Wyoming challenges public lands rule

An analysis of the comments sent to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) while the agency worked on its new Public Lands Rule suggests that more than nine in ten were in favor of placing more focus on conservation.

Wyoming, however, has strongly objected to the rule and is calling for it to be retracted.

Last week, Governor Mark Gordon announced that the states of Utah and Wyoming had filed a lawsuit to challenge the rule.

“Ever since this abomination of a rule raised its ugly head, demonstrating the Biden Administration’s disregard for the law, I have fought it tooth and nail,” Gordon stated in a release announcing the lawsuit.

“This legal challenge ensures that this Administration is called out for sidestepping the bedrock federal statutes which guide public land management by attempting to eliminate multiple use through a corrupted definition of conservation, and for doing so with impunity.”

According to BLM, the updated regulations that were announced in April are intended to, “guide balanced management of America’s public lands now and for the future”.

Safeguarding lands, the agency says, will be done by protecting clean water and wildlife habitat, restoring lands and waters where needed and making informed management decisions.

The rule also, “recognizes conservation as an essential component of public lands management, on equal footing with other multiple uses of these lands” and makes conservation a land use of its own.

The BLM claims that, during the longest comment period on rulemaking in recent history, a total of 216,403 tribes, states, local governments, industry groups, advocacy organizations and members of the public voiced their opinions. The agency says it reviewed them all, found 8000 unique and substantive comments and responded with changes to the final rule.

According to an analysis by the Center for Western Priorities, a statistical analysis based on a random sample of 10,000 of the comments showed that 92% were in favor of the rule as written or wanted its conservation measures to be further strengthened.

As to whether BLM lands are truly facing significant threats, a white paper from the University of Colorado’s Getches-Wilkinson Center, the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment and the S.J Quinney School of Law says yes.

“For decades, BLM has emphasized traditional extractive uses like oil and gas, mining, grazing and timber over conservation values, an approach that has historically and continues to cause ongoing negative environmental impacts like degradation of watersheds, fragmentation of wildlife habitat and impairment of soil resources,” the paper says.

“…There is a pressing need for BLM to modernize its approach to managing the 245 million acres of land entrusted to its care.”

The finalized rule directs the BLM to manage for landscape health, provides a mechanism for restoring and protecting lands through restoration and mitigation leases and clarifies the designation and management of Areas of Critical Environmental Concern.

In a letter sent last week to Tracy Stone-Manning, Director of the BLM, Governor Gordon criticized the rule and the process by which the agency arrived at it.

“The proposed rule was rushed, did not include the benefit of a thorough public engagement effort, it mischaracterizes conservation as something mutually exclusive of what existing users already do, seeks to preempt wildlife management form the states and oversteps the scope of authority BLM was given by Congress under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976,” he wrote.

“All in BLM’s effort to promote an exclusive use of a practice already appropriately delineated in the law.”

In his letter, Gordon claims that the proposed rule caught people “completely by surprise” and contains sweeping statements that remind him of, “often misinformed propaganda put forth by folks who neither live close to the land or make their living from it”.

He accuses the BLM rule of being pushed from the top down “to serve an agenda of organizations whose meal ticket is cultivating hysteria instead of better management”.

Gordon argues that conservation is not something that has to happen by leaving nature alone to find a natural stasis.

“It is a lovely thought that ignores the fact that we are all part of our environment, that we only have one ecosystem with many parts, and that succession is a dynamic process, not something aimed at an ideal,” he wrote.

Wyoming hosts 18.4 million acres of BLM lands, he wrote, and 42.9 million acres of federal mineral estate. Over a third of Wyoming lands are already under restricted use for conservation purposes and many county economies depend on the ability to properly utilize federal lands.

“Unless considerable constraints are included in the final rule, additional analysis is necessary to assess what sort of unintended, or intended, economic impacts it could have on the nation’s rural and public land dependent communities,” he wrote.

This would have been achieved had the rule been planned through the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process, he commented.

The lawsuit makes just this complaint, claiming that the Public Lands Rule overhauls the priorities of the BLM and “represents a sea change in how the agency will carry out its mission moving forward”. Consequently, it is significant enough that the NEPA process should have been applied – something that Wyoming and Utah asked for.

“BLM brushed all these objections aside, by relying on an inapplicable NEPA exclusion and unreasonably concluding that no extraordinary circumstances warrant further review,” states the complaint, which asks for the new rule to be set aside.