Trump looks to make the BLM the Bureau of Livestock and Mining Again

Plus: Clearing up confusion over oil and gas lease reviews

Vermillion Cliffs. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

“The initials BLM no longer stand for Bureau of Livestock and Mining. The days when economic interests exercised control over decisions on the public domain are past. The public’s lands will be managed in the interest of all the people because they belong to all the people. For too long, much of the land where the deer and the antelope play has been managed primarily for livestock often to the detriment of wildlife.”

— Cecil Andrus, secretary of Interior under Jimmy Carter, in 1977.

In what came as no surprise to just about anyone, the Trump administration moved this week to rescind the Bureau of Land Management’s Conservation & Landscape Health Rule. The Public Lands Rule, as it is commonly known, was implemented last year by the Biden administration to put conservation on a par with other federal land uses, such as energy development, grazing, and mining.

The administration announced the intention to revoke the rule quietly at reginfo.gov rather than, as is its wont, with some inanely named executive order, and it doesn’t give any specifics as to how or under what authority it would eliminate the rule. Yet if Trump were to issue a specific order, it might be titled: “MAKING THE BLM THE BUREAU OF LIVESTOCK AND MINING AGAIN!”

Yet it is not at all clear what effect the rollback might have on the ground, chiefly because the impacts of the rule, itself, remain unclear since there hasn’t even been time to truly implement it yet.

When the rule was first proposed in 2023, it was met with mixed reactions from the environmental community, some of who saw it as largely ineffective, and harsh rebukes from the livestock and energy industries and their political enablers.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association called the rule a “capitulation to the extremist environmental groups who want to eradicate grazing from the landscape,” and Sen. John Barrasso, the Wyoming Republican, compared the bureaucrats who wrote the “decree” to the tree-spiking eco-warriors of the 1980s.

Yet it is hardly radical. In essence, the rule simply reiterates and reminds us of what Congress intended when it included the multiple-use mandate in the Federal Land Policy Management Act of 1976, the law that created the modern framework for modern public land oversight (and that endeavored to rid the BLM of the “livestock and mining” monicker).

Multiple use, according to the law, is public lands management that “will best meet the present and future needs of the American people” and allows for “a combination of balanced and diverse resource uses that takes into account the long-term needs of future generations … including … recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish, and natural scenic, scientific and historical values.”

So, yes, the BLM is required to accommodate recreation, grazing, and mining, but also, must manage the land for the sake of watersheds, wildlife, and natural values — i.e. conservation.

The rule aims to carry out this mandate by:

• directing the agency to prioritize landscape health in all decision making, which is what it’s already supposed to do when assessing grazing allotments;

• creating a mechanism for outside entities — states, tribes, or nonprofits — to lease public land for restoration projects, much as a rancher or oil and gas company might lease BLM land (but only on parcels that aren’t already leased/claimed for other uses);

• allowing firms to lease land for mitigation work to offset impacts from development elsewhere (again, these would not override existing, valid rights);

• clarifying the designation process for areas of critical environmental concern, or ACECs, where land managers can add extra regulations to protect cultural or natural resources; and,

• directing the agency to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into decision-making, particularly when considering ACECs.

Really it is more of a tool than a rule. That is, it gives third parties and agency state and field office staffers a mechanism to step up conservation on some lands, but does not create any new restrictions that would interfere with other uses. And there’s simply no way this tool could be used to “eradicate” grazing or drilling or any other use, as the hyperbolists claim, even if BLM personnel wanted to — and history shows they do not. In fact, the mitigation leases could be used to facilitate other development by allowing, say, solar or oil and gas companies to “offset” the damage inflicted by utility-scale arrays or drilling projects.

So rescinding the rule really amounts to tossing a brand new tool out the window before it even got used. On the one hand, we’re not necessarily going to miss the tool. But simply discarding it is also totally senseless and a waste that benefits no one, even Trump’s oil and gas executive buddies. But as we’ve pointed out before, Trump’s haphazard policymaking is more about spite, vindictiveness, and cruelty than common sense.

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Drill rig and Raplee Ridge. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Last week, a friend sent me an email with the subject line: “not a fan of bureaucracy, but this is not good.” In the message, she had cut and pasted this headline from National Parks Traveler:

Interior Plans To Drop Environmental Reviews Of Energy Development In The West

Environmental reviews designed to protect landscapes and communities from oil and gas development in the West will be done away with, the Interior Department announced Thursday.

Yes, it is bad. No, it’s not as bad as the headline makes it sound (though the confusion is understandable).

The story came from a brief Interior Department press release announcing it “will no longer pursue lengthy analysis for oil and gas leasing decisions in seven states.” That sure sounds like they are dropping environmental reviews for all oil and gas leases in the West. And plenty of news outlets and social media posters interpreted it as such.

That’s not the case. At least not yet.

The press release was referring to the revocation of a specific environmental review for 3,244 oil and gas leases that date as far back as the Obama-era. The leases were issued as the result of 74 lease sale decisions between 2015 and 2020. Environmental groups filed multiple lawsuits, saying the original environmental reviews were inadequate. The courts agreed, remanding the decisions back to the BLM for more thorough reviews that included analysis of greenhouse gas emissions, social cost of carbon, and other impacts. .

In January the Biden administration decided to lump all of the leases together and prepare a new, comprehensive environmental impact statement for the whole lot that would incorporate current science and public input.

Trump’s Interior Department decided the review went against the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda and related executive orders, so it cancelled the EIS. According to the press release, the BLM is now “evaluating options for compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act for these oil and gas leasing decisions.” What that means isn’t clear, even to BLM officials, and the industry is confused as well.

If the agency issues the leases without further review, you can bet the same groups that sued — and won — the first time will go for a repeat performance. Meanwhile, environmental analyses are ongoing for future oil and gas lease sales (I checked). That’s not to say that they will be adequate, however.

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🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

The Center for American Progress has put together a nice, but disturbing, interactive map illustrating the myriad ways DOGE is slashing federal spending and harming communities across the nation. You can click on a congressional district and get a list of specific grants that have been revoked and leases that have been cancelled.

🤣🙄🤔🤪

I went down the oddest wormhole the other day when I stumbled upon the Google reviews for none other than the Cholla coal power plant near Joseph City, Arizona. That an industrial facility even has starred reviews is weird enough, and possibly yet another sign of the apocalypse. But this one, I happened to notice in passing, has 138 reviews with an average four star rating. Obviously I had to check them out.

And let me tell you, they are something. Each and every one is really special. I have no idea which ones are sincere and which ones ironic. All I know is that read together, it is an epic poem. You should look at them all, but for now I’ll share some of my favorites.

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