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The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released a draft rule late last month known as the Public Lands Rule, which would place conservation on equal footing with industrial development and other traditional uses on public lands—a marked shift from the status quo of the past 150 years.
Historically, the federal government has incentivized drilling, mining, logging, and livestock grazing on public lands through outdated leasing laws dating back to the late 1800s. The Public Lands Rule, however, would create a pathway for BLM to issue “conservation leases”, opening the door for private groups to promote land protection and ecosystem restoration on parts of the BLM’s 245 million acres of federal public land. In addition to issuing conservation leases, the rule requires the BLM to prioritize the creation of new “areas of critical environmental concern”—a designation that limits harmful activities like mining and drilling.
The rule would also help the Biden administration achieve its goal of protecting 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030. According to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the proposal is a “smart path to ensure healthy landscapes, abundant wildlife habitat, clear water and balanced decision-making on our public lands.”
New podcast episode: A terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mining bill
In this episode of The Landscape, Kate and Aaron are joined by Alli Henderson, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, and Blaine Miller-McFeeley, a senior legislative representative at Earthjustice, to talk about the recently-introduced Mining Regulatory Clarity Act—or, as Miller-McFeeley has renamed it, the Dirty Mining Trumps All Other Uses Act.
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The potential that the Mining Law might not fully account for what modern mining looks like and the amount of acerage it needs isn't necessarily a surprise. I mean, we are dealing with a 151-year-old law after all.”
