OPINION:
Public lands in the great American West could go south if President Biden has his way. The Bureau of Land Management has proposed new rules that would dramatically restrict the use of Western states’ vast expanses that have provided the nation with valuable resources for generations. A move to lock citizens out of the West in the name of climate change shouldn’t prevail in “the land of the free.”
The bureau, an agency of the Department of the Interior that oversees some 245 million acres, has proposed a “Conservation and Landscape Health” amendment to federal land use regulations. Published in April, the plan “would advance the BLM’s mission to manage the public lands for multiple use and sustained yield by prioritizing the health and resilience of ecosystems across those lands.”
But it could also upend long-established allowances for such uses as livestock grazing, timber extraction and mining across the trackless plains and remote wilderness.
Shortly after taking office, Mr. Biden signed an executive order placing the “climate crisis” at the center of both foreign and domestic policymaking. Later, he rolled out “a goal of conserving at least 30 percent of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.”
The president claimed that “public lands are increasingly degraded and fragmented due to adverse impacts from climate change and a significant increase in authorized use.” That’s disturbing. After all, who doesn’t want to preserve clean land, water and air?
At the same time, the president mandated the secretary of homeland security “to consider the implications of climate change … along our Nation’s borders.” Yet Americans are witnessing immigrants by the millions flooding the U.S. illegally with little regard for “the health and resilience of ecosystems” or of the citizens who inhabit them, thanks to Mr. Biden’s border free-for-all.
In Washington, some rules are meant to be honored, others to be broken. Likewise, some “landscape health” is apparently worth conserving, and others is not.
Most of Uncle Sam’s public holdings are spread across Western states such as Nevada — 85% federally owned — and Utah, Idaho, Alaska and Oregon — more than 50% under federal control. Fears grow in those states that Washington aims to allow environmentalists opposed to customary land uses to receive preference in land leases and lockout ranchers, loggers and miners, whose industries provide Americans with essential resources. It’s Washington at its worst, ratcheting up its power over hinterland dwellers with little regard for their needs.
That’s why 16 Republican senators from Western states sent a May 11 letter, topped with a signature from Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota, to bureau Director Tracy Stone-Manning expressing “serious concerns” about the amendment: “Taking large parcels of land out of BLM’s well-established multiple use mandate would cause significant harm to many western states and negatively impact the livelihoods of ranchers, energy producers, and many others that depend on access to federal lands,” they wrote.
Mr. Biden is locked into a mindset in which land conservation trumps utilization owing to one simple phrase: climate change. With a June 20 deadline for comment, Americans should buck his scheme to lock them out of the great American West.
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