Editor’s Note: For those of you not in Montana, you may not be familiar with the editorials of George Ochenski. George Ochenski was an environmental and tribal lobbyist at the Montana legislature for 22 years and and wrote, funded and passed many of the significant environmental bills in Montana during those decades. He is Montana’s longest running weekly political columnist. From time to time, we are going to share his insights here because they are very important.
This article was so on target I couldn’t let it go by. I see so many conservation organizations praising the BLM for this ‘conservation’ rule without seemingly bothering to read or understand it.
The regulations, themselves, are written to be aspirations at best. Unenforceable, contrary to what regulations are supposed to be. The ‘conservation leasing’ section appears to be spit out by an AI chatbot because it has no connection to reality. The BLM’s new ‘conservation’ rule is pure political theater, at best and will do nothing to advance real conservation of our public lands.
For many months now the federal Bureau of Land Management has been misleading the public about what exactly is in what they referred to as “the conservation rule.”
According to the agency, and parroted by a host of organizations and groups, the new administrative rule would put conservation on equal footing with extractive industries. But it didn’t — and it doesn’t — it was pure and shameful political propaganda spewed to garner conservation votes in an election year.
What’s amazing was the lack of due diligence in the statements put out by so many groups and media outlets based on the BLM’s facetious representation. Apparently there’s a significant lack of ability to read law by these groups since nowhere in the rule does it say you can walk into an auction for oil and gas, grazing or mining leases and bid against the extractive interests.
Were that the case, then indeed conservation would be on an “equal footing” with the extractive interests. But it’s not. As finally revealed by the agency this week in a column by BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning, what they called the “Conservation Rule” for so long is now the “Public Lands Rule.”
And those “conservation leases”? Well, that term is gone now and they’re officially “restoration and mitigation leases” — which is all they ever were. But while avoiding specifics, Stone-Manning says the rule will “provide opportunities for Americans to work on conserving and improving our public lands, not merely extracting resources from them.”
Indeed, those “opportunities” are considerably less than putting conservation on equal footing with extractive interests. Instead, as quoted directly from the BLM’s own document,
“comments…resulted in changes that include: establishing restoration and mitigation leases rather than conservation leases.”
In short, what the rule does is “incentivize lease proposals that collaborate with existing permittees.” As quoted from the final rule, they allow the BLM to “issue restoration and mitigation leases for the purposes of restoring degraded landscapes or mitigating impacts resulting from other land use authorizations” — with the salient term being “degraded landscapes.”
In other words,”qualified entities” including individuals, businesses, non-governmental organizations, Tribal governments, conservation districts, and State fish and wildlife agencies, get the wonderful opportunity to spend their own money to clean up after extractive industries have “degraded” the environment and landscape.
But even then, the original lease holders retain their leases for the extractive purposes. Want to go do “reclamation and mitigation” on a landscape that has been gnawed to the roots by overgrazing? Sure, you can do that, but first you have to post a bond, produce letters of credit and/or “establish an escrow account for the full amount needed to ensure the development plan meets all performance criteria.” Then you can attempt to bring it back to what the agency calls “sustainable” condition. And when you get done investing all that money, time, and resources, the grazing lease holder continues to get to run the livestock and the leases for the “conservation” interests are cancelled.
What a deal, ehh!
Even worse, by misrepresenting the whole conservation on an “equal footing” with extractive uses, the agency, media, and the clueless groups that parroted that line actually generated significant opposition to the rule with legislation already being introduced in Congress to overturn it.
Had BLM told the truth right out of the chute, those extractive lease holders would have understood not only was there no threat from “conservation leases” it would have resulted in having someone else pick up the tab for the degradation resulting from their extractive uses.
But it’s an election year. As they say “in war, truth is the first casualty” — and shame on those who tried for so long to fool the public on the phony “conservation rule.”
This was first published in the Daily Monantan. You can read all of George’s articles at https://dailymontanan.com/author/george-ochenski/
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