A new report from the Wilderness Society says some of Western Colorado’s landscapes — including canyons and mesas, and stretches of the Colorado River — are some of the most vulnerable in the country to oil and gas leasing.
The “Not for Sale” report identifies ten landscapes across the nation — most of them in the West — as being particularly vulnerable to extraction, particularly oil, gas, and mining. On that list is “Western Colorado Canyons and Mesas,” which contains stretches of the Colorado River.
Where oil and natural gas companies can drill on public lands in Western Colorado has been under question for years, and was the subject of lawsuits that forced the Bureau of Land Management to redo two of the area’s resource management plans.
The Colorado River Valley and Grand Junction BLM field offices both went through multiple rounds of public feedback and review before settling on plans that kept acreage open to oil and gas leasing while also prioritizing wildlife habitat and areas of critical environmental concern.
But last year, Rep. Jeff Hurd, a Republican representing much of Western Colorado in the 3rd Congressional District, introduced the “Productive Public Lands Act,” which sought to invalidate both of those resource management plans, and would compel the agency to adopt plans that would open significantly more acreage to oil and gas leasing. He claimed the Biden administration “locked up access to viable lands throughout Colorado and the West.”
“That would just throw out so much work and community input and public input and tribal consultation,” said Jim Ramey, the Colorado state director for the Wilderness Society. “All kinds of effort goes into these planning processes where the BLM works with all the stakeholders to hear what everyone thinks are the priorities and how they want to see their public lands managed.”
Ramey was also concerned about the BLM’s recent efforts to ramp up leasing in Colorado. Earlier this month, the BLM announced that it had leased 68 parcels for oil and gas in the state, amounting to over 45,000 acres, which it says brought in over $8 million. It’s currently proposing a sale in September that would offer up over 17,000 acres in Northwest Colorado, including areas in Moffat, Rio Blanco, Garfield, and Mesa counties. The public can comment on this proposal until April 12.
Ramey said that opening even more public land in the state to oil and gas drilling effectively closes them off for recreation, habitat, and conservation.
“That gets industrialized with truck trips, with pipelines, with active drilling, and then the hydraulic fracturing to poke more holes in the ground and produce more methane gas and other hydrocarbons— that leaves a long impact and it prevents that land from being prioritized for other uses,” he said.
“Who wants to go on a hunting expedition in the drilling field where the wildlife have been driven out? You don't go for that. Who wants to go on an awe-inspiring mountain bike ride along those pipelines or in an actively drilling site? You don't go there for that.”
All of Western Colorado is currently in some state of drought, with over 20% of the state being in the U.S. Drought Monitor’s worst category, exceptional drought. Most of that exceptional drought is concentrated in the Northwest part of the state. This winter broke records across multiple western states for low snowpack, leaving water availability in question for this coming spring.
Ramey said in light of these conditions, driven by human-caused climate change, Colorado cannot afford to open up even more public lands to oil, gas, and mining.
“We’re already in what I feel like is a climate emergency, and that is due in substantial part to oil and gas and coal that has been produced for decades, over a century, on our public lands and waters,” he said. Researchers estimate that about a quarter of the United States’ fossil fuels production between 2005 and 2019 came from federal lands and waters, equivalent to roughly 1.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in emissions per year.
Other landscapes listed in the “Not for Sale” report include Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments in Southern Utah. When the first Trump administration shrunk the boundaries of both monuments in 2016, there was significant interest in uranium mining in the region.
Currently, Utah’s congressional delegation is attempting to use a law called the Congressional Review Act to overturn the resource management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante. That effort is the first of its kind: last year, Congress used the CRA to overturn several local BLM resource management plans, but it would be unprecedented to use it on a national monument.
Copyright 2026 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.
