On Monday, the Trump administration repealed a Biden-era rule that had put conservation on par with the Bureau of Land Management’s other “multiple uses,” like logging, recreation, grazing and mining.
“The Public Lands Rule essentially gave conservation a meaningful seat at the table in how public lands are managed,” said Craig Benjamin, executive director of the Lander-based Wyoming Wildlife Federation.
But the two-year old rule wasn’t in place long enough to fully understand what that impact could have looked like, Benjamin said.
Proponents of the rule said it had encouraged tribal involvement, environmental protections and conservation of scenic and ecologically important areas. It gave the BLM tools to manage “Areas of Critical Environmental Concern” through conservation leases that focused on restoration and mitigation.
While the BLM has leased land for conservation before, in limited cases, the rule created the first program to do so. The agency doesn’t appear to have signed any conservation leases under the rule. The Wyoming Outdoor Council also said it hasn’t noticed any in the state, either, in the two years the rule was in effect.
The program focused on protecting intact ecosystems, which would have been relevant to the 7% of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s 22 million acres managed by the BLM. The GYE remains one of the largest intact ecosystems in the continental United States.
But to the BLM, the rule “threatened to restrict productive use of the public lands and introduced uncertainty and unnecessary burdens in planning and permitting,” the federal agency wrote in its final decision. The BLM began the effort to overturn the rule in 2025.
Still, Wyoming public land watchdogs say the move is “what we would call ‘blind deference’ to industrial uses,” said Carl Fisher, executive director of Wyoming Outdoor Council.
“Where the red carpets are being rolled out for these industries while checks and balances on them are being significantly rolled back.”
The decision coincides with a larger shift from the Biden administration’s interest in conservation back to fast-tracking extractive projects on BLM lands. That shift counters some of Wyoming Wilderness Association’s conservation efforts, said the nonprofit’s BLM Wildlands Director Jennie Mans.
“It all leads to the consequence of public lands being parceled and sold off in a way that we won’t recover from,” Mans told KHOL.
The agency’s summer auction could open up all three of Wyoming’s migration corridors to oil and gas leasing.
“As the state with the fourth most BLM land in acreage, we should be leaders in thoughtful stewardship of multi-use management practices,” Mans said. “These lands are critical to safeguarding wildlife habitat, migration corridors and our cultural heritage.”
Out of 130,000 public comments on the rule in the last year, 98% supported it, according to analysis by the Center for Western Priorities.
This story has been updated to add a quote on conservation leases from the Wyoming Outdoor Council. — Ed.
