Just over two years ago, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) adopted a policy designed to ensure that, after decades of uneven attention to conservation, the Bureau would center conservation and ecological concerns in its management of public lands.
The Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, also known as the Public Lands Rule, explicitly stated that conservation is a use of public lands on par with other uses and aimed at protecting intact landscapes and restoring degraded ones. It was heralded as a major step forward for the BLM by environmental advocates.
Then, months later, Donald Trump was elected president—and just over a year into his second term as president the Public Lands Rule was taken off the books.
In Oregon, where the BLM manages more than 15 million acres of land, the federal agency’s decision could have serious, lasting consequences.
In its decision to rescind the rule, the BLM stated the move “restores balance to federal land management” under the principles of multiple use, the management philosophy dictating that the many different uses of public lands be balanced in the best interests of the American people.
According to BLM, the 2024 rule “introduced unnecessary complexity and placed operational constraints on the BLM’s planning and permitting processes.” The Bureau also claimed the rule “inappropriately elevated conservation as a discrete ‘use’ of the public lands”, which it said ran counter to the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
Conservation advocates, who cheered the implementation of the rule, see the BLM’s decision to rescind it as a major missed opportunity.
“The rule really hadn’t even had a chance to show all of the different ways that it could have benefited public lands management—in balance and collaboration with those who use and extract public lands—before the Trump administration moved to eliminate it,” Mark Salvo, senior advisor at the Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA), said.
BLM lands in Oregon and across the West have been ecologically degraded in recent decades, and debate about the Bureau’s willingness to prioritize conservation concerns is very much ongoing. Late last year, for instance, the BLM approved a lithium mining exploration project in Malheur County over a host of objections from environmental activists.
“Right now, transnational mining companies have claimed and are now seeking to explore and eventually develop public lands in extreme southeast Oregon for minerals,” Salvo said. “Those are incredibly controversial projects for how they will impact fish and wildlife, intact sagebrush steppe habitat, [and] resources of tribal interest.”
The rule, Salvo said, could have allowed the public a greater say in how it evaluated the lithium mining project proposed by a subsidiary of the Australia-based company Jindalee Resources.
“Those mining claims in the northern McDermitt Caldera in southeastern Oregon are sort of exhibit A for how I was hoping to see how this policy could help to more responsibly and thoughtfully guide potential development of mineral resources,” Salvo said.
The repeal of the rule means that the BLM has returned to the status quo—and while existing BLM regulations do include conservation requirements, their scattered nature has hampered their effectiveness.
“The Public Lands Rule was really focused around making sure the BLM had some solid direction to make sure they were considering conservation and restoration values,” Maddy Munson, senior policy and planning specialist with Defenders of Wildlife, said. “Now, without the rule, there is a lot more leniency and discretion for the agency to decide what kinds of things they’re considering.”
That has environmental advocates concerned. The BLM has not cultivated an especially strong environmental record in recent years, to the point that more than 80 percent of BLM land is open to oil and gas drilling or other types of extraction.
“In Oregon there’s some logging, which is kind of unique, but otherwise it’s a lot of oil and gas mining, grazing; some of these other kinds of uses that can have significant impacts on the land and wildlife habitat,” Munson said.
Munson pointed to the Sagebrush Sea, a sagebrush steppe ecosystem that stretches from Oregon all the way to Colorado and Wyoming, as an example of a largely BLM-managed ecosystem that has been degraded to a point that environmental activists warn it is in danger of disappearing.
“We’re seeing this accelerating cycle of invasive plant species and drought caused by climate change and other factors,” Munson said. “It’s concerning that the BLM is moving backwards in their management when all of the conditions are requiring that they actually take some steps forward and think about modernizing the system.”
If the public comments on the proposal were any indication, the rescission of the Public Lands Rule was not popular with the American people. An analysis by the Center for Western Priorities found that 98 percent of comments on the proposal opposed the recession.
The overwhelming public opposition to the proposal, which did not impact the BLM’s final decision, mirrors a similar process that played out with a proposal to expand logging on BLM land in Oregon.
Salvo said scrapping the Public Lands Rule has just been one part of a much broader assault on the country’s public lands and environmental infrastructure over the last year-and-a-half.
“The Trump administration’s treatment and approach to public lands management has surprised even me,” Salvo said. “It’s been head-spinning.”
Salvo pointed to cuts the administration has made to a number of environmental agencies, its close ties to extractive industry interests, and its dizzying pace of deregulation as examples of ways in which the second Trump administration has staked out extreme positions on climate issues.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration and its allies in Congress have not been able to fully enact their public lands agenda—an agenda that has, at various points in recent years, included selling off public lands to states, developers, and other business interests.
A high-profile effort to sell off millions of acres of public lands led by Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, for instance, failed last year when it was met with furious opposition from a coalition of advocates and elected officials that included four Republican senators from Western states.
Salvo said, amid the many setbacks for environmental advocates during the first years of the second Trump administration, the response to Lee’s proposal was “heartening.”
“The public has not only come to the defense of their own public lands, but are keying in and understanding more so how they’re being managed and what this administration is attempting to do to our shared commons,” Salvo said.
