The Election and Public Lands. What Does the Future Hold?
Caption: In honor of the 60th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, and to celebrate the launch of the National Wilderness Coalition, staff from the Workshop and Colorado Wildlands Project, among others, traveled to D.C. to lobby for additional wilderness.
This article first appeared in the Winter 2024 edition of Wild Works.
As we were heading to print with this newsletter, Donald Trump was elected President and the Senate and the House will now be controlled by anti-conservation majorities. It’s a near certainty that both Trump and Congress will be hostile to public lands conservation and will seek to undo many essential and widely supported protections we, and the movement as a whole, achieved in recent years. Below are five conservation wins we’ll be working hard to ensure remain intact:
Thompson Divide!
Many of you joined us and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland this summer to celebrate the Administrative Withdrawal for the Thompson Divide, which secured 20 years of protection from future oil and gas leasing. We’re prepared to defend that decision and keep the Thompson Divide free from oil and gas drilling.
Protections from oil and gas development
This year, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) finished updating land management plans for our region, which closed more than one million acres of our local public lands to oil and gas leasing. We also removed the final two oil and gas leases on the top of the Roan Plateau. Going forward, we’ll guard against new oil and gas leasing proposals that would undo these important protections.
Conservation management
The BLM’s new management plans for western Colorado use conservation designations, such as Wilderness Study Areas and Areas of Critical Environmental Concern, to protect these values. The Trump administration methodically removed these types of protections during its first term in office, but we’re ready to fight to keep them intact.
Camp Hale National Monument
We all know too well that national monuments will be a target for Trump. President Biden protected beloved public lands across the West with national monument designations, including our own Camp Hale near Leadville, and we’ll be in good company working to defend them.
National regulations that promote public land protection
President Biden revised regulations for public land conservation that are sure to be in the crosshairs of the incoming Trump administration. These common-sense protections give advocates like us the tools we need to preserve our local public lands, and we’ll be doing everything we can to keep them in place.
