NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE T his week the Biden administration closed the comment period on an innovative and potentially transformative proposal to allow for conservation leasing of federal public lands. Such a program could fundamentally improve the mechanisms by which federal lands are allocated to different uses. But in its current form, the proposed rule needs important revisions to realize the full potential of elevating conservation objectives.
The proposed conservation-leasing rule would allow the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to identify acreage in “areas of environmental concern” and lease that acreage for a period of years to environmental groups or other parties that would pay to help protect the land or let it heal and regain its natural function. On the face of it, this is a wonderful idea very much in step with BLM’s history of managing federal lands for multiple uses. Including conservation in the list of recognized values of federal land and creating a channel to generate revenue from that value is a long time coming.
Of the 244 million surface acres managed by BLM, almost one in three is in Alaska, and most of the rest is in square-bordered western states. BLM manages those acres for many different uses — grazing; mining for oil, gas, coal, and other minerals; recreation; watershed and wilderness protection; and other uses. BLM works with other agencies to protect wildlife and guard against hazards such as wildfires.
One issue with federal land management is that the bureaucracy may not be as nimble as we’d like, and it is particularly maladroit at adapting to new and changing values. Broadening the scope of public-land leasing to include non-extractive and conservation leasing allows new uses to express themselves. If a local community values the environmental attributes of a tract more than a grazier does for livestock feed, it makes sense to switch uses to conservation and formalize that change with a new lease. Increasing environmental values might be slow to penetrate the “Bureau of Logging and Mining,” just as higher values for extracting newly valuable rare-earth minerals could be ignored by a reticent bureaucrat. Proposing conservation leasing is a new and welcome milestone.
Federal land agencies already use leasing contracts as an important management tool — grazing, oil and gas exploration and production, coal-mining, and timber harvest are just a few examples. Leases are not quite the same across the different uses, and the prices of resources vary. One common feature is that members of the public can nominate acreage for leasing. Citizen nominations should be part of any conservation-leasing program.
Current leasing programs are sometimes critiqued as unfair giveaways. One reason is that competing uses such as conservation have not been able to be expressed — until now. The other is that the leases have fixed rather than variable values. Avoiding these mistakes is an important consideration for any prospective conservation-leasing program. Environmental values vary widely, and there is no reason to expect that a lease to protect wildflowers in California would have comparable value to one for ground-nesting birds in Wyoming. Auctions are an ideal mechanism to elicit such disparate values.
Traditional commodity users, such as miners or graziers, might justifiably be worried about conservation leasing. For decades, some of them have been able to benefit from relatively little competition. In contrast, the owners of federal lands — taxpayers — should be optimistic that realizing some revenue from non-extractive uses will help bolster the bottom line. While BLM officials currently forecast a minimal economic impact, they are missing the forest for the trees and are underestimating the potential of the program.
In the longer run, commodity users are likely to see the benefit of allowing conservationists to bid alongside them. It removes the incentive for conservation to be politicized. When environmental uses cannot be expressed except through capturing bureaucrats and politicizing the land-management process, then we can expect environmentalists to do just that. When they can exhibit their strength through fund-raising and leasing, they will excel.
As the BLM considers revising its conservation-leasing proposal, several important details must be included to maximize the possible gains. To start with, conservation use needs a clearer definition. As currently drafted, the proposal allows conservation use — as identified and designated by the BLM — to trump all competing uses. Yet the scope of what a conservation use is remains amorphous. If the BLM can clarify what does and doesn’t qualify, then the appropriate term and contract structure to achieve the objectives is likely to be apparent.
Another crucial issue is how conservation leases will govern other ways the land is currently used now and in the future. Currently, such conflicts are resolved via management decisions by the BLM. Several issues immediately arise, including how to handle infrastructure, wildfires, and wildlife. Infrastructure is an issue both in terms of current infrastructure, such as roads and trails, but also in terms of future infrastructure, such as power lines and renewable electricity generation. How will conservation leases be drawn up to deal with each of these types of infrastructure? Natural phenomena that move across a landscape, such as wildfires and wildlife, also pose important questions about the role and scope of conservation acreage. Such interactions are likely to depend strongly on spatial proximity in ways that grazing or mining do not.
Overuse of commonly owned resources is well recognized as a “tragedy of the commons.” It is not clear how the current conservation-leasing proposal can prevent exploitation and depreciation of any environmental gains. For example, if a conservation lease improves a wildlife habitat, the current proposal suggests that a conservation lease cannot restrict recreational access that might degrade the habitat the conservation lease is trying to protect. This sort of conflict between uses needs to be clarified, much as precedence among existing lessees has been over the course of time.
One feature of conservation leasing is that it may generate revenue. Where that money would go is not clear. In terms of the federal budget, it will not make much difference, but even modest amounts of locally retained revenue could provide valuable resources to improve federal lands and send an important signal to managers about the value of conservation. Recycling revenue from conservation leases to improve the management of nearby lands could offer the ability to improve and direct recreational use away from areas of environmental concern. If there is a way to put a value on conservation that exceeds traditional extractive uses, the amount of revenue to be gained could be large. Locally, communities can share in conservation revenue through existing payments in lieu of taxes.
The current proposal for conservation leasing can be improved to make it a more viable and valuable program. Perhaps the greatest promise of a successful program is to provide a channel for environmental values to show themselves in comparison to traditional uses. Today, the BLM has no way to incorporate such values into management except via political lobbying and decision-making. Environmental groups can spend their time and money identifying and leasing acreage for conservation rather than hiring lawyers to sue the government. That promises to lower the political temperature, which is something that we can all get behind in these times.