Equal footing
Can a new rule fix the 'Bureau of Livestock and Mining?'

When the Interior Department issued a draft of a new Public Lands Rule, designed to “guide the balanced management of public lands” and put conservation on a par with other uses, like drilling, grazing and mining, I thought I had been transported back in time to 1976. That’s when Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, or FLPMA, which was supposed to elevate conservation and rid the Bureau of Land Management of the well-deserved moniker: Bureau of Livestock and Mining.

FLPMA didn’t always do the job it intended. While the BLM has progressed, many of the agency’s field offices still behave as if it’s the 1950s, prioritizing drilling and grazing above all other uses, regardless of what policies are handed down from Washington, D.C.

Given that history, I wondered whether this proposed rule really amounted to more than merely “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” as the Center for Biological Diversity put it. If it was just reiterating FLPMA policies, how could it make any difference on the ground now?

To sum it up, the rule would elevate conservation by:

• Applying land health standards and guidelines to all BLM-managed public lands and uses; Current BLM policy limits their application to grazing authorizations. The problem is that the agency is doing a piss-poor job applying land health standards to rangelands. So how can we expect them to do any better with other lands?

• Making conservation leases available to entities that seek to restore public lands or provide mitigation for a particular action. A nonprofit could lease a parcel, pay rent and post a reclamation bond to do riparian area restoration, for example, or a solar company might lease a parcel to do some land-healing to offset its impacts to other public land.

• Amending the existing Area of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) regulations to emphasize protecting important natural, cultural and scenic resources, and contributing to ecosystem resilience by protecting intact landscapes and preserving habitat connectivity. It would also establish a more comprehensive framework for identifying and evaluating these areas.

The biggest change, then, appears to be the conservation leases. But it’s still unclear exactly how they’d work. In theory, someone could lease out a parcel for conservation, thereby precluding grazing or oil and gas leasing during the lease. But what happens when the lease term ends?

Josh Osher, Public Policy Director for the Western Watersheds Project, pointed out that an organization could use the leases to, say, do a regenerative grazing project and cynically use it to lock the land into a grazing lease afterwards. He also noted that even though oil and gas drilling and mining are restricted in ACECs, grazing typically is not.

This only reinforced my skepticism about the rule. But then I started looking at industry’s reactions to the rule, and I have to say, I was a little taken aback.

Sen. John Barrasso, the Wyoming Republican, compared the bureaucrats who wrote the “decree” to the tree-spiking eco-warriors of the 1980s, while the ranching industry feels “betrayed” by what it says is a plan to “eradicate” grazing on public lands. Say what?!

Chris Saeger, an advocate and consultant from Montana, gathered some more responses:

“The rule would make conservation one of the uses on equal footing as grazing, water rights, oil, gas and mining,” rancher Rachel Gabel said.

“When BLM is analyzing projects and uses because they are mandated as a multiple-use public land agency, conservation will now have as much standing as recreation, grazing, mining and other uses as outlined in FLPMA,” according to a Blue Ribbon Coalition Action Alert email, titled “Proposed BLM Rule to Devastate Public Land Access.”

And then there’s the reaction by Rep. Matt Rosendale, a Montana Republican. In a hearing, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said the rule would put conservation on equal footing with other uses. Rosendale responded, rather testily: “Well, they’re not supposed to be on equal footing.”

Wow. Just wow. See, here I thought that conservation already was on an equal footing with drilling, mining, and so forth, as mandated by FLPMA. Obviously I was wrong!

All of these folks are acknowledging that, in fact, the agency has been kowtowing to the oil and gas, drilling and livestock industries all along while shirking their duties as stewards of the public’s land.

In that case, this new rule might actually have some real on-the-ground impacts. That is, if the Biden administration implements it quickly enough to insulate it from future efforts to rescind it. And if they can ensure that the new policies are implemented on a field-office level, rather than sitting around moldering on some Washington, D.C., desk.

The Land Desk is a newsletter from Jonathan P. Thompson, author of “River of Lost Souls,” “Behind the Slickrock Curtain” and “Sagebrush Empire.” Subscribe at: landdesk.org