The largest land management agency in the country, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oversees 245 million acres of public lands and waters across the United States. That includes 8.1 million acres in Montana. Since the mid-20th century, however, the BLM has managed our public lands with an overwhelming focus on oil and gas drilling, grazing, mining, and other extractive uses. As a result, the agency has neglected a host of other values and uses, including land conservation, water quality, and cultural preservation, not to mention hiking, hunting, fishing, wildlife viewing, and other forms of recreation that underpin Montana’s quality of life and sustain the state’s $2.5 billion outdoor recreation economy.
The BLM has taken this extraction-above-all-else approach to public land management even though, in 1976, Congress mandated the agency take a multiple-use approach, which meant giving equal weight to extractive and non-extractive uses alike. The extraction-above-all-else approach has also stood at odds with how much Montanans and other Americans have come to value conservation, healthy wildlife populations, and outdoor recreation. Moreover, the approach has prevented the agency from properly addressing climate change in its planning and on-the-ground management decisions.
Last week, however, the BLM took a significant step towards achieving true multiple use in how it manages our public lands. It released the draft of a proposed “public lands rule” that would put non-extractive uses, including conservation, on equal footing with extractive ones. With over 90% of BLM-managed public lands in Montana currently available for oil and gas leasing, there is a clear need for more balanced management of public lands in our state.
The rule would protect undeveloped and intact landscapes, restore degraded habitat, and base management decisions on the best available science and data. It would help ensure healthy wildlife habitat, clean water, access to public lands, and the preservation of archeological sites, historic properties, spiritually significant landscapes, and other cultural treasures.
Moreover, it would enable the agency to co-steward and co-manage some public lands with Tribal nations that have cared for these lands and waters since time immemorial.
Wild Montana and dozens of other conservation groups across the U.S. fully support this update to BLM management and applaud BLM Director (and fellow Montanan) Tracy Stone-Manning and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland for proposing the rule. We now encourage all Montanans to join us in supporting the proposed rule during the ongoing public comment period, which will end on June 20, 2023. (Read on for more on how you can comment on the rule.)
Notably, the rule would compel the BLM to consider land health assessments and monitoring – including standards for water and soil quality, wildlife habitat, and vegetation diversity – in all management plans and agency decision making. (Currently, the BLM considers land health only for existing grazing allotments.) It would allow the BLM to issue “conservation leases” to entities wishing to invest private funds in public land restoration. And it would prioritize the designation and management of so-called “areas of critical environmental concern,” defined as lands that contain “important natural, cultural, and scenic resources.”
The greater emphasis the BLM places on conservation would help the agency mitigate the effects of the climate crisis. It would help the agency keep our streams running cold, clear, and connected, giving trout the thermal refuge they need to survive during extreme heat. It would also help the agency keep our wildlands intact and connected, offering wildlife the space they’ll need to move in response to drought and a warming climate.
As poll after poll has demonstrated, Montanans across the political spectrum want our public land management agencies to do a better job of caring for our public lands. The 2023 bipartisan Conservation in the West poll, for instance, showed that 66% of Montanans “prefer that leaders place more emphasis on protecting water, air, wildlife habitat, and recreation opportunities over maximizing the amount of land available for drilling and mining.” The proposed public lands rule would do just that, giving Montanans and other Americans a once-in-a-generation opportunity to vastly improve how we manage our public lands.
Please join us in commenting in support of this rule by visiting wildmontana.org/publiclandsrule.
Maddy Munson is public lands director at Wild Montana.