteria. That is not in any way acceptable and the Draft Alternatives of the WSP must establish clear rules to both mitigate and prohibit such impacts.
Stock can be allowed only to the extent they further wilderness values by allowing human visitors to enjoy wilderness. This must be made clear in the Topic summary and the Alternatives so derived.
Protecting Individual Meadows
The draft alternatives suggest that the primary management tool to completely close meadows to grazing will be by a yet to be determined elevational limit. This is not sufficient to provide for the ecological integrity and aesthetic enjoyment of the iconic Sierran meadows that might be below such limits, should such limits be established. The grazing section of Table 6, Alternatives 3, 4 and 5 must explicitly require that criteria will be established such that an increasing number of the large canyon-bottom meadow per drainage will be completely closed and protected from grazing to preserve and protect their ecological and aesthetic integrity with a long-term goal of rehabilitating them to as pristine a state as possible.
Historically, meadow management has been focused almost entirely on establishing limits for use nights in specific meadows. Establishing those limits have been based on several criteria: long term ecological impacts, e.g. whether the meadow is likely to show changes in species composition over years; short term ecological impacts, e.g. whether an unacceptable amount of biomass (aka grass) is being removed from the meadow such that it can't recover to some arbitrary state that season. No serious consideration is given to either aesthetics or the effects of grazing on any part of meadow ecology other than removal of grass by grazing.
Aesthetics – the sights, sounds and smell of a meadow – are inseparable from the wilderness experience and enjoyment of a meadow. Yet aesthetics and the potential effects of grazing on visitor enjoyment of a meadow play absolutely no part in meadow management and little explicit part in the draft alternatives.
Stock routinely create "roll pits” in fragile meadows. While not optimal or encouraged, these pits are not a violation of any current regulations or policies. Such pits take decades to recover to their vegetated condition, if they do at all. In addition, a party supported by even a small group of stock (6 or fewer) will leave the immediate area around their camp an incredibly unpleasant experience for weeks after their visit. Manure and urine in and around camps make them smell like a pasture; the grasses for hundreds of yards a camp is trampled, pawed and chewed up; stream banks near where stock go to water are sheared off; and stock often urinates and defecates directly into and near open water. Regulations are in place – and strictly enforced – stopping human visitors from causing even 1/100 of these types of impacts, yet it is perfectly within regulations for stock to do it.
The draft alternatives say that grazing and party size of stock will be managed to protect resources. Yet it allows a 1:1 exchange of people and stock to make up a maximum on total party size. Although a maximum of each (people and stock) is set and can't be exceeded, the implication is that subtracting one person can be substituted by an animal, which is an absurd proposition. An animal has, at minimum, ten times the ecological impact of a human and some estimates put that impact at 50 times. Nowhere is there a hint on how these relative numbers are arrived at or a clear set of criteria for changing those numbers based on actual ecological and aesthetic benchmarks.
Two standards, then, must be explicitly stated throughout the final alternatives:
1. Independent of where a possible elevational limit is set for grazing, specific iconic meadows will be chosen for their ecological and aesthetic values and closed permanently to grazing. For Alternative 3, this could be one meadow per canyon; for Alternative 4 this could be 2 meadows; and 3 for Alternative 5. Camping with stock would still be allowed in designated stock camps (to preserve the aesthetic integrity of both camps and meadow) but they'd have to bring their own feed.
2. It is not enough to merely list "scenic” as a quality to determine a management criteria. Aesthetic considerations must be integral – and equal to biomass removal – in how meadows are evaluated for stock use nights. Such an evaluation will establish criteria to look at the meadow, the stream and surrounding campsites. Criteria will include how an area looks – how close its status is to one undisturbed by stock or human use; how it smells; and how it sounds – are the grasses tall enough such that one can hear the susurration as they are moved by the breeze? The latter won't happen if the grasses are trampled or eaten by stock.
Additional ecological considerations beyond mere biomass removal must be established and made in both the alternatives and, eventually, accompanying supporting narrative. Short term impairment should be integral to a true evaluation of a meadow. It is not enough if, after several stock parties have grazed a meadow that recovery the following season is sufficient to find no impairment to the ecology of a meadow. A meadow's total ecological integrity much be considered – what is the effect of grazing on small mammals such as marmots and belding's ground squirrel; what are the potential effects on nesting habitat of birds, both aquatic and those on dry ground; what are the effects of manure on meadows and the potential runoff of pathogens, nitrates, phosphorous etc. into streams. Not a single one of these criteria currently guides stock use numbers. If "meadow management” is truly to be about meadows, it then has to be more than "grazing management” which is all it currently is.
