BLM Plans Reveal Troubling Trend

The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is responsible for the preservation, maintenance, and use of a quarter of a billion acres of public lands across the United States. Every two decades, the agency revises its management plans for each of the more than 100 planning areas—designated regions that it oversees. In 2019, BLM released draft plans for the upcoming 20-year period. The Pew Charitable Trusts reviewed the plans and found troubling trends that could result in the loss of protection for millions of acres of public land. The proposals would fail to conserve lands that the agency’s own research has deemed worthy of protection and would remove decades-old safeguards, leaving only a fraction of the areas appropriately conserved and opening vast swaths to energy and mineral development.