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CAPTION: The Valley of Fires in south-central New Mexico, pictured above in 2021, is one of the areas New Mexico Wild is most worried about due to the proposed rescission of the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule. This area, like others NM Wild identified, has “wilderness characteristics” that might be ignored if conservation is de-emphasized relative to extraction under the proposed rule’s rescission. (Photo courtesy BLM)
A prominent New Mexico environmental advocacy group has identified wild areas comprising more than 210 square miles across the state that will lose an important defense if a 2024 federal land use rule is rescinded.
The Department of Interior late last week announced in the Federal Register that it would seek to undo the “Public Land Rule,” formally known as the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, which Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a news release stands in the way of oil and gas development, along with other extractive uses of federal public land.
The Bureau of Land Management last April finalized the rule, which provided guidance for ensuring conservation of public lands received due consideration along with mining, timber, grazing, recreation or other uses. It also allowed the BLM to issue leases specifically for conservation, though none has been issued yet, said Sally Paez, a staff attorney for New Mexico Wild, in an interview Monday with Source New Mexico.
She said the rule only reiterated and provided guidance for a 1976 law called the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which provides the BLM with a framework for balancing multiple public land uses. The rule lets the agency protect “intact, functioning landscapes” along with emphasizing landscape health through the use of science, data and Indigenous knowledge.
The rule being rescinded could have implications for all 13.5 million acres of BLM land in New Mexico, particularly those that are not currently designated for oil and gas extraction or other economic uses and those that don’t have existing wilderness protections, Paez said.
The nonprofit, with the help of a “citizen inventory” done by volunteers, has identified more than a dozen areas comprising 134,600 acres that her office said have “wilderness characteristics,” but no protections as such. Those characteristics include being bigger than 5,000 acres with “opportunities for solitude” or recreation.
Without the Public Lands Rule, New Mexico Wild won’t be able to argue that those areas across the state, which she said are popular with hikers and other recreators, should be protected.
“Those are really the areas that for us, I think, we’re most worried about because under the Public Land rule, we had an argument for those,” she said. “‘This is an intact landscape.’”
The public can comment on the proposed rule rescission until Nov. 10.
In addition to the “citizen inventory” areas NM Wild identified, Paez pointed out a handful of other places popular with hikers on BLM lands that might benefit from the Public Lands Rule if it is allowed to stay on the books. Those areas include the Caja Del Rio near Santa Fe; San Lorenzo Canyon south of Albuquerque; Quebradas Mountains in Socorro; the Florida Mountains near Deming; and Montezuma Crest near Placitas.
And the Pecos River Watershed could benefit from the restoration leases enabled by the rule, she said, which could offset the impacts of intensive oil and gas extraction in the Permian Basis by restoring riparian and aquatic habitat.
“That’s the type of project that I could definitely see being really good,” she said.
Paez said the BLM’s effort to rescind the Public Lands Rule is comparable to the Forest Service undoing the Roadless Rule, which nixes protections against timber harvesting in designated wild forest areas. Public comments for that proposal are being accepted through Friday.
“It’s all kind of this broad pattern of a policy shift towards short term gain and extraction and corporate interests, and out of public values and shared resources,” she said.
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