The Department of the Interior is moving to strike a Biden-era conservation rule for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). On Wednesday, September 10, Sec. Doug Burgum announced that the agency is proposing to rescind the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, saying it was impeding extractive industries on public lands.
“The previous administration’s Public Lands Rule 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,” Burgum wrote in a statement.
The announcement also claims the rule “created regulatory uncertainty, reduced access to lands, and undermined the long-standing multiple-use mandate of the BLM as established by Congress.”
The Federal Lands Policy Management Act, or FLPMA, is the law that gives the BLM its multiple use mission. The word “conservation” doesn’t come up in FLPMA’s definition of multiple use, but the law does mandate that the BLM protect ecological and environmental factors like air and water quality, and it says certain public lands should be protected in their “natural condition.”
Colloquially known as the Public Lands Rule, the policy officially codifies conservation as a “use” for the BLM, like grazing, recreation, and oil and gas. It also gives the agency tools to manage conservation.
Steve Bloch, the legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), said the characterization of locking land up is false, and that many of the management strategies were commonsense.
“Identifying those intact landscapes and working through a process to protect them is one of the things BLM was charged with doing,” he said. “They were also told to go and restore degraded landscapes, look for the most bang for the buck, and look for opportunities to work with all comers: local conservation districts, with ranchers, with energy operators.”
Bloch referred to a new leasing program created by the Public Lands Rule. It created two new kinds of leases: restoration leases and mitigation leases. Restoration leases would have allowed leaseholders—including non-governmental organizations, state land managers, and Tribes—to restore degraded or damaged ecosystems. Mitigation leases are intended to offset other uses of public lands that may occur, like energy development.
He said the rescission is a rejection of the reality of climate change, and the idea that our public lands can be part of climate resilience.
“It’s not surprising that the Trump administration would see (the rule) as an impediment to their agenda of prioritizing fossil fuel development, extractive industry,” he said.
Other public lands advocates were similarly dismayed by the Interior’s proposal to rescind the Public Lands Rule.
“If Secretary Burgum spent more time in the West, he’d understand how conservation fits into everything the Bureau of Land Management does,” wrote Jennifer Rokala, Executive Director of the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities, in a statement. “Hunters, anglers, hikers and backpackers all praised the Public Lands Rule because it helps ensure access to public lands for future generations. Public lands management is a balancing act, and you just tipped the scales back to the 19th century, when robber barons ran the country, exploiting our lands for personal gain.”
In 2023, CWP did an analysis of the over 150,000 public comments during the rulemaking process for the Public Lands Rule, and found that over 90% of them were in favor of the rule.
The Wilderness Society also questioned the Interior’s assertion that the BLM exceeded its authority in drafting the rule.
“To the contrary, the Public Lands Rule was informed by many months of thoughtful public engagement and review, and it has solid grounding in a nearly 50-year-old directive from Congress,” wrote Alison Flint, TWS’s senior legal director, in a statement. “Indeed, it is necessary to ensure compliance with long-standing direction from Congress that protecting undeveloped landscapes, wildlife habitat, and cultural resources is central to BLM’s mission. The administration cannot simply overthrow that statutory authority because they would prefer to let drilling and mining companies call the shots.”
“I think we’ll all litigate over this,” Bloch said of SUWA and other conservation groups. “We’re comfortable defending the rule, which was well-grounded in law and fact.”
The public will have 60 days to comment on the rule change on the Federal Register. Bloch said SUWA is encouraging its members to participate in that comment period.
“The lands that we work on here in Utah, the 24 million acres or so of BLM-managed land, are federal public lands, that all Americans own and have a stake in, and have a voice in how they should be managed, and raising that voice is important.”
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
