In 1950 Congress passed legislation that prohibited presidents from using the Antiquities Act to designate national monuments in Wyoming. Since this time, Wyoming has thrived off of its natural resource wealth as most public lands have been managed for multiple use.
About a year ago, the BLM released their draft Resource Management Plan for the Rock Springs area, and it was clear that the current administration was looking for ways to bypass Wyoming’s protections against unilateral land grabs. The most restrictive version of the Rock Springs RMP called for the creation of 1.6 million acres of a land designation called an Area of Critical Environmental Concern – or ACEC.
Here is how BLM regulations define an ACEC:
An ACEC is defined as an area “within public lands where special management attention is required to protect and prevent irreparable damage to important historic, cultural, or scenic values, fish and wildlife resources or other natural systems or processes, or to protect life and safety from natural hazards.” While an ACEC may emphasize one or more unique resources, other existing multiple-use management can continue within an ACEC, provided the uses do not impair the values for which the ACEC was established.
On the surface this sounds like an ACEC is a tool to identify environmental resources that should be prioritized by management actions that still allows existing uses. Unfortunately, we have had enough bad experiences with ACEC’s being used as a tool to create de facto wilderness-level management for areas.
After I saw an ACEC designation being used to justify locking out private landowners from being able to access their homes in Oregon, it became clear that this was just one more tool that land managers will abuse to implement a radical agenda to shut down our public lands. (In the past I’ve discussed this with Glenn Beck on his national radio show).
Last week the BLM released its final version of the Rock Springs RMP, and ultimately they settled on creating almost 1 million acres of ACECs. Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of current ACECs, and a quick glance shows that the biggest ones are usually measured in the thousands of acres. For a recent plan to be designating nearly 1 million acres of ACECs suggests that this is simply a new way to create something equivalent to a national monument in Wyoming.
It is also worth noting that the BLM’s conservation leasing rule devoted an equal amount of attention to create new rules for designating new ACECs. All of this suggests that the ACEC will be one of the primary tools that the agency uses to comply with the 30 x 30 agenda to lock up 30% of our public land by 2030.
On the surface the plan doesn’t propose to enact OHV closures through an OHV closed designations. We have no confidence that the 1 million acres of ACECs won’t be used to close OHV access to a substantial portion of this area.
We are also still reviewing the details of this plan and checking with stakeholders in the area to determine what our response to this land grab should be.
