We Need To Talk About The Public Lands Rule

It’s being repealed, in large part, because no one understands it

People in our world—people who care about public lands, wildlife, the environment, and stuff like that—often operate with the best possible intentions. But good intentions aren’t enough, on their own, to create effective change. That’s a lesson we’re learning the hard way right now, as our nation’s unique system of public lands is being undone in pursuit of reckless greed. Case in point: The Public Lands Rule. Arguably the biggest problem with it is that people don’t understand it. Here’s my attempt to fix that.

This is the third installment in a four part series I’m writing about the pro-public lands world’s inability to effectively or accurately communicate policy, and the limits that failure imposes on our ability to successfully advocate for the protection of public lands. I first tackled the Roadless Rule, then the Land and Water Conservation Fund and the Great American Outdoors Act, and next I’ll wrap all that up with what I feel the lessons are for all of us, as well as how we can use them to more effectively work to protect America’s natural heritage.

To me, nothing embodies this failure more than the Public Lands Rule.

The PLR was first proposed back in April 2023, back when Deb Haaland ran the Department of Interior and Tracy Stone-Manning was in charge of the Bureau of Land Management. As used to be the case back when democracy was a thing, it was then subject to five public hearings and a 90-day public comment period that more than 200,000 people participated in. 92 percent of those comments were in favor of implementing PLR, which was done in April 2024.

What does PLR do? Let’s turn to the current DOI, which is managed by Doug Burgum, a billionaire Trump stooge dead set on privatizing public lands.

“The 2024 Public Lands Rule, formally known as the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, made conservation (i.e., no use) an official use of public lands, putting it on the same level as BLM’s other uses of public lands,” writes DOI, in the press release announcing its plans to rescind the rule.

None of that is true. So where’d they get the idea that it is?

“The Public Lands Rule advances the BLM’s multiple use and sustained yield mission by addressing the health and resilience of public lands,” reads an information bulletin about PLR sent to all BLM employees in June of 2024. “Conservation is a use of public lands on equal footing with other uses and is necessary for the protection and restoration of important resources.” [Emphasis mine.]

Variations on this claim are present throughout all forms of messaging around PLR. Even an Associated Press story from last week, reporting the news of Burgum’s plan to undo PLR, claims, in its headline: “Trump administration wants to cancel Biden-era rule that made conservation a ‘use’ of public land.”

But PLR did not do that, because the BLM itself is prevented by law from defining “uses” on lands it manages. Under the Federal Public Lands Management Act, that power is reserved for Congress.

As an aside, it was proposed alterations to language in FPLMA that made land sale provisions inserted into early versions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that could have led to the eventual sale of hundreds of millions of acres of BLM and USFS land.

Of course, DOI and BLM under Haaland and Stone-Manning knew they couldn’t just elevate conservation to equal footing with extraction, grazing and recreation without Congress. And given the broken nature of that branch of government, no such legislation was even introduced.

Instead, PLR set out to create something initially called a “conservation lease.” Through one of those, a third party entity such as a non-profit, local government, or private company could acquire the rights to perform mitigation and restoration work to areas damaged by those other uses. A specific rider was included to clarify that conservation leases could not preclude or interfere with any other permitted activity. Nor could entities hoping to purchase a conservation lease participate in the lease sales held for oil, gas, mineral, timber, or other forms of extraction.

To the best of my knowledge, no process for implementing these conservation leases was ever put in place. No conservation leases were ever sold.

So what’s the big deal here? It seems as if the messaging around this being an exciting new “use” of BLM land has gotten everyone involved all hot and bothered. Those of us who care about public lands got excited that PLR achieved some sort of balance between conservation and extraction, even though it didn’t. People who see public lands as only a source of revenue got very angry that somehow a non-industrial activity might be allowed to compete with industrial uses, even though that wasn’t what PLR did.

There’s a lesson here, that’s central to the thrust of this entire series. I’ll let longtime environmental activist and writer George Ochenski make it for me.

“…by misrepresenting the whole conservation on an ‘equal footing’ with extractive uses, the agency, media, and the clueless groups that parroted that line actually generated significant opposition to the rule," Ochenski wrote in the Daily Montanan last year. “Had BLM told the truth right out of the chute, those extractive lease holders would have understood not only was there no threat from ‘conservation leases’ it would have resulted in having someone else pick up the tab for the degradation resulting from their extractive uses. But it’s an election year. As they say ‘in war, truth is the first casualty’—and shame on those who tried for so long to fool the public on the phony ‘conservation rule.’”

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