On the Little Salmon River. Sure looks like a place the Trump crew would like to do some drilling.
Sticking to its crackpot fossil fuel agenda, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced Wednesday that the Trump regime will do away with the Public Lands Rule the Biden administration finalized last year. It’s been clear since April that this was coming as part of the regime’s slash-and-burn of environmental protections and defunding of agencies dedicated to enforcing them.
Formally known as the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, 92% of Americans who participated in public comments during the drafting supported it. Just 4.5% were opposed. But it’s the public and private comments of oil and gas companies, ranchers, loggers, and other industries that are holding sway as they have but for brief hiatuses over more than a century.
Two of the rule’s key elements stirred the most opposition. Under the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the Bureau of Land Management can issue leases for the public to “use, occupy, and develop public lands.” The Public Lands Rule added to new kinds of leases—habitat restoration and mitigation of environmental threats. As Ian Rose wrote in Sierra:
For the first time, a qualified person or group would have been able to lease public land for the sole purpose of turning the land back to nature, or fixing damage done by a previous use, the same way an oil or logging company could lease it for profit. [...]
Another important section relates to areas of critical environmental concern (ACEC). This designation dates back to the original 1976 act and allows specific pieces of BLM land to be set aside for special protection. They include not only ecological conservation, but also cultural protection, and that has made ACECs especially important to Indigenous peoples in Alaska and the West.
When the Public Lands Rule rescission was announced five months ago, Alison Flint, senior legal director at the Wilderness Society, said in a written statement: “This is not policy—it’s a blatant giveaway to industry that threatens to dismantle decades of conservation progress, shut down public access, harm wildlife, and accelerate the reckless sell-off of our natural resources. Public lands belong to all of us, and they should not be cast off to the highest bidder.”
In a press release Wednesday, the Interior Department noted that the rule made conservation “(i.e. no use) an official use of public lands, putting it on the same level as BLM’s other uses of public lands.”
Burgum himself said: “The previous administration’s Public Lands Rule had the potential to block access to hundreds of thousands of acres of multiple-use land — preventing energy and mineral production, timber management, grazing and recreation across the West. The most effective caretakers of our federal lands are those whose livelihoods rely on its well-being. Overturning this rule protects our American way of life and gives our communities a voice in the land that they depend on.”
Oh, horrors, the crime of “idle land.” Burgum and the corporate interests he played lapdog to as governor of North Dakota, just can’t get their minds around the idea that conservation is in itself a valuable use of land. Their view of acceptable “use” is only satisfied by clearcut forests, strip mines, and oil-and-gas fracking rigs lined up from horizon to horizon in every direction.
Burgum’s assertion that the Public Lands Rule upends the balance required for multiple-use public lands is, like so much policy emerging from this regime, greatly at odd with the facts. Altogether, the BLM manages 240 million acres, which makes its domain 25% larger than Texas. Just 13% of that is set aside for conservation.
In 2023, the bureau reported that leases and activities on lands it managed generated $152 billion in total economic output. The oil and gas industry produced more than $100 billion of that, two of every three dollars. With overall U.S. production at record levels, 25% of crude oil and 10% of natural gas comes from public lands.
“This rule provided for healthy habitats and now it’s foolishly being yanked away in service of the ‘Drill, baby, drill’ agenda,” said Vera Smith, national forests and public lands director at Defenders of Wildlife, in a written statement.
Defenders points out that some 300 threatened and endangered species and 2,460 at-risk species “are struggling in the face of widespread habitat degradation resulting from chronic drought, continuing invasive plant species invasions, and unsustainable levels of grazing, oil and gas drilling, and other disturbances. These trends highlight the importance of this rule and its emphasis on science-based decision-making, land health and sustainability.”
Science so often loses when dueling with greed.
—MB
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![The W.A. Parish Generating Station is a 3.65-gigawatt (3,653 MW), dual-fired power plant located in unincorporated Thompsons, Texas, the station occupies a 4,664-acre site near Smithers Lake southwest of Houston in Fort Bend County and consists of two four-unit plants; one natural gas and the other coal (2,697 MW).[1] With a total installed capacity of 3,653 MW, it is the second largest conventional power station in the US.](https://cdn.prod.dailykos.com/images/808019/story_image/1024px-W.A._Parish_Generating_Plant_Aerial.jpg?1590144056 "The W.A. Parish Generating Station is a 3.65-gigawatt (3,653 MW), dual-fired power plant located in unincorporated Thompsons, Texas, the station occupies a 4,664-acre site near Smithers Lake southwest of Houston in Fort Bend County and consists of two four-unit plants; one natural gas and the other coal (2,697 MW).[1] With a total installed capacity of 3,653 MW, it is the second largest conventional power station in the US.")
