I won’t go into the most disastrous of Biden’s mistakes, the appointment of the jellyfish-like Merrick Garland as Attorney General, instead focusing on public lands issues.
Looking at the trajectory of public lands and wildlife issues over the last half century, what I have found consistently is that when there is a Republican administration, strong and highly motivated ideologues are put in charge of the agencies and their drive results in real damage.
But when Democratic administrations come in they often leave many of the people put in place by the Republican administration they are following. They rarely have any serious conservation background, rarely reverse the damage previous inflicted and whatever ‘conservation proposals’ they put out are riddled with loopholes and seemingly designed to be little more than window dressing to claim to be conservation-minded in the next election.
The result is a continual stair-stepping down.
The BLM’s Public Lands Rule is a perfect example of this farce. With great fanfare, the BLM released these regulations, but unlike the point of regulations which is to require or limit actions, these new regulations neither require or limit anything. Assuming these regulations are not reversed in the next few weeks, we will review the Biden administrations Public Lands Rule in a later post.
The renowned forest ecologist Dr. Dominick A. DellaSala recently critiqued the Forest Service’s ‘crown jewel’ conservation effort of the Biden administration, the Old Growth Forest Plan Amendment process.
You can read Dr. DellaSala’s critique published in Mongabay here.
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