The Biden administration on Friday issued final regulations designed to protect the greater sage grouse, a speckled brown bird with a sprawling habitat across 10 Western states.
The move to safeguard the iconic species would limit drilling and mining on federal lands as well as the development of clean energy such as solar and wind power.
But the plan could soon be upended: President-elect Donald J. Trump has pledged to increase oil and gas development on public lands, and he sought to weaken sage grouse habitat restrictions in his first term.
The conservation effort is part of a long tug of war between environmentalists and the drilling and mining industries over wildlife habitat across the Western states. The habitat of the grouse has shrunk in recent years due to mining and other industrial activity, along with wildfire and drought linked to climate change. Once abundant, the greater sage grouse, a bulbous bird with a fan of tail feathers that nests on the ground, is teetering toward endangered status.
The sage grouse population has declined about 80 percent since 1965, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
“For too long, a false choice has been presented for land management that aims to pit development against conservation,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement. “This administration’s collaborative work has demonstrated that we can do both successfully.”
The plan was issued by the Bureau of Land Management, which controls nearly 65 million acres, or roughly half of total sage grouse habitat. The agency proposed six possible plans in March and received more than 39,000 public comments.
The Biden administration hopes its new plan will provide a compromise between drilling and mining interests and environmentalists. The plan does not close any acreage to drilling activities, but on four million acres of particular concern, those activities must remain underground, and there are no allowances for wind and solar. The plan outlines about 30 million more acres where solar or wind developers would face heightened scrutiny to receive a permit.
The federal battle over the greater sage grouse was set in motion more than a decade ago, when the Obama administration issued a plan to shield the bird’s habitat from mining and energy development.
That move was sharply criticized by the oil and gas industry, and, in 2017, the Trump administration issued a new plan that weakened protections and made it easier for states to approve drilling, pipelines and other activities in sage grouse breeding areas. A federal court in 2019 blocked the Trump plan from moving forward.
According to the Bureau of Land Management, the birds rely on sagebrush to meet their food and reproduction needs, and a local population could need as much as 40 square miles of landscape to stay healthy. Conserving sagebrush habitat protects a much wider ecosystem: 350 other wildlife species like mule deer and pygmy rabbits depend on it, as do nearby human communities.
“This remarkable species and the people who live, work and play alongside it deserve management that will sustain sagebrush habitat across the West for years to come,” the bureau’s director, Tracy Stone-Manning, said in a statement.
The post Biden Administration Restricts Development in West to Protect Sage Grouse appeared first on New York Times.
