A Biden administration plan to increase the conservation efforts of America’s public lands is receiving mixed reviews. In March of last year, the administration announced the Public Lands Rule, which establishes a policy to protect, restore and manage the country’s more than 245 million acres of public lands. While the move is largely supported by environmentalists, some critics of the proposed rule argue that the policy could negatively affect the energy industry as well as local economies.
The Department of the Interior and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — the agency that oversees U.S. public lands — argued that the proposed rule is in response to the rise in climate change issues, including wildfires, droughts and storms, that have been occurring in the West. “Our public lands provide so many benefits — clean water, wildlife habitat, food, energy and lifetime memories, to name just a few — and it’s our job to ensure the same for future generations,” BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in a statement. “As pressure on our public lands continues to grow, the proposed Public Lands Rule provides a path for the BLM to better focus on the health of the landscape, ensuring that our decisions leave our public lands as good or better off than we found them.”
Among the policy’s aims is to put “conservation on an equal footing with other uses,” including resource extraction. One area where this new approach is most hotly contested is the Red Desert area of Wyoming. In August, the BLM released a two-volume plan for how to manage this area going forward, including a proposal to place hundreds of thousands of acres of the Red Desert and surrounding areas off limits to development to preserve biodiversity and wildlife. Unsurprisingly, the plan was cheered by many environmentalists.
“This plan really is about the future rather than the past. It is about charting a new course,” Matt Skroch, a project director with Pew Charitable Trusts, told Wyoming Public Radio. “And I will say a relatively bold course for wildlife conservation [and] for cultural resource conservation.” The Red Desert area is home to a variety of natural life and is one of the country’s longest migration corridors. “This landscape has been called the Serengeti of the United States,” Mark Kot, a former county planner from Rock Springs, Wyoming, who has spent years trying to create a compromise for managing the area, told the Washington Post. Kot described the unfenced, open-range nature of the land mass as “probably the most unique thing about this country.”
Yet, not everyone is on board with the new conservation plans. “It doesn’t put conservation on par [with other uses],” Petroleum Association of Wyoming President Pete Obermueller told the news outlet WyoFile. “It elevates it above everything else, to the exclusion of everything else.”
Among the lands managed by the BLM are rich sources of energy production. According to federal data, the BLM manages land responsible for almost 11% of all U.S. oil output and roughly 8% of U.S. natural gas, both of which produce about $3 billion to $10 billion of revenue a year. Public lands are also responsible for almost half of the coal mined in the U.S. every year.
The BLM leases these lands to energy companies to mine and extract resources, but under the Biden administration, the agency has leased fewer acres than under previous administrations. Some Republican lawmakers who oppose the proposed rule also argue that it is government overreach.
“It does seem to me this is a very top-down, Washington-centric approach that has kind of cut the legs out from the local people,” Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon (R) told the Washington Post. “Unfortunately, Wyoming finds itself imposed upon by these colonial forces of national environmental groups who are pushing an agenda onto Wyoming.”
Republican Rep. John Curtis from Utah also argued for less federal government involvement. “Utahns cherish our public lands, and we won’t stand for excessive government bureaucracy restricting access,” the congressman wrote on X, formerly Twitter. Curtis introduced a bill in May to withdraw the Public Lands Rule, but no action has been taken on the bill as of yet.
The Department of the Interior and BLM are still reviewing comments on the proposed Public Lands Rule.
For more background, see the June 2017 issue of Congressional Digest on “Public Lands.”
