What does the BLM’s Public Lands Rule mean for outdoor recreation?
In April, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) released its final Public Lands Rule, the culmination of many years of work to better balance conservation and climate considerations with development and extraction on BLM lands.
BLM lands—and our public lands and waters in general—are facing unprecedented challenges. Americans’ expectations for our public lands, and how the BLM should oversee them, are also evolving. Climate change is putting new stresses on landscapes, and drought, fire, and invasive species are threatening to undercut the productivity of BLM lands for nearly all types of uses. At the same time, addressing climate change is encouraging BLM to consider new patterns and locations for development to facilitate a clean energy transition. That transition is likely to depend on utility-scale wind and solar development, transmission infrastructure, and potentially more mining to support new energy technologies. Outdoor recreation is also booming and is arguably the most economically important activity on public lands.
“BLM lands—and our public lands and waters in general—are facing unprecedented challenges.”
Over the past three and a half years, BLM has taken critically needed actions to bring agency management up to date with current and future needs. These actions include oil and gas leasing reforms; the agency’s Solar PEIS to help guide utility-scale solar development to appropriate locations; the 21st Century Recreation Blueprint; and the Public Lands Rule, which will help to protect intact landscapes, guide restoration efforts, and ensure that science and landscape health considerations deeply inform agency decisions.
The Public Lands Rule is an important step in helping BLM fulfill its longstanding mandates. BLM’s primary source of direction is FLPMA, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, which dictates how the agency should care for its lands. FLPMA requires BLM to serve present and future generations through multiple-use and sustained yield. “Sustained yield” means that the BLM must maintain “in perpetuity” the resources of its lands for current and future generations, but in practice, the agency has often tolerated long-term impairment of public lands. The final Public Lands Rule pays close attention to how the BLM should manage its lands for the long-term, conserving and restoring its lands so the agency can provide benefits into the future, particularly in the face of these growing stressors.
What does the rule mean for outdoor recreation?
While the rule is very focused on conservation (which of course has substantial benefits for outdoor recreation, discussed in more detail below), it will also support outdoor recreation. The final rule includes a specific objective to “Provide for healthy lands and waters that support sustainable outdoor recreation experiences for current and future generations.”
The rule recognizes that outdoor recreation depends on healthy public lands and that climate change and degraded landscapes hurt outdoor recreation experiences. Conserving and restoring land will benefit recreationists, who rely on these healthy lands and waters. The rule also makes clear that outdoor recreation opportunities are a “reason to protect and restore certain landscapes.”
Restoration and Mitigation Leases
In order to help restore degraded landscapes and compensate for unavoidable impacts from development, the Public Lands Rule will implement a program for restoration and mitigation leases. These leases will be offered to restore lands or to offset the impact of other development activities. These leases can only be offered in places where there aren’t authorizations incompatible with the lease. For example, if there’s grazing authorization or a mine, a restoration lease would not be allowed unless the restoration activities are compatible with those existing uses. The mitigation leases may be an avenue to support outdoor recreation, for example, by offsetting the loss of a trail due to development, although that isn’t explicitly addressed in the rule and will be something we hope to see BLM clarify through guidance.
Resilience and Sustainability
The BLM’s mandate requires the agency to manage land for the long term, and the Public Lands Rule focuses on how to improve resilience and sustainability on BLM lands.
In practice, the rule outlines three ways to achieve resilient landscapes:
1. Protecting intact landscapes.
2. Restoring degraded ecosystems.
3. Using science and data to inform management decisions.
The goal is to prevent any particular “disturbance,” whether that is man-made like a well or mine, or natural like a wildfire or flood, from permanently impairing the landscape.
Areas of Critical Environmental Concern
Areas of Critical Environmental Concerns, or ACECs, are BLM’s primary tool to protect BLM lands “where special management is required to protect and prevent irreparable damage to important historic, cultural, or scenic values; fish or wildlife resources; or natural systems or processes.” During land planning, the Public Lands Rule will require land managers to identify, evaluate, and prioritize potential ACECs. ACECs in practice are very important, but can also restrict some forms of recreation, and as BLM develops its management guidance, Outdoor Alliance will be working to ensure that ACECs do not restrict recreational activity beyond conservation necessity. The BLM does state that “sustainable recreation” is “compatible with conservation management, including specifically […] ACECs.”
On the whole, the Public Lands Rule will modernize how the BLM approaches land planning and improve how it responds to the effects of climate change to help protect public land and water over the long term. Development continues to be an important activity on BLM land, and expediting renewable energy development will depend on BLM lands; the Public Lands Rule will help the agency focus on using its assets sustainably and with a vision for long-term productivity.
Outdoor Alliance and our partners, including Outdoor Industry Association and The Conservation Alliance, will continue to work with the BLM on implementing the rule and ensuring that recreation is incorporated into how the rule is administered.