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Interior Secretary David Bernhardt personally signed off on a controversial highway project in Utah that will cut a 4-mile corridor through the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area, bisecting protected habitat for the threatened Mojave Desert tortoise.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service partnered with Bureau of Land Management on the project review and is expected to issue an "incidental take permit" that would exempt the killing, harming, or harassing of a certain number of desert tortoises due to the construction of the highway.
Critics of the decision point out that sections of the conservation area were purchased using funds from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, and that there are alternative routes for the highway that would avoid the conservation area entirely.
Todd Tucci, an attorney representing conservation groups who oppose the road said in response to the decision, "This is the beginning, not the end, of the fight to protect the world class recreation, open space and Mojave Desert tortoise habitat provided by the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area. We look forward to convincing President-elect Biden (and a court, if needed) that Secretary Bernhardt's plan to punch a four-lane highway through this desert paradise will not protect, restore, and enhance these irreplaceable recreation and conservation values."
Podcast: Inside the Trump administration's destructive final days
In the latest episode of the Center for Western Priorities’ podcast, The Landscape, Jenny Rowland-Shea of the Center for American Progress joins CWP’s policy director Jesse Prentice-Dunn to look at the barrage of environmental damage being unleashed by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt in the waning days of the Trump administration, as well as the tools the Biden administration may use to stop it.
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This is a blatant attempt to reopen loopholes for the oil and gas industry and allow them to skirt royalty payments owed to American taxpayers for publicly owned resources. It’s just an open and shut case of delivering benefits to the oil and gas industry at the expense of the American people."
