{"id":22573,"date":"2025-04-21T18:20:41","date_gmt":"2025-04-22T00:20:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/white-house-to-reverse-rule-promoting-conservation-on-blm-land\/"},"modified":"2026-03-30T22:15:17","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T04:15:17","slug":"white-house-to-reverse-rule-promoting-conservation-on-blm-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/white-house-to-reverse-rule-promoting-conservation-on-blm-land\/","title":{"rendered":"White House to reverse rule promoting conservation on BLM land"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"Public
Public lands, Sept. 14, 2022, at the Upper Colorado River District outside Gypsum. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun file)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Public lands protection took another hit last week when the White House Office of Management and Budget posted the administration\u2019s intent to roll back a Biden-era ruling that put conservation on equal footing with energy development, livestock grazing and recreation on 81 million acres of Bureau of Land Management land, including 8.3 million in Colorado.<\/p>\n

Posting the notice is a part of the formal process to list rules at the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, so a rule hasn\u2019t been proposed yet, said Kathleen Sgamma, President Donald Trump\u2019s appointee for BLM director until she withdrew her nomination after a 2021 letter critical of Trump that she wrote as president of the Western Energy Alliance resurfaced. She recently resigned from the oil and gas trade group.<\/p>\n

But conservation groups like Backcountry Hunters and Anglers are raising the alarm, because the Public Lands Rule, which is on the chopping block, reflects years of work from multiple stakeholders \u201cto ensure the long-term health of the landscapes we rely on for healthy fish and wildlife habitat,\u201d they say, and \u201crescinding it in its entirety is a direct affront to those who value America\u2019s wild places, and the democratic process used to steward them for the benefit of all of us as public landowners.\u201d<\/p>\n

The notice aligned with a meeting called by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum last week when he let Interior Department employees know the job of the agency is to \u201cmanage and protect\u201d public lands, not just protect them. \u201cWe\u2019re in the world of \u2018and,\u2019 not \u2018or,\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Management and protection of BLM lands was what the Biden administration\u2019s Public Lands Rule espoused as it moved through the Republican-controlled U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources in 2023 and was finalized in April 2024 following review of more than 200,000 public comments.<\/p>\n

The BLM is the nation\u2019s largest land management agency. The Public Lands Rule sought to put conservation and ecosystem restoration on equal footing with drilling and other extractive uses, including by offering new leases for improving and recovering federal lands and offsetting development impacts.<\/p>\n

Not everyone loved it: During the 2023 House committee hearing it was called a seismic shift in public land management that would upend the agency\u2019s multiple-use mandate and a Biden administration tactic to lock up more lands and advance the administration\u2019s goal of conserving 30% of U.S. lands and oceans by 2030.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration seems intent on dismantling that goal.<\/p>\n

\"People
People tour BLM land on Sept. 14, 2022, at the Upper Colorado River District outside Gypsum. (Hugh Carey\/The Colorado Sun file)<\/span>cca<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Following directions in Trump\u2019s Unleashing American Energy executive order released in January, the U.S. Department of Agriculture last week lifted protections proposed by the Biden administration on over 264,000 acres in Nevada\u2019s Ruby Mountains and parts of New Mexico to promote oil, gas, geothermal and hard-rock mineral extraction, for instance. Burgum has called the nation\u2019s parks, public lands and natural resources \u2013 including timber, fossil fuels and minerals \u2013 assets on \u201cthe nation\u2019s balance sheet.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Sgamma said rescinding the BLM rule would be essentially inconsequential as it was \u201cbased on a very novel interpretation of the Federal Lands Policy and Management Act,\u201d which established the BLM\u2019s sustained yield and multiple-use mandate. And \u201cthere\u2019s no legal basis for it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The rule has \u201cbarely been implemented, so it really hasn\u2019t had much effect on BLM lands in the West,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s pretty much a given that it will be rescinded, Sgamma said, because \u201cCongress overturned a substantially similar rule using the Congressional Review Act when they overturned BLM Planning 2.0\u201d during Trump\u2019s first presidency.<\/p>\n

That rule was considered a long-overdue attempt by the BLM to improve the way the agency had developed land use plans over the previous 40 years in ways that made its efforts with multiple stakeholders more collaborative, transparent and efficient.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis rule is obviously substantially similar,\u201d Sgamma said.<\/p>\n

But The Wilderness Society says the Public Lands Rule wasn\u2019t attempting to stop oil and gas development and there\u2019s no reason to rescind it.<\/p>\n

\u201cPublic lands belong to the American people, not to drilling or mining interests,\u201d Alison Flint, its senior legal director, said. \u201cThe BLM Public Lands Rule simply affirmed that conservation is just as valid a use of our public lands as development, and it brought common sense and overdue reform to how these places are managed.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy marking it and pragmatic protections for the Western Arctic for rollbacks, the administration is shouting from the rooftops that they intend to give our public lands away, threaten access to outdoor recreation and run roughshod over wildlife habitat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sgamma said \u201cif the left really wants to have this type of conservation regulation of BLM lands, then the left needs to do the hard work of getting something passed in Congress.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Colorado Sun is a reader-supported, nonpartisan news organization dedicated to covering Colorado issues. To learn more, go to coloradosun.com<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Act put restoration on equal footing with ranching and drilling<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22574,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[529,875,876,221,28,194,193,476,976,315,195],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-22573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-conservation","tag-energy-and-resource","tag-energy-resources","tag-gas-and-oil","tag-headlines","tag-land-resources","tag-land-use","tag-natural-resources-general","tag-outdoor-recreation","tag-president-donald-trump","tag-u-s-bureau-of-land-management"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22573","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22573"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22573\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77769,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22573\/revisions\/77769"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22573"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22573"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22573"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=22573"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}