Grand Junction Daily Sentinel

Is there no place for conservation on public land?

We supported the Public Lands Rule as an overdue and modest way of bringing better balance to Bureau of Land Management decision-making.

But the rule is on its deathbed, soon to be rescinded by the Trump administration before it could live up to its promise of helping make America’s public estate viable for future generations

The BLM is responsible for managing 245 million acres of public land. It’s supposed to manage for sustainability as well as multiple uses, but over decades the agency was coming up short on fulfilling that dual mission. Ecological values, like watershed health, were persistently taking a back seat to extraction and grazing — if they were acknowledged at all.

The Public Lands Rule, finalized in April 2024, was going to change that — largely without disrupting traditional uses of land. It sought to put conservation on equal footing with other uses for the first time since the BLM was established in 1946.

But before it could begin to work in earnest restoring degraded lands or offsetting environmental damage, the rule is about to be yanked off the books. Earlier this month, the Trump administration moved to repeal the rule, arguing it was never needed.

“The Public Lands Rule exceeded the BLM’s statutory authority by placing an outsized priority on conservation or no-use at the expense of multiple-use access, threatening to curtail grazing, energy development, recreation and other traditional land uses,” the Interior Department said in a Sept. 10 news release.

“Many rural communities depend on public lands for livelihoods tied to agriculture, mining and energy production. Rescinding the rule restores BLM to its legal mandate and protects these economic drivers from restrictive land-use policies. The people who depend on public lands for their livelihoods have every incentive to conserve them and have been doing so for generations — no new rule was needed to force what is already a way of life.”

It’s debatable that the rule would have reduced access to lands. It offered restoration and mitigation leases to restore the health of lands and waters, but the rule specified such leases could not conflict with valid existing rights and authorized uses, such as grazing. Casual uses of lands leased for restoration or mitigation, such as recreation and hunting and fishing, were generally to continue.

The Interior Department is also claiming that the rule sidelined local voices. It’s worth noting that the vast majority — somewhere on the order of 90% — of respondents during the rule’s public comment period supported it. The repeal of the rule is sidelining local voices as much or more than the rule did.

But the rule stood in stark contrast to Trump’s energy dominance agenda. The rule was a reminder that there is no use — or multiple uses — without sustainability. It acknowledged the need to preserve and restore federal rangeland against the impacts of climate change. If the land can’t support grazing, wildlife habitat or recreational uses, what becomes of it? Conveniently, energy extraction is impervious to climate change. If land has no value on the surface, it only heightens its extractive value.

There will be a rulemaking in the federal register and a 60-day public comment period. But who are we kidding? The Public Lands Rule will go away, restoring a status quo that treated conservation as an impediment to development.