Grazing or Overgrazing? The Correct Word for Bovine Impact on Public Lands

Top Line: Describing harm to lands as being due to overgrazing implies that ecologically and/or hydrologically, some amount of grazing is benign or even beneficial. Not so.

Figure 1. Livestock in the Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument, Utah. Is overgrazing the cause of their harm—or just grazing? Source: George Wuerthner.

As sheep advance, flowers, vegetation, grass, soil, plenty, and poetry vanish.

—John Muir, John of the Mountains (1938)

Using the correct word matters. Take the example of bovine grazing on public lands.

Not only in the popular media but also often in government reports and scientific papers, the term overgrazing is employed to describe a use of land that has harmful effects on the natural environment. But herbivory by domestic livestock in a natural environment is accurately called grazing.

Use of the term overgrazing when the facts actually call for the term grazing incorrectly presumes or represents that some level of grazing in the arid American West is benign for—if not helpful to—native wildlife, water quantity, water quality, and ecosystem function. However, that is not the case.

Livestock (including cattle, sheep, goats, and horses) trample vegetation, damage soil, spread invasive weeds, pollute water, steal forage from native wildlife, and contribute to climate change. Livestock grazing in riparian (streamside) areas—especially in the arid American West—causes immeasurable damage to riparian resources, including loss of habitat for fish and wildlife, soil erosion, and diminishment of water quality and quantity. In the many forested areas in the American West where public lands livestock grazing occurs, such grazing joins the proliferation of roads, the scourge of logging, and the exclusion of fire in creating unhealthy forests.

Grazing—just plain grazing—is among the most environmentally destructive activities in the American West and around the world. Former Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt concluded that grazing—not overgrazing—“is the most damaging use of public land.”

Because of their numbers and pervasiveness across the landscape, bovines have done more damage to the earth than bulldozers have. This fact makes it all the more egregious that apologists for livestock grazing in natural ecosystems characterize the ecologically irritating agent as overgrazing rather than grazing. But such is to be expected, because, after all, they are apologists. What is more distressing is when scientists and public land managers also use the term overgrazing when what they are actually describing is grazing.

One does not see the term overlogging used when describing harm done to forests by chainsaws and bulldozers. Nor does one see the terms overmining and overdrilling used to describe the activity of solid, liquid, or gaseous mineral extraction as a cause of degradation of land, water, and wildlife. One does not read the term overroading in a discussion of landscape fragmentation.

A common dictionary definition of overgraze is “to allow animals to graze (as a pasture) to the point of damaging vegetational cover.” Overgrazing is most appropriately used to describe the impacts of too much grazing in an area to maintain domestic livestock grazing, rather than in the context of sustaining functional ecosystems, intact watersheds, and native species.

Sage-grouse, Pacific salmon, native trout, Mexican spotted owls, and numerous other species—as well as water quantity and water quality—are all detrimentally affected by grazing long before soil loss becomes an issue. Even “light” grazing (if such could be done by 1,400-pound beasts ill bred for such environments) alters ecosystem composition and function.

The continued use of overgrazing rather than grazing to define the problem of bovine impacts on public lands in the American West only serves to shield that activity from needed scrutiny. 

Bottom Line: Words matter. Use of the word overgrazing to describe livestock impact implies that undergrazing might similarly be a problem. Not so.

For More Information

Babbitt, Bruce. 2005. Cities in the Wilderness: A New Vision of Land Use in America. Washington, DC: Island Press / Shearwater Books, p. 148.

Belsky, A. J., A. Matzke, and S. Uselman. 1999. “Survey of Livestock Influences on Stream and Riparian Ecosystems in the Western United States.” Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 54:419–431. 

Donahue, Debra L. 2000. The Western Range Revisited: Removing Livestock from Public Lands to Conserve Native Biodiversity. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Fleischner, Thomas L. 1994. “Ecological Costs of Livestock Grazing in Western North America.” Conservation Biology8(3):629–644.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. 2006. Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options. Rome, Italy: UNFAO.

Kauffman, J. Boone, et al. 2022. “Livestock Use on Public Lands in the Western USA Exacerbates Climate Change: Implications for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation.” Environmental Management 69:1137-1152.

———. 2023. “Forum: Climate, Ecological, and Social Costs of Livestock Grazing on Western Public Lands.” Environmental Management 72:699–704.

Wuerthner, George, and Mollie Matteson (editors). 2002. Welfare Ranching: The Subsidized Destruction of the American West. Washington, DC: Island Press.