BREAKING: Public Lands Rule Rescinded

Today, the Trump Administration finalized its rescission of the Public Lands Rule, eliminating safeguards for America’s public lands and ignoring strong public support for the conservation of public lands.

The Public Lands Rule (officially the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule) was a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) regulation that recognized conservation as an essential component of public lands management. It placed conservation on equal footing with other multiple uses (such as oil and gas drilling, mining, and grazing) of the more than 250 million acres of BLM-managed lands nationwide.

Americans rely on public lands to deliver food, energy, clean air and water, wildlife habitat, and places to recreate. The Public Lands Rule helped safeguard the health of those public lands for future generations by ensuring protections for clean water and wildlife habitat, restoring lands and waters that needed it, and making management decisions based on science, data, and Indigenous knowledge. Rescinding the Public Lands Rule strips the BLM of critical tools for managing the well-being of the landscapes under their purview, makes it that much more difficult for the BLM to respond to growing climate and ecological challenges, and harms local communities who rely on healthy public lands for recreational tourism.

According to an analysis published in a press release from the Conservation Lands Foundation, ninety-eight percent of over 130,000 comments submitted during the comment period for the rescission of the Public Lands Rule urged the administration to retain the Rule. Commenters included members of Congress, local elected leaders, former BLM officials, Tribal representatives, and community voices from across the country.

“To rescind the Public Land Rule betrays the trust of thousands of citizens who believed themselves to be represented when conservation was finally given a seat at the table," states Jennie Mans, WWA's BLM Wildlands Director. 

"Wyoming’s BLM lands, approximately 18.4 million acres representing thirty percent of our state, are critical to safeguarding wildlife habitat, migration corridors, and our cultural heritage. The Public Lands Rule restored accountability, science-based management, and public transparency — ensuring that conservation was treated as a legitimate use of our shared lands, and in doing so acknowledging a truer meaning of ‘multiple use.’ Working lands should work for all Americans, not just those with industrial interests at heart."