Former Bureau of Land Management bureaucrat Richard Spotts seeks to “reform” the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), a United States agency that administers and prepares land resources for exploitation by mining, oil extraction and grazing. Confusingly, Spotts’ description of the agency’s obstacles toward a conservationist and protectionist future implies that the BLM was originally formed to ensure such an objective:
Unfortunately the current dominant management culture at the agency is fundamentally incapable of doing what’s necessary. That culture is regressive, biased and secretive. It’s almost a joke in some circles: BLM is often said to stand for “Bureau of Livestock and Mining” because those are the activities it tends to favor over the health of the land.
It’s not a joke when that’s exactly what this agency was organized to do: sell, lease, and manage the exploitation of its land resources by means of mining, oil extraction and grazing. Where in this agency description does it say to conserve and protect natural landscapes?
Working for the U.S. Forest Service, I recognize that there is a large public misconception about the essential duties of agencies like BLM, USFS, and the Fish and Wildlife services: When the public hears about these particular outdoor agencies, they have the National Park Service in mind. The public thinks about preserves and refuges and wildernesses that are supposedly protected by these agencies. They think about the word “protection”. For some reason, Spotts also gets confused by the agency’s objectives:
Most of its managers are hard-wired to a multiple-use mission rather than conservation, meaning they believe land should be open to exploitation for mining, logging or ranching. Congress has reinforced this by failing to reform the 1872 Mining Law, raise grazing fees to fair market rates, allow voluntary grazing permit buyouts or otherwise modernize relevant statutes.
If visitors to the National Forests and BLM lands care to look up these respective agencies on Wikipedia, it doesn’t take long to see that what Spotts perceived as the contemporaneous “dominant management culture” is in fact the only reason that they exist. Here are some numbers from Wikipedia:
- The BLM oversees over 247 million acres of land (1/8th of the whole country!)
- Ranchers hold nearly 18,000 permits and leases for livestock grazing on 155 million acres of the total.
- 36 million acres are apportioned to National Conservation Lands, which include national monuments and wilderness areas. (Technically, these lands are supposed to be “protected”, but the previous administration started working to un-protect those lands for a little extra oil money.)
- There are more than 63,000 oil and gas wells.
I was told during a wildfire response that to make really good money working for the government, you gotta join BLM’s oil technician teams. They go around checking these thousands of wells to make sure they’re up to some type of regulation. I don’t know if those were safety or environmental ones, but who cares, it’s good money.
The Bureau of Land Management is a pretty young agency compared to the granddaddies like National Park Service and Forest Service. It was formed in 1946 during a combination of two older agencies, the General Land Office and the U.S. Grazing Service. The former even contributed to the formation of the U.S. Forest Service in 1905, when 18 million acres of forest resources were transferred to the Department of Agriculture. The latter agency speaks for itself (though after reading Spott’s article, maybe it’s a surprise to everyone). The Bureau of Livestock and Mining it is, then.
The Bureau of Land Management was formed to systematically exploit, lease and sell the land resources it owned. With such a comparatively small budget to manage so many millions acres of land (about 1.1 billion dollars annually), the agency made a name for itself with backpackers and RV enthusiasts around the West due to the commonly fee-less, laissez-faire camping spots. Little did the non-Wikipedia-reading, fans of BLM’s camping practices know that the agency was already making enough cash destroying the land from the inside out.
Back to Richard, who between 2002 through 2017 watched in horror as the agency did its job:
After working at the agency for six stressful years under the George W. Bush administration, I was excited by the prospect of seeing its version of “change we can believe in” when President Obama took office. It seemed like a chance to fix the agency — but tragically, under the Obama administration that change never arrived. I saw many missed opportunities for positive actions over those eight years, including necessary livestock grazing reforms.
Spotts’ recommendations for the BLM—re-protecting the supposedly “protected areas” under the agency’s purview, allowing voluntary grazing permit buyouts, and raising grazing fees to fair market rates to give the land just a bit of a break from over-grazing—all make sense to me. But Spotts’ description of the BLM implies that it may have had a heart in the past—and could have a heart *now*—which ignores that this agency was borne out of a heart of darkness, and never needed to change its direction because it was never assigned to do anything different.
That leads to the most likely reason Spotts reveals his naïveté: His work with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which I and environmental activists have described as “the formal codification of environmental destruction”.
Much of my job was overseeing compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act and other relevant federal laws, regulations and policies. I saw the reality of how managers’ biases could influence how these were interpreted and implemented… I repeatedly raised concerns that the latest science on landscape ecology and conservation biology was being ignored in NEPA documents. My concerns were likewise ignored, even though these omissions created vulnerabilities in the adequacy of the NEPA analyses, including on cumulative impacts.
I’ll steal from Thomas Linzey again:
The National Environmental Policy Act requires environmental impact statements for any project that uses federal money. But there is no accompanying legal requirement to select the least environmentally destructive course of action. The act is supposed to inform decision makers, yet it is not binding in any way on the decision. So, really, it’s a pointless expenditure of money that gives people the illusion that something is being done to protect the environment.
Spotts, a good-hearted bureaucrat, must have been surprised to see the total inadequacy of NEPA to address “concerns” and “latest science” and “conservation”, et cetera, et cetera. When you run into the word compliance in a job description, you will recognize that the compliance officer does not seek that a job is well-done or efficient, but that the job—document in this case—was done exactly within specifications. Every “t” crossed and every “i” dotted, even when those T’s and I’s spell out one word: destruction.
This article is not to drag Richard Spotts through the coals. Some of his aforementioned ideas, oft-repeated but salient, are worth re-visiting during a new administration. But let me repeat this: The U.S. Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management aren’t here to protect land or life. They aren’t here for me or you. They were borne over a century ago for one thing only: good money-making business, otherwise known as the exploitation of land resources by means of grazing, mining, or oil extraction.
Spotts points out one last egregious plan by the BLM:
The BLM is pushing to allow a destructive “Northern Corridor” highway through its Red Cliffs NCA, even through feasible alternatives are available.
Here is a parallel with Thomas Linzey’s past with the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund:
Construction of the Virginia highway project meant blowing apart a mountain and wreaking havoc in southwestern Virginia’s pristine and historic Ellett Valley, which happened to be two miles away from where Linzey’s father still lived. At the time, Linzey believed in the effectiveness of the National Environmental Policy Act, a law established to “create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony.” Over time, CELDF brought forth five lawsuits. They lost in every ruling… Speaking through a bullhorn from the back of a pickup truck, he read out a “Eulogy For Ellett Valley,” and was thrown in jail. (This “road to nowhere” still doesn’t connect to anything and has caused wide-scale water losses throughout the region.)