Interior Department proposes shift for public land management

Earlier this year, the Interior Department issued a draft of a new Public Lands Rule designed to “guide the balanced management of public lands,” and help those lands “resist and recover from drought, wildfire, and other disturbances.” Among other things, the rule clarifies that conservation is on a par with other uses of federal lands, such as grazing, oil and gas drilling, and mining. The draft rule is open for public comments until June 20. Jonathan Thompson, contributing editor at High Country News, joins us to explain what’s in the draft and how it might change our public lands.

This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Earlier this year, the Interior Department issued a draft of a new public lands rule designed to “guide the balanced management of public lands,” and help those lands “resist and recover from drought, wildfire and other disturbances.” Among other things, the rule clarifies that conservation is on par with other uses of federal lands like grazing, drilling and mining. The draft rule’s open for public comments until June 20th.

Jonathan Thompson wrote about this as a contributing editor at High Country News. He started his article with some fascinating history, including an excerpt from a rousing speech that President Carter’s newly appointed Interior Secretary, Cecil Andrus, gave in 1977. Andrus said ‘At Interior, we’ve begun to make sweeping institutional and policy changes to end what I see as the domination of the department by mining oil and other special interests. We intend to exercise our stewardship of public lands and natural resources in a manner that will make the three R’s: Rape, Ruin, and Run a thing of the past.’

When I talked to Jonathan Thompson recently, I asked him what land use changes actually happened in 1976 and 1977.

Jonathan Thompson: 1976 is when the Congress passed something we call the FLPMA, which is the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. And that was a huge restructuring of the Bureau of Land Management and a refocusing of its mission. In very basic terms what it did is, it took what had been considered the Bureau of Livestock and Mining but really actually was kind of the Bureau of Livestock and Mining. I mean the Bureau of Land Management was kind of created to oversee the Taylor [Grazing] Act, grazing lands, which, that was their purpose, is for grazing. And there was also mining, and before 1976 there was also a rule in place that basically said if you want to build a highway across public land to reach your mining claim or your property or whatever, you could do it without really getting any permission or anything like that.

And there was also actually that’s called Disposal of Public Lands [Act] or the homesteading [Act], where somebody can stake a claim, a homestead or a mining claim. And after a certain period of time, usually about five years, they can patent that claim, meaning they take title to it. So it’s no longer public land, it’s then private land. So that was all in pre-’76 era.

Basically what FLPMA did is it ended disposals, it ended R.S.2477, which was that road building rule I talked about, and it also said that the BLM was no longer gonna be just about livestock and mining and drilling, it was going to be multiple use. They’re going to manage the land for multiple uses, which includes recreation, sightseeing, wildlife, that sort of thing.

Miller: How much of a backlash was there?

Thompson: Big, huge backlash. That was what we now call, it sparked what we now call the Sagebrush Rebellion, and there had been kind of these anti-federal land management rebellions in the past, but this was the first one that was called the Sagebrush Rebellion. And it was big. I mean, there were county commissioners in Utah who were driving bulldozers into wilderness areas and bulldozing roads. There were people all across…from U.S. senators – including Utah, Senator Orrin Hatch – down to local leaders and just ranchers.

It was a rebellion that kind of preceded the Bundys armed occupations and that sort of thing, although it wasn’t nearly as violent and there weren’t nearly as many guns involved, but it was the same sort of thing. These people were rebelling against what they saw as the federal sort of an absentee landlord, telling them what they could do with their backyards, the land in their backyards, even though it was public and owned by all Americans, they saw it as kind of like they had some kind of entitlement to it. And so they resented being told what to do and they resented the idea of multiple use which, we kind of think that that’s standard today, but that was a big shift at the time. And so, part of one of the things they wanted to do was to transfer that public land, to the states, the counties, and maybe ultimately to private hands, similar to the land transfer movement we see today in some places.

Miller: So let’s zoom forward to today. You noted, unlike with the Carter administration, the Biden administration and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, are not singling out mining or ranching as the reasons for their proposed changes. They are talking a lot more about climate change. What are they saying as the reasons for the changes to federal land management?

Thompson: Yeah, I mean, they’re saying that basically the public lands are now endangered by climate change, drought and wildfires. And so there’s sort of a new urgency to protect them for various reasons. I think they probably acknowledge that they’re already being degraded by other uses, but they’re not really talking about it in those terms because they don’t want to be too antagonistic and they probably don’t want to experience that kind of backlash again like they did before; but they are

kind of dancing around it in a way, but they’re focusing on climate change as the main threat and they need to figure out a way to preserve what’s left of those intact lands and really make sure that they do whatever they can to keep them intact.

Miller: So let’s turn to some of the details of these changes. The agency states that the new rule “clarifies that conservation is a use on par with other uses of the public lands under the multiple use and sustained yield framework.” I’m confused by the word ‘clarifies.’ Does that mean that conservation should always or has always been considered totally on par with other uses, or that now we are going to say that we will consider it as just as important as recreation or mining or ranching?

Thompson: Yeah, I was confused at first too, because I always thought that multiple use meant that the conservation was included in that multiple use thing. But it’s clear that a lot of people did not believe that that was the case, including a lot of ranchers and oil & gas industry folks who responded to that specific line in the rule about putting conservation on par with these other uses. There’s a big backlash to that specific line because they clearly did not think that conservation was on par before. So it is a change. But I think that the public in general kind of always assumed that the federal land management agency’s job was to steward or conserve these lands, along with these other things.

Miller: Do you have an understanding now of if this does represent a change in practice, what that would mean going forward for somebody who wants to continue to have ranching rights on some part of federal land in Oregon or wants to mine somewhere else in the west?

Thompson: Well, I don’t think that that line–just saying we’re gonna put conservation on par with everything else is gonna do anything. Honestly, I think that what’s going to change things are some of the more detailed changes in these more detailed rules. And so one of them, for example that’s big, is that they’re going to create this thing called conservation leases, which means that you can lease land just like oil and gas drillers can or just like grazers can, and you can lease land in order to do some kind of conservation or restoration work on that land.

Miller: You point out that this doesn’t mean that you, if you have no interest, and no plan  to drill, if you purely have conservation in mind, you cannot legally get an oil lease.

Thompson: Correct. Tim DeChristopher is probably the most famous person who tried to do that. He bid for an oil and gas lease in Utah back in, I don’t know, years ago, I guess, and he bid for it and he was successful. He won the bid, but then he had no intention of actually doing anything on it. He just wanted to lease it so that he could set it aside and keep it out of the driller’s hands. He was actually put in jail for that. So, it’s definitely illegal to try to do that and it’s never been kind of an avenue for it. And so this represents sort of a change, although it’s not changing that. It doesn’t allow you to go to an oil and gas lease and say I’m going to lease it, in order to keep the drillers out. What it’s going to do, we don’t really know exactly how this is gonna work, but presumably what’s gonna happen is that they’ll put some land up for lease and they’ll say – just like they do with oil and gas drilling –  maybe people can nominate it and say, ‘hey, I wanna do some kind of riparian restoration work or some kind of invasive species eradication work on this piece of land. Can you put it up for lease?’ And they’ll put it up for lease. Theoretically, there might even be competitive leasing for it and somebody will pay some money to get it and they’ll pay rent on it and they’ll do their project, and they’ll have it under lease for 10 years.

What that will do with that land is that for that 10-year period, it will preclude other uses like oil and gas or grazing. If they conflict with the restoration project. It probably would not preclude recreation or sightseeing or something like that, but it would preclude those other uses for that 10- year period. What happens after that though is kind of up in the air right now, and that’s important because you’re not gonna want to go in and invest a lot of money and time and resources into doing some kind of restoration project on a piece of land if after 10 years, you leave and someone comes in and leases it for oil and gas drilling and wrecks all your work. So that’s still a detail that’s going to be worked out.

Miller: The Bureau of Land Management proudly notes on its website that it administers more than 1/10 of the United States land base: 245 million acres. Does it currently have the infrastructure, the organization, the human resources to pay attention to conservation in that entire area?

Thompson: No, I don’t think so. They’re notoriously short staffed. It’s been kind of a problem for years with this short staff, but during the Trump administration there was really kind of a house cleaning if you will. But, I mean, a lot of senior management people left during that time – in part because they moved their headquarters to Colorado, which a lot of Washington people didn’t want to do. And also just because they were kind of trying to gut the agency. So, you lost a lot of people and that exacerbated what had already been happening.

You have huge pieces of land out there that have one ranger for a million acres or something like that. There’s just no way that right now they are actually staffed for that. So the BLM, Tracy Stone-Manning, who leads the BLM, is really pushing to get more staff in all departments of the agency. And I’m sure that would include conservation, but that’s kind of partially up to Congress and budgets.

Miller: What kind of pushback have you heard from various groups here? I’m thinking about ranchers and miners, for example, who over the last 50 years have sometimes found common cause with each other, not always, and conservationists as well.

Thompson: I’ll do the conservationists first because that’s been fairly mixed. You’ve got more hardline conservation groups like the Center for Biological Diversity who are saying, I think their quote was, ‘this is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.’ It doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just kind of some nice talk. You’ve got other people, the more moderate kind of environmental groups, who are saying this is a great start and let’s keep pushing. And then you’ve got a few others who are saying this is, I think a quote was ‘a seismic shift for public lands,’ and that it really is meaningful.

I have heard back from some people who say, you know, these conservation leases, they could be used in a sort of a cynical way, like you could go in and do something called regenerative grazing, which is very low-impact grazing that actually helps bring native plants back and stuff, and you could do that and then you could demonstrate that look, grazing is great for the land after 10 years, and then they’ll bring normal grazing back. So there’s different kinds of takes on how this will work from the conservation side. From the ranching side, I think that the strongest response has been from them and it’s been kind of universally negative. People, Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming, he said that it was this decree and the people who wrote the decree were just like the tree spiking eco-warriors of the 1980′s, and that the ranching industry is betrayed, and that it’s going to eradicate grazing on public lands, and there’s absolutely no evidence that it’s going to eradicate grazing or maybe even affect it at all.

Miller: Those different points of view, they do remind me of, broadly, the agency’s overall language here, which is a kind of ‘we can have everything’ attitude. This is what they wrote: ‘This proposed rule is designed to ensure public lands continue to provide minerals, energy, forage, timber, and recreational opportunities, as well as habitat, protected water supplies, and landscapes that resist and recover from drought, wildfire, and other disturbances.’

This seems like an agency that is refusing to make politically difficult decisions and say we can’t have everything. Can all these land uses be accommodated?

Thompson: No, I don’t think so. Not on the level that they are now. I think sure, you could probably cut back on some of these things, and try to make it work, shuffle things around. But no, I think that’s unrealistic, and I think it’s a reflection of the Biden administration’s way they’ve operated this whole time where, on the one hand, they’ll approve the Willow project in Alaska, oil and gas project. And on the other hand, they’ll kind of try to make up for it with some other kind of restriction somewhere else, or even by trying to speed up permitting for renewable energy products projects on public land. It’s kind of like, yeah, let’s try to please everybody, and I’m not sure that’s gonna work so well.

At the same time, if you look back at the Carter Administration and Cecil Andres, when he said those things that he said, he took a much harder line, I’m not sure that they accomplished all that much either. So in the end, it’s a hard one to figure out how to approach.

Miller: Just briefly, let’s turn to the timing here, the public comment period for these proposed changes is open now through June. What’s the possible timing here in terms of the implementation of a finalized rule?

Thompson: These things are notoriously slow. They take a long time, They’ll have to take those comments and figure them out and make some changes and put out a final rule and then they’re gonna have to post that up for comment and protest. And that can take a long time. So there’s a lot of concern right now about this among environmental groups because if it takes too long, if you finalize a rule like this too close to the end of your term, and then a more hostile administration is elected in 2024, then it’s much easier to come back, for that administration to come back or for Congress, for that matter to come back and overturn the rule and just throw it out. So there is an urgency, and that’s partially up to the Biden administration to hurry up. And it’s partially they just have to wade through the bureaucratic stuff.

So, one of the interesting things, though, about the comment period, is that this rule, a lot of times they submit a rule and it’s kind of set in stone and they say we want public comments and you think, ‘well, they already figured out what they want to do, my comment’s not gonna matter.’ But in this one, they actually ask questions, they say we want the public to tell us, what kind of lands should we lease out for conservation leases? How much should we charge for these leases? What should the terms be, etc., etc.? So this is kind of different. So it seems like they’re willing to listen and they really genuinely want input and that they will change this accordingly.

Miller: Jonathan Thompson, thanks very much.

Thompson: Thank you.

Miller: Jonathan Thompson is a contributing editor at High Country News. He wrote recently about the proposed rule change at the Federal Bureau of Land Management.

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