Broads Applauds New BLM Public Lands Rule

DURANGO (April 18, 2024)—Great Old Broads for Wilderness applauds the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for releasing its final “Public Lands Rule” to balance and uphold its multiple-use mission. This new framework promises to place conservation, access to nature, wildlife, cultural lands protection, and climate change mitigation on equal footing with industrial development across the West.

For too long, the protection and preservation of our public lands have been treated as secondary (at best) to activities like oil and natural gas extraction and production, mining, and livestock grazing. The well-documented destructive impacts of these activities are now being exacerbated by climate change, as already-stressed native plant and wildlife species across the West struggle to adapt to increasingly warmer and drier conditions.

“The Biden administration deserves a great deal of credit for prioritizing the Public Lands Rule. They are the first administration—of either party—to put conservation on equal footing with economic development on our public lands,” says Sara Husby, Executive Director of Great Old Broads for Wilderness. “Broads applauds today’s announcement of this new, forward-looking Public Lands Rule, and we hope that it will finally give the Bureau of Land Management the tools it needs to keep our remaining wild public lands intact and resilient for future generations.”

This new Public Lands Rule represent an incredibly rare opportunity to change how the BLM handles the needs of wild ecosystems for the better when those needs come into conflict with natural resource extraction and development.

Broads now strongly urges the Biden administration to get to work on the ground immediately to implement these new rules before our wild public lands—and the many species of plants and wildlife that rely on them for their survival—are lost forever.