As we brace ourselves for the onslaught of messages from anti-access groups that opening public lands up for oil and gas leasing is a “sell-off” of our public lands, we want to remind everyone that we’ve had to fight hard during the last 18 months to stop the largest sell-off of our public lands since the Homestead Acts were repealed. Before we list all the ways that current land managers worked to sell off our public lands, it is worth mentioning that public lands utilized for oil and gas generally remain open for public use. We regularly encounter pump jacks, pipelines, and other oil and gas infrastructure while exploring public lands on roads that are often built and maintained by those with mineral, oil, and gas leases. We’re not opposed to split estates on public lands as long as the land is generally managed according to the multiple-use mandate in a way that promotes recreation. The efforts to sell public lands during the last 18 months involve schemes that would replace multiple-use management with single-use.
The Natural Asset Company Rule
Last year around this time we were mobilizing supporters to oppose a rule introduced by the Securities and Exchange Commission that had been developed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York Stock Exchange to create a new form of publicly traded company called a Natural Asset Company or NAC. The purpose of the NAC would be to securitize all of the natural processes of the entire planet, and those who acquire these natural assets would manage them to receive a return on investment for the ecosystem services. The rule in the Federal Register acknowledged that these companies would securitize national parks, sovereign (meaning public) lands, and basically anything an average person would call nature. The rule was intended to be global in scope and it predicted the market for NACs would be over $4 quadrillion dollars. This was a major policy shift that would have invited the deepest pockets in the world to stage a hostile takeover of our public lands, and it was buried on page 68,000 of the federal register. We were part of a coalition of opponents to this rule who submitted public comments in opposition to the rule. After getting flooded with comments, the SEC decided to suspend the rulemaking process. The rule did draw attention of members of Congress who will now be in the majority in 2025, and it is likely that they will enact legislation that will prevent a rule like this from being introduced in the future. We will continue to closely track this issue.
The BLM Conservation Leasing Rule
The Bureau of Land Management also introduced a rule in the summer of 2024 to allow for the sale of conservation leases on public land. The rule is called the Landscape Health and Conservation Rule, and it proposes to sell conservation leases on all land managed by the BLM. The rule had no statutory basis in the law, and it is currently being challenged in court. In its final form, the rule creates a scheme where all public land users would need to pay to offset or mitigate their impact to public lands to create the return on investment for those holding the conservation leases.
We helped mobilize supporters to encourage Congress to pass the West Act, and it was passed by the House of Representatives. It hasn’t passed the Senate, but it is likely that this legislation will be revived in the next Congress and passed as part of the budget reconciliation process. It is also very unlikely that the incoming administration will implement the rule. We have been monitoring the implementation of the rule, and if it ever gets implemented, we will be ready to litigate individual leases if they are ever proposed. This rule also created new guidelines for establishing Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, and we have seen ACECs being used as a tool to lock up public lands in a way that undermines multiple-use management. It is likely that we will challenge the expansion of ACECs in the coming years.
The Western Solar Plan
If you’ve ever come across a massive solar farm on public land, you will know that these installations turn multiple-use land into a single use eyesore surrounded by barbed wire. In 2024 the BLM finalized its Western Solar Plan, which will fast track over 30 million acres of public land for solar farm development. While they excluded lands with protective designations, they didn’t exclude lands with special recreation designations. We have seen a flood of new leases since the rule was released, and we are participating in the public process for all of them to ensure that they don’t build these installations on high-value recreation land.
In addition to these three big changes, we have also engaged on a variety of smaller projects. We opposed the Lava Ridge Wind Farm that was widely opposed by locals in southern Idaho. We’ve regularly opposed the 30×30 lock up of our lands, national monument designations, and wilderness laundering effort to make multiple-use lands into restricted use lands. At the same time we’ve supported reasonable active management projects that would follow existing laws to harvest timber in an effort to reduce fuel loads for fires or to salvage burned trees from mega fire burn scars. We’ve also educated our members about efforts to increase fees for recreation access or move recreation experiences to reservation-system monopolies.
With your support we will keep fighting to ensure that our public lands are kept open for public recreation and multiple use.
We are only a few thousand dollars away from crushing our goal to raise $150,000 in the month of December. Help us finish strong!
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