A more balanced conservation approach for the Bureau of Land Management

National parks in the West are connected to other public lands, not islands of conservation unto themselves. Park visitors sometimes cross into and out of park boundaries without even knowing it. Wildlife certainly do as they move across vast and ancestral migration routes.

Over 80 national park units, including Grand Canyon, Arches, Joshua Tree and Dinosaur, border on public lands managed instead by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). The health of our national parks, including the abundant wildlife, rivers and streams, and delicate ecological communities they host, are therefore directly affected by decisions made by the BLM.  

The BLM is also the agency responsible for administering the federal oil and gas program. Currently, a staggering 90 percent of the 245 million acres managed by the BLM are open for oil and gas development without restraint, including those directly adjacent to national parks. 

Even though the BLM has a multiple-use mandate to place land, water and wildlife conservation on equal footing with energy development, the agency has never upheld this balance. One look across the Permian Basin surrounding Carlsbad Caverns National Park reveals the influence the oil and gas industry has on our public lands. 

The BLM must be made to comply with its own mission and better balance land management. Fortunately, the Biden administration is taking this on by issuing two critically important directives to ensure that conservation is elevated as a priority alongside extractive uses such as oil and gas drilling. 

Stretching between Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone lies the longest mule deer and pronghorn migration route in the 48 contiguous states. Over the last decade, mule deer populations have dwindled due to habitat loss from energy development, shrinking by nearly one-third since 1991.

Nevertheless, oil and gas leasing continues to disrupt these migration corridors, with a fourfold increase in drilling applications in the past decade. BLM lands are home to more than 3,000 species, and extraction activities fragment wildlife habitat and disrupt critical connectivity for seasonal migration.

Through the Biden administration’s first directive, the Public Lands Rule, the BLM commits to a more balanced approach between conservation and extraction. This represents a pivotal departure from a prior paradigm which earmarked public lands for industrial development over the conservation of wildlife, clean water and culturally significant resources. At the heart of the Public Lands rule is the aim to strike a balance that could preserve millions of acres of critical wildlife habitat across the West. 

Further south, from Chaco Canyon in New Mexico to Mesa Verde in Colorado to Canyonlands in Utah, changes in drilling technology have sparked industry interest in the Four Corners region. This focus brings a slew of concerns to the high-desert wilderness, as new drilling, light and air pollution, and industrial traffic pose real threats to the parks and visitor experience in this world-renowned cultural landscape.  

On the heels of the Public Lands Rule, the Biden administration initiated another process, proposing common-sense reforms to BLM’s oil and gas leasing program. This directs the BLM to consider additional values in leasing decisions, aligning the program with its conservation mandate, safeguarding sensitive areas, mitigating environmental risks and providing a path for the BLM to end leasing near national parks and their connected landscapes. 

On behalf of the National Parks Conservation Association, we applaud the leadership of the Biden administration and the Bureau of Land Management in aligning public lands priorities to begin tackling the modern, urgent challenges facing our environment and communities.  

Biden’s BLM deserves praise for recognizing that these landscapes are not places for endless extraction. Interwoven through our national parks, BLM-managed lands knit together a vast and interconnected landscape of the American West. Balancing conservation stands as a pressing solution to the climate crisis and a remedy in reversing the catastrophic decline in biodiversity, with wildlife connectivity at the forefront. 

Beau Kiklis is Senior Program Manager of Energy Policy and Landscape Conservation at the National Parks Conservation Association.