Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands are among the nation’s most iconic open areas of the West, driving tourism, offering refuge for wildlife, and safeguarding innumerable stories of human experiences on the land. Public lands provide residents daily access to nature, clean air and water, and the outdoor experiences that define local culture and community identity. When access is lost or landscapes become degraded local communities feel this impact immediately. Now is the time to engage and save these critical places that are the backbone of our vibrant western Colorado communities.
On September 11th, the Department of the Interior announced its intent to repeal the BLM’s Public Lands Rule. Formally known as the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, this policy was implemented in April of 2024 following an extensive and thorough public comment period in which 92% of public comments favored the Rule. The BLM stewards approximately 245 million acres of land including 8.3 million acres in Colorado, and the Uncompahgre Field Office manages nearly 900,000 acres of public land in BLM Colorado’s Southwest District including four river systems, the Gunnison, San Miguel, Dolores, and Uncompahgre, and two National Conservation Areas (NCA), Gunnison Gorge NCA and the southern portion of the Dominguez Escalante NCA.
For nearly 50 years, the agency has largely focused on resource extraction including oil drilling, mining, logging, and grazing, but has neglected conservation, outdoor recreation, wildlife protection, and the preservation of fragile watersheds and cultural resources. The Public Lands Rule modernizes this outdated, extraction-first approach and helps to ensure that conservation is on equal footing with other uses. The Rule provides the BLM with land management tools to better fulfill its mission of protecting the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands for present and future generations of Americans.
Despite the Rule’s passing over a year ago, and strong public support and input from a wide variety of stakeholders, the Rule is currently threatened. A public comment period is open through November 10th, and NOW is an opportunity for your voice to be heard. Submit your comment, and let the administration know that we want public lands to be managed to protect intact ecosystems, restore degraded lands, and apply science and Indigenous Knowledge to management actions that promote and support robust and healthy communities in the West.
What is the Public Lands Rule?
The Public Lands Rule offers a framework to responsible development that helps ensure the BLM can meet its statutory obligation to protect the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands for present and future generations of Americans. It does this by:
- Fulfilling the BLM mandate of ‘multiple use and sustained yield’ as described in FLPMA:
- Multiple uses of BLM lands as outlined in FLPMA include, but are not limited to: recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish, and natural scenic, scientific and historical values.
- Sustained yield is identified in FLPMA as “the achievement and maintenance in perpetuity of a high-level annual or regular periodic output of the various renewable resources of the public lands consistent with multiple use.”
- Elevating conservation to equal footing with mining, drilling, and other industrial development: Conservation is active land management that maintains the health and productivity of public lands so they can support multiple uses such as grazing, recreation, timber, energy, and other land uses for generations to come. Without it, lands become degraded, and degraded lands cannot support these industries.
- Seeking balance: The Public Lands Rule seeks to balance the use of natural resources with the protection of wildlife habitat, watersheds, landscapes, and cultural resources, all contributing to resilient ecosystems and healthy local economies supported by a robust recreation industry.
What Are The Main Components of the Rule?
The Public Lands Rule establishes a framework to ensure healthy landscapes, abundant wildlife habitat, clean water, and balanced decision-making. It does this by:
- Protecting the most important and healthiest landscapes:
- Manage according to wildlife habitat and clean water to protect intact landscapes
- Designate Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC) to protect and manage these fragile landscapes
- Restoring landscapes back to health:
- Identify priority landscapes, develop restoration plans, and put people to work restoring America’s public lands
- Use a landscape-scale approach to develop and implement mitigation strategies.
- Ensuring decision-making is based on science, data, and Indigenous knowledge by:
- Make management decisions informed by the health of lands and waters using science, Indigenous knowledge, and data.
- Expand land health assessments beyond the grazing program to all BLM-managed public lands.
- Ensure science drives decision-making by incorporating assessment, inventory, and monitoring (AIM) information.
What Are The Tools To Advance Conservation Management?
- Areas of Critical Environmental Concern (ACEC): The Public Lands Rule safeguards ACECs, the most ecologically, culturally, and scientifically important landscapes on our public lands, and strengthens protections for these areas, ensuring that vital wildlife habitat, sacred Indigenous sites, and irreplaceable natural systems are managed responsibly and prioritized for conservation. To be designated, a landscape must have relevance, importance, and special management attention. The rule:
- Clarifies that ACECs are the principal designation for protecting important natural, cultural, and scenic resources;
- Requires BLM to identify, evaluate, and give priority to ACEC designation and management in land use plans or amendments;
- Improves transparency around ACEC removal, interim management, and Indigenous co-stewardship opportunities.
- Restoration & Mitigation Leases: The Public Lands Rule establishes a process for the BLM to issue restoration leases and mitigation leases to entities seeking to restore public lands or to offset unavoidable impacts by protecting and improving the health of public lands.
- The Public Lands Rule establishes the process used to apply for and grant restoration and mitigation leases, terminate or suspend them, determine noncompliance, and set bonding obligations.
- The Rule establishes that restoration and mitigation leases will not disturb existing authorizations, valid existing rights, or state or Tribal land use management.
- Watershed Condition Assessments (WCA): The Rule establishes the WCA as a tool to assess and synthesize resource conditions to inform conservation actions and ensure healthy and resilient ecosystems on BLM-managed lands. WCAs are conducted every 10 years and assess the condition of soil, water, habitats, and ecological processes; disturbances; and landscape intactness. The five primary uses of WCAs are:
- Inform land use planning and other NEPA actions
- Identify intact landscapes
- Provide a foundation for land health assessments
- Prioritize areas for conservation or restoration
- Inform the development of restoration plans
- Land Health Standards & Indicators: Land Health Standards describe the minimum requirements for land health and apply to all resource uses on public lands. Each fundamental will have a list of supporting indicators including indicators to be used in WCAs. The four Fundamentals of Land Health are:
- Watershed function
- Ecological processes
- Water quality
- Habitat condition, connectivity, and intactness