“[The Roadless Rule] is just one on a list of things, for a single dominant use which appears to be oil and gas development,” said former BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning of the current administration’s approach to public lands. “They do not believe in multiple use. They want energy dominan ce.” Credit: Adobe Stock The dictionary definition of use is “to employ for some purpose.” The definition of conserve is “to keep from loss, decay or waste.” So is conservation a use? In the matter of managing 245 million acres overseen by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the new answer is no.  This story also appeared in Mountain Journal On June 11, the BLM will rescind the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule. That’s a change from just a year ago, when BLM declared that conservation was a co-equal option to uses such as mining, grazing or energy development on public land. Before that Biden-administration policy could have much practical impact, Trump-administration officials deleted it. “By rescinding the 2024 Rule, the BLM eliminates mechanisms — such as restoration and mitigation leasing — that threatened to restrict productive use of the public lands and introduced uncertainty and unnecessary burdens in planning and permitting,” the Federal Register Final Rule announcement stated on May 12. It added that repealing the Biden rule would remove “any thumb on the scale in favor of conservation at the expense of productive use and development of the public lands and their many important resources.” Tracy Stone-Manning, President Joe Biden’s BLM director, oversaw the drafting and promulgation of the Public Lands Rule. In an interview with Mountain Journal, Stone-Manning said the policy switch went beyond regular rule-tweaking. “This is not a pendulum swinging,” Stone-Manning said. “It’s not political football. What this administration is doing on public lands is unprecedented. It’s a full-on attack on the lands we all own.”  As an example, Stone-Manning pointed to the U.S. Forest Service’s move to rescind the Roadless Rule, which she called “the largest environmental rollback in this country’s history.” “And that’s just one on a list of things, for a single dominant use which appears to be oil and gas development. They do not believe in multiple use. They want energy dominance.” Tracy Stone-Manning served for four years as director of the Bureau of Land Management. Here, she kneels at Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah. Public Lands Day weekend, September 2024. Courtesy Tracy Stone-Manning Getting that change into BLM’s decision-making process clarified the agency’s responsibility for protecting public lands as well as profiting from them, according to Stone-Manning. And the effort drew on deep agency experience backed by widespread public support. “The Public Lands Rule was built on years of career staffers trying to get their arms around how to manage for landscape health,” said Stone-Manning, now executive director of The Wilderness Society. “They were not only excited about the idea, but brought incredible experience and wisdom to the writing of that rule. It was born of people’s experience on the ground over decades.” When it was in draft stage, a Pew Charitable Trusts analysis of the Biden rule said it created a “more level playing field where conservation of our nation’s natural resources is actually in the game.” Dozens of community meetings during the BLM drafting process and numerous public opinion surveys, including one recently produced by Montana Free Press backed up that sentiment. “That was true across all metrics: political affiliation, age, gender, geography,” Stone-Manning said. “People want these lands managed for conservation, for future generations, for wildlife habitat, for clean water, and for the products we get off of them today in a balanced way. The [Trump] administration is absolutely not listening to what the public wants.” On the other hand, it drew early opposition from nine state attorneys general as well as extractive industry trade groups such as American Clean Power. The states of Wyoming and Utah sued BLM within a month of its promulgation to block it, followed by similar challenges from Montana, Idaho, North Dakota and several industry groups. Last September, President Donald Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced his intention to overturn the Biden rule, saying it 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.” Getting rid of it, Burgum said, “protects our American way of life.” “People want these lands managed for conservation, for future generations, for wildlife habitat, for clean water, and for the products we get off of them today in a balanced way. The [Trump] administration is absolutely not listening to what the public wants.”Tracy Stone-Manning, former BLM director BLM’s guiding law is the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, or FLPMA, which requires it to manage use, occupancy and development of public lands for multiple use and sustained yield. That second clause, sustained yield, is defined as “managing public lands and resources in perpetuity to achieve a high-level annual or regular periodic output of the various renewable resources of the public lands.” FLPMA also orders BLM to “take actions necessary to prevent unnecessary or undue degradation of the lands.” The Boise-based Blue Ribbon Coalition praised the decision to its motorized-recreation membership. A May 11 statement on its website highlighted a line from the Federal Register “in language we will be quoting for years, that ‘it is not appropriate, or logical, to treat conservation as a ‘use’ under FLPMA.’” Rather, BRC argued, the federal government’s public lands laws already require extensive protection and conservation of landscapes. In its analysis, BRC claimed the rule’s real intention was to hand public land over to “well-funded organizations that could buy leases, exclude other uses and lock landscapes into single-purpose management without congressional action.” The Trump administration has touted its success rolling back Biden-administration conservation efforts on BLM land, including the use of 80 categorical exclusions to streamline development activity 2025. The Interior Department currently lists more than 21.3 million acres of BLM land leased for oil and gas development. Photo Credit BLM Wyoming.  Ben Burr, executive director for BRC, told Mountain Journal another major objection was the rule’s changes to Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, a BLM designation of places where special management rules would apply. Burr said the proposed Rock Springs Management Plan in Wyoming, for example, would have placed about 1 million of its 3 million-acre region as an ACEC. “That would have treated it essentially as a wilderness area, and would have limited all forms of use other than conservation,” Burr said. “That would mean very limited or non-existent motorized access. Wyoming is exempted from the Antiquities Act, so presidents can’t make national monuments there. What they wanted to do was have a BLM field manager to lock up millions of acres of land. Which is what they did.” Montana Governor Greg Gianforte added his agreement on Wednesday, calling the new rule “a win for public land users, our rural communities, and the rule of law.” Gianforte had objected to the 2024 Rule to both Biden Interior Secretary Deb Haaland and Trump Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, saying that the Biden policy “risked tilting federal land management decisions toward non-use, even where productive uses are consistent with the land’s capabilities.” Revoking the Public Lands Rule resets BLM’s guidelines to the version of FLPMA that’s been in place since 1983. The Federal Register notice said BLM would resume using those old policies “verbatim,” but added it was considering future modifications that present-day opponents of the Public Lands Rule suggested. Those could further reduce “burdensome regulations and barriers to efficient management of public lands.” The agency added that the old version of the rule better helped it follow recent Trump executive orders declaring a national energy emergency,unleashing American energy production, and expanding the coal industry, among others. Just before stepping away from her federal job in 2025, Stone-Manning told the Missoulian newspaper “A future director could say, yeah I don’t like this rule, we need to change it. But he or she doesn’t have a magic wand … Rule-makings are a big public process.” Motorized recreation advocates including the Blue Ribbon Coalition argued the Public Lands Rule unfairly excluded their activities in favor of lower-impact uses on BLM land. Places like the St. Anthony Sand Dunes in Idaho have become popular attractions for off-road-vehicle gatherings. Credit Bob Wick / BLM The Trump administration has made history by shrinking that public process. Several tools exist for one administration to overwrite a predecessor’s agenda. Trump has been particularly active using the Congressional Review Act, using it 16 times in his first term and 23 in his second, so far, to cancel laws of past administrations. Last December alone, Trump signed seven CRA bills targeting BLM actions, including eliminating the resource management plans for field offices in Montana, Wyoming and North Dakota. By comparison, Biden used the CRA three times and vetoed 11 attempts by a Republican-led Congress. President Barack Obama used the CRA five times, and President George W. Bush did so once. President Bill Clinton signed the law in 1996, but never used it. The Federal Register charts the updates to all federal laws and policies. Trump filed numerous changes to the Endangered Species Act to overturn Biden changes to rules Trump had installed in his first term as well as new initiatives to rewrite the law. His attempt to revoke the Roadless Rule is ongoing, and a potential delisting of grizzly bears from the ESA could arrive this coming December. Stone-Manning also oversaw the return of BLM headquarters staff to Washington, D.C. after Trump moved them to Grand Junction, Colorado in his first term. The bureaucratic moves, mass firings and resignations have added to the challenge federal workers face when trying to accomplish what their agency wants them to do. “Along with the thousands of people who have walked out the door is an unknowable amount of wisdom and knowledge about managing these lands we own in common,” Stone-Manning said. “I’ve been talking to people who are left in land management. They’re saying ‘I have no idea what’s going on back there’ — they mean Washington, D.C. People working in agencies are as in the dark as the public is.” The post Trump, Burgum Rescind Public Lands Rule appeared first on Montana Free Press. ...read more read less