Every American benefits from our public lands. They provide us with clean air and water, energy and minerals, and the healthy ecosystems, wildlife and recreation that define our cultures and ways of life. The Department of the Interior has the profound mission of managing over 500 million acres, and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is responsible for about half of those lands. We are committed to caring for these lands, and to creating durable and enduring policies focused on landscape health.
To achieve this, we recognize that we can’t go it alone. We are working with state, local, Tribal and federal partners on solutions that recognize the multi-use mandate of our public lands, the threats they face, and a collaborative path ahead.
Our public lands are facing unprecedented challenges, including more frequent and intense droughts and wildfires worsened by the climate crisis and invasive species that transform entire ecosystems. These growing challenges put immense pressure on the landscapes, water resources, and wildlife that support each of us.
With science and landscape health as our guides and collaboration as our north star, we have developed conservation solutions that engage the communities our work depends on, while leaving our public lands and waters better than we found them.
Our Public Lands Rule is at the heart of this effort. It recognizes what Congress told us nearly 50 years ago with the passage of the Federal Land Policy Management Act of 1976 – that conservation is equal to other uses of our public lands. Through this rule, we will balance the management of BLM-stewarded lands, restore those lands in decline, and make smart decisions that are guided by the health of our lands.
We are providing opportunities for more Americans to be a part of the implementation of the Public Lands Rule, including through restoration and mitigation leases that enable qualified, conservation-driven organizations to invest in and restore our shared lands and waters. We are also engaging Tribes – the original stewards of our public lands – like never before through provisions that respect Indigenous Knowledge by directing the BLM to seek out increased opportunities for Tribal co-stewardship.
Already, we have made strides in implementing the rule, prioritizing and planning restoration actions, undertaking timely watershed condition assessments, defining health standards, and advancing the inventory and monitoring of ecological resources on BLM lands.
As we put historic funding from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda to work, we are identifying the landscapes and watersheds most in need of assistance across the nation and directing resources toward their restoration and long-term resilience. Much of this work takes shape through our Restoration Landscapes effort. Funded with $161 million from the Inflation Reduction Act, the effort focuses on the restoration and revival of 21 unique landscapes across the western United States. In Colorado, for example, nearly $11 million has gone toward restoring wildlife habitat, clean water and biodiversity in the San Luis Valley and core sagebrush and wildlife habitat in North Park.
All told, investments in these critical, irreplaceable landscapes will translate to stronger ecosystems, healthier wildlife populations, and resilient ways of life for the communities who have stewarded the West over generations.
This commitment to our shared future has also manifested in protections for public lands like the Thompson Divide area in Colorado, Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument in northern Arizona, and Avi Kwa Ame National Monument in the desert expanse of southern Nevada – an area sacred to numerous regional Tribes. These special places will be managed with BLM’s partners on the ground.
Driven by science and collaboration, our team has made important strides in managing our public lands for future generations. The success of this work is rooted in three things: the remarkable public servants who work at the BLM; our partnerships with local communities, states, industry, non-profit groups and with Tribes that count on the health of our public lands and waters and the resources they provide; and finally, the support and engagement of our fellow Americans, who love and depend on our public lands.
All of us must play a role in ensuring that our grandchildren, and their children experience the same joy and solace from these lands that we do today in Colorado and throughout our nation.
Deb Haaland is the U.S. Secretary of the Interior and Tracy Stone-Manning is the director of the Bureau of Land Management.
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