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Last week, Colorado's U.S. Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper introduced the Gunnison Outdoor Resources Protection (GORP) Act, which proposes to increase protections for more than 730,000 acres in central Colorado's Gunnison County. The proposal is the culmination of more than a decade of collaboration between a wide variety of stakeholders in an area that is important to ranchers and recreators alike. "These lands are the treasure of our country," said Gunnison County Commissioner Jonathan Houck. "This isn’t just an issue for Gunnison County, this is an issue for the country."
Like all public lands bills in recent years, the proposal faces an uphill climb in Congress, as Bennet acknowledges. In April 2024, the Center for Western Priorities released the 2024 update to the Conservation Gridlock report, which investigates whether Western states are living up to their reputations when it comes to making progress on public land protections. Since the release of the first Conservation Gridlock report in 2022, Colorado has burnished its conservation track record thanks to President Joe Biden's use of his Antiquities Act authority to designate Camp Hale-Continental Divide National Monument at the urging of Senator Bennet and Coloradans across the state.
An earlier CWP report, Languishing Lands, found that, as of November 2022, more than 16 million acres of national public lands have been proposed for increased protection through legislation that has spent years, and in some cases decades, going nowhere in Congress due to partisan paralysis. The report also describes the importance of the legislative process in crafting thoughtful and broadly-supported proposals, but concludes that public lands advocates can't wait for Congress to pass these bills and should not hesitate to also pursue Antiquities Act protections for these irreplaceable landscapes and resources before it's too late.
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When we think about the harsh environments in the Great Basin, the presence of a prey item in abundance like Mormon crickets is in some ways a small miracle for the birds, fish and mammals inhabiting these extreme environments.”
