Many local officials in the West are urging the Interior Department to keep a Biden-era rule that put conservation on equal footing with grazing and energy production, as the Trump administration seeks to roll it back.
The Bureau of Land Management’s Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, frequently referred to as the Public Lands Rule, promotes protecting intact landscapes for wildlife habitat and clean water and allows land to be leased for conservation purposes.
“The Public Lands Rule is in alignment with our values,” said Laura Puckett Daniels, a county commissioner in Gunnison County, Colo., who was one of 180 officials to sign a letter organized by Mountain Pact, a coalition of local leaders in Western mountain communities.
“It's in alignment with our economy, and it will help us to consider all of these values when making decisions with BLM lands going forward,” said Puckett Daniels. “Rescinding it feels like moving backwards, and like not holding conservation, wildlife and recreation values as highly as extractive values.”
Though the rule officially went into effect before the end of the Biden administration, it largely had not begun to be implemented on the ground before Trump’s Interior Department signaled doing away with it.
Tom Boyd, a commissioner in Eagle County, Colo., thought the policy would help land managers at BLM district offices balance traditional land uses with ones that are increasingly driving economies like his, such as recreating in and enjoying the outdoors.
“What's at stake right now is the idea that conservation, for some of us, really is a value in and to itself. So, we'd like to keep that,” he said.
The Mountain Pact letter said the Public Lands rule did not eliminate oil and gas development, mining, logging or grazing, and BLM officials during the Biden administration said it didn’t eliminate or invalidate existing leases on the land. But Cody Davis thought it could effectively do so in the future.
“Once those use leases are over, then someone could sneak in and get a conservation lease and therefore restrict any use of the land in the future,” said Davis, chair of board of commissioners in Mesa County, Colo., which wrote a letter advocating that the Interior Department rescind the rule.
“True conservation comes from active management, not bureaucratic restriction,” the letter stated.
The Bureau of Land Management is accepting public comments on the decision to rescind the rule through Nov. 10.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
