Two conservation groups have teamed up on a report
intended to shift the Bureau of Land Management away from its
long-term emphasis on natural-resource extraction and toward
conservation of the public lands. This reasonable and readable
74-page report by the National Wildlife Federation and Natural
Resources Defense Council sets out a vision for the BLM’s 265,000
square miles of land in the West, and offers suggestions to change
the management of the once-unknown lands. Recommendations address
staffing, the agency’s continued allegiance to ranching and mining,
the lack of a land-protection vision, and the need for
reorganization. Unlike other federal land-management agencies, the
BLM is divided into states. That means a BLM state director from
Wyoming, for example, tends to be dominated by that state’s
political machine. The report recommends that the BLM be reworked
into multistate regions, weakening the control any one state would
exercise over the BLM land in that state.
Conservation Management of American’s Public
Lands: An Assessment and Recommendations for Progress 25 Years
After the Federal Land Policy and Management Act can be downloaded
from www.nwf.org/grasslands/blmreport.html. A limited number of
hard copies are available by request. Call Kayla Atkinson at
303/786-8001, or send e-mail to atkinson@nwf.org.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A new vision for the BLM.
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