Public Lands

Freshman Representative Jeff Hurd (R-Colo.) is sponsoring a bill that would require Bureau of Land Management field offices across the West to adopt plans to open more lands to oil and gas drilling.

Politicians and environmentalists are sounding the alarm on the impacts of federal job cuts in land management agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. They say services like firefighting, recreation management, and access to permits for extraction will be affected.

The 15th annual Conservation in the West Poll also found strong support for maintaining national monument designations and for addressing climate change as a serious problem.

A bipartisan team of researchers is leading Colorado College's annual "Conservation in the West" poll of about 3,300 voters in eight western states: Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico.

Sen. Bennet (D-Colo.) is pledging to fight for public land protections and funding for agriculture, and is looking for more support from the federal government in Colorado River negotiations.

A hearing on the multiple-use policy for public lands on Tuesday was repeatedly trumped by politics. Multiple-use allows public lands to be used simultaneously for different purposes, including hiking, logging, hunting and fishing, wildlife conservation, watershed protection, and more.

Public lands advocates worried that allowing Utah’s case to move forward would threaten to upend management of 200 million acres of public lands across the West.

Utah is asking the Supreme Court to grant it control of public lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance argues the state’s case is illegal and they’re concerned about the potential implications for public lands across the west.

The December 15 event was billed as a peaceful response to a group called the Free Land Holders' attempt to lay claim to more than 1,000 acres of public land in the San Juan National Forest.

Environmental and clean energy advocates are voicing concerns over Trump’s picks for Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of Energy. They say the president-elect’s nominees reveal an overreliance on fossil fuels and a disregard for conservation and green energy.