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@nationalparkservice To all of the moms and mother figures in our lives: Thank you for all that you do! Moms are important to all animals, like this mama moose helping her baby cross the Colorado River at @rockynps.
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Key news from May:
- The Biden administration announced that it will protect Bristol Bay in Alaska in order to protect one of the world’s biggest salmon spawning grounds. The EPA proposed a new veto of the Pebble gold and copper mine in Alaska under the Clean Water Act. If finalized, this action will create permanent environmental protections for Bristol Bay fisheries and ensure stability for the fishing industry that Alaska Natives depend on.
- The Supreme Court denied an attempt to block the Biden administration's use of an important climate accounting metric. The metric known as social costs of greenhouse gases is a set of values that help the government calculate the climate costs of its actions. It sets a dollar amount for the damages caused per ton of greenhouse gas emissions. Attorneys representing some Republican states challenged the use of this metric, claiming their states are harmed when it is used to evaluate oil and gas leasing on their lands.
- The Department of the Interior announced a $33 million investment through the bipartisan infrastructure law to plug and clean 277 orphaned oil and gas wells on public lands. This funding is part of $250 million allocated for cleaning up oil and gas sites in national parks, national wildlife refuges, national forests, and other public lands. In total, there are an estimated 130,000 orphan wells across the country which could require around $8 billion to clean up.
- The Interior Department Inspector General released findings of an investigation into whether former Trump Interior Secretary David Bernhardt violated the Lobbying Disclosure Act by working for California’s Westlands Water District, a former client of his, during the Trump transition—after he had deregistered as a federal lobbyist. The investigation revealed that while Bernhardt did continue to advise Westlands during the transition, it could not prove that Bernhardt violated federal lobbying laws regarding his former client. However, the investigation itself was stonewalled by Bernhardt, who canceled a scheduled in-person interview the night before, and refused to participate in the investigation or meet with investigators without special conditions.
- Lawmakers in Utah approved a land swap to consolidate 160,000 acres of land in Bears Ears National Monument. The swap would give the state school trust agency, SITLA, 165,000 acres of federal land with more economic potential to fund Utah schools.
- The Interior Department announced a list of 125 ecosystem restoration projects that will receive $68 million in funding through the bipartisan infrastructure law. The projects will take place in 20 states, U.S. territories, and on Native American tribal lands and will aim to address a wide array of issues, including slowing the spread of invasive plant species and preventing catastrophic wildfires.
- A federal appeals court upheld a ruling that blocks a proposed mile-wide open pit copper mine near Tucson, Arizona. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that while Rosemont Copper has a valid mining claim to the minerals, it cannot use that claim to dump an estimated 1.9 billion tons of waste on adjacent forest service land.
- The Interior Department's initial report found burial sites at 53 Native American boarding schools. The first-of-its-kind federal study of Native American boarding schools that for over a century sought to assimilate Indigenous children into white society has identified more than 400 such schools that were supported by the U.S. government and more than 50 associated burial sites, a figure that could grow exponentially as research continues.
- The Interior Department announced it would not move forward with planned oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska's Cook Inlet this year. The Alaska sale was called off due to insufficient interest from the oil and gas industry, while offshore sales for the rest of the year were pulled due to contradictory court rulings. The previous offshore sale was thrown out by a judge because the Interior Department failed to consider how the leases could impact global climate change.
- The House Natural Resources Committee asked the Justice Department to investigate a “likely quid pro quo” arrangement involving then-Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and an Arizona real estate developer. The criminal referral is a first for the committee, which uncovered $241,000 in coordinated donations from associates of developer Mike Ingram to the Trump Victory Fund and Republican National Committee. The donations came in as the Interior Department reversed its long-standing position that Ingram's proposed Villages at Vigneto mega-development would require a full-scale analysis of its impacts on the San Pedro River and protected species. The author of that decision, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service supervisor Steve Spangle, later turned whistleblower and revealed that he had been “rolled” by Interior officials.
- President Joe Biden has signed into law The Modernizing Access to Our Public Land, or MAPLand that will digitize and make mapping data available to help the public access federal lands. The database will include easements and rights of way on private land; whether roads and trails are open; types of vehicles allowed on roads and trails; boundaries where hunting or recreational shooting is regulated or closed; and the boundaries of any portion of a body of water closed to entry. In addition, the Bureau of Land Management unveiled a new online portal where members of the public can nominate parcels of land for improved access. The agency is looking for help identifying parcels where recreational opportunities are high, but access is difficult or impossible. BLM will use this process to create a priority list of parcels that Congress could make accessible.
What to watch for in June:
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Bruce Babbitt: Historic drought requires Colorado River Compact redo
Los Angeles Times
First-ever map shows wildfire risk to homes across the lower 48
Washington Post
19,000 acre Bison Range preserve returned to Tribal management
Missoulian
Sec. Haaland promises new 5-year offshore leasing plan by June
Houston Chronicle
More human remains discovered as Lake Mead continues to drop
KLAS
Private lands are the next battleground in conservation policy
Washington Post
The desert's fragile crust can't take much more heat
Wired
What qualifies as camping—and who is it for?
The New Yorker
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From the Center for Western Priorities:
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New report shows public land conservation lagging in Western states
Wyoming, Arizona, Oregon, and Colorado have fallen behind their neighbors, protecting less than 400,000 acres in the past decade
A new report from the Center for Western Priorities finds that not every Western state is living up to its conservation reputation. States like Colorado and Arizona have a proud conservation tradition, but efforts by their elected leaders to conserve public lands have run into the reality of a broken Congress.
The report, Conservation Gridlock, looks at the acres of national public land protected over the past two decades in eight Western states. It finds that in the last decade, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon, and Wyoming have conserved far fewer acres of public lands than neighboring Western states. In fact, these bottom four states, combined, have conserved 23 times fewer acres than the top four states: California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah.
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Greater Chaco and Greater Gila added to CWP Postcards campaign
Check out the two latest additions to CWP's Road to 30: Postcards campaign
The Center for Western Priorities shared two new Postcards about the ongoing efforts to protect the area surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park from oil and gas development, and the history and future of the Gila Wilderness as it turns 100.
Our friends at Archaeology Southwest released a new film, “Protecting Chaco’s 10-Mile Zone,” that illustrates the urgent need to protect the Greater Chaco Landscape and its cultural resources from encroaching oil and gas development in northwest New Mexico. Chaco Culture National Historical Park is a World Heritage site that is thought to be the center of what was once a hub of Indigenous civilization and the ancestral home of both Pueblo and Navajo peoples. The area holds deep cultural and spiritual significance for many Tribal nations to this day. Watch the film to hear from Pueblo and Diné leaders in their own words as they speak to the living and vital connections their communities have to the Greater Chaco Landscape and why it must be protected from further oil and gas development.
The Gila Wilderness in New Mexico became America’s first designated Wilderness area, and the centennial is coming up in 2024. The Center for Western Priorities had the pleasure of speaking with two authors featured in a collection of essays on the Gila about their personal experiences and connection to the Gila Wilderness. Leeanna Torres was born and raised in New Mexico and worked as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist, and Joe Saenz is an Apache backcountry guide. We also spoke with Madeleine Carey with Wild Earth Guardians about the future of the Gila Wilderness and the proposal to protect the Greater Gila bioregion. Listen to the podcast to hear more about each of them and what’s next for the Gila.
To learn more about the Postcards campaign and to read, listen, or watch other stories, please visit www.RoadTo30.org/postcards. More postcards are on the way, so check back soon!
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Cryptocurrency operations are increasing demand for dirty energy and straining power grids
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Former Center for Western Priorities’ policy and design associate Tyler McIntosh and Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance wildlands attorney Judi Brawer join The Landscape to discuss the increasing pressures outdoor recreation is putting on our public lands—just in time for Memorial Day Weekend and summer camping season! They break down CWP’s Camping Crunch report and SUWA’s Outdoor Recreation and Ecological Disturbance report and talk about how we can balance visitation and conservation on our public lands.
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The Gila Wilderness was the first wilderness area designated in the U.S., and it’s coming up on its 100 year anniversary in 2024. Kate and Aaron talk to USFWS biologist Leeanna Torres and Apache backcountry guide Joe Saenz about what makes the Gila special, as well as the threats it’s facing today, from military flyovers to attempts to dam the Gila River. Then, WildEarth Guardians’ Southwest Conservation Manager Madeleine Carey tells us how her group is working to protect the Greater Gila region. This episode is part of the Center for Western Priorities’ Road to 30: Postcards series, which highlights places across the country that are in need of protection and can set America on track to protect 30 percent of its land and waters by 2030.
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Researcher and author Laura J. Martin joins The Landscape to talk about the history of ecological restoration in the United States and how it led to today’s booming off-site environmental mitigation and carbon offset industries. Martin has a new book coming out May 17 on the subject called “Wild by Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration”, which covers the early conservation movement in the United States from a slightly different angle than our listeners may be used to hearing.
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"This landmark decision further validates that Rosemont’s foreign owners have neither the legal right nor the valid mining claims for their proposed plan to destroy sacred sites beneath a mountain of poisonous mine waste. The ruling thoroughly dismantles the error-riddled process and reinforces the importance of protecting these sites and the entire region’s water supply. As decisive as this decision is, Rosemont’s foreign investors will likely continue to try and profit through environmental and cultural destruction. We must not allow this to happen.”
—Tohono O'odham Nation Chairman Ned Norris, Jr., Courthouse News
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From early spring to late fall, nature puts on a spectacular show with public lands. Wildflowers come in all shapes, sizes, and colors and grow in unusual places. You can see them in mountain meadows and along forest edges, but these colorful displays can surprise you in salt marshes and across desert plains. 🌹🌻🌷🌼
See stunning displays of these desert beauties at the Bureau of Land Management’s Mojave Trails National Monument in California.
📸 Bob Wick
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