One of the obligations of friendship is to speak up when you believe someone you know and respect has taken a wrong turn. My longtime good friend John Curtis, who represents my home town and Utah’s third congressional district in the U.S. House, has done just that in his legislation to block the Public Lands Rule recently proposed by the federal Bureau of Land Management.
The goal of the rule proposed last spring and now en route to be finalized, is straightforward: allow the BLM to make conservation one of the recognized uses of the 245 million acres of federal land the agency manages, alongside traditional extractive activities like mining, livestock grazing and energy development. In essence, the rule gives conservation, outdoor recreation, and hunting a seat at the table along with those muscular interests that have long dominated how BLM manages the American public’s land, including 23 million acres in Utah.
For Utah and America’s outdoor recreation industry (an industry that in Utah alone supports over 66,000 jobs, $6 billion in spending, and $3 billion in salaries and wages), this is long overdue and essential to our vibrancy. Many of these federally-owned public lands are integral to our recreation and hunting opportunities, watershed integrity and climate change mitigation. They are both a defining pillar of our high quality of life and of our state’s economic health.
This is why more than 70% of all Utahns support greater protection for public lands and why industries as diverse as clean energy, finance, distillers, automobiles and craft brewing now have companies that have joined and/or have committed to join our the Conservation Alliance of the Outdoor Industry (a nonprofit dedicated to advocating for the protection of America’s wild places). With human-powered outdoor recreation booming in America and so many existing areas under pressure from overuse, expanding the amount of public lands that are protected is required.
Like many people here in the West and across the nation, I view the proposed public lands rule as a long overdue re-calibration of how the BLM — often rightly mocked as the Bureau of Livestock and Mining —operates. Our outdoor industry, our user advocacy NGO’s, and our friends in conservation have long pushed the BLM to make more balanced decisions and be less of a handmaiden to extractive industries that have a long and often unfortunate history of abusing our public lands. This rule change finally gives the BLM the decision making tools required to account for these other, long recognized, essential and more sustainable uses/benefits of our country’s public lands. It is all about “best & highest value” of these lands and the recognition that there is such a thing as “mutually incompatible use.”
Well over a century ago our civilized society developed the concept of zoning in our communities as we recognized that heavy industry areas were not compatible with residential use, that commercial was not compatible with industrial, that parks needed to be situated near residential, etc. The same principles must apply to our public lands, and the newly proposed BLM rule is how such thoughtful “zoning” can finally be accomplished.
The public lands rule is hardly a radical departure from what Congress intended when it enacted in 1976 the so-called “organic” legislation defining the BLM’s mission and responsibilities. In fact, the public lands rule promises to make good on one of the key duties Congress gave the bureau in that act, that:
“[The] public lands be managed in a manner that will protect the quality of scientific, scenic, historical, ecological, environmental, air and atmospheric, water resource, and archeological values; that, where appropriate, will preserve and protect certain public lands in their natural condition; that will provide food and habitat for fish and wildlife and domestic animals; and that will provide for outdoor recreation and human occupancy and use.”
Contrary to our congressional delegation’s assertion that east coast bureaucrats should not be telling us westerners and Utahans how to manage “our” lands, BLM lands belong to Americans from all regions. Public surveys show that most westerners overwhelmingly support protecting the environment and conserving public lands, (lands that belong to all Americans) rather than allowing more mining and drilling. That includes 64% of respondents from Utah.
It appears that it is our congressional delegation that is out of touch with the wishes of a majority of Utahns and westerners. It is our industries, our customers, and the Conservation Alliance’s diverse industry membership who respectfully ask our delegation and my good friend Rep. Curtis to reconsider their bill and pull it.
Peter Metcalf is the founder of Black Diamond Equipment, its brand and policy ambassador, and is a board member of The Conservation Alliance.