Opinion: A vision for conserving public lands we can all agree on

Last week I was on a mountain top in the West, looking over a vast expanse of our nation’s public lands. A young couple was nearby, and I offered to take their photo. Suddenly, the young man went on bended knee, proposing to his beloved. He had planned it for months. They had travelled from the Midwest, hundreds of miles, for this moment. I was delighted but not surprised: Public lands often serve up lifetime memories.
Each and every American owns our public lands. They provide so much: wildlife habitat, clean water and energy, food and timber, solace and recreation and more. Balancing these values is the job of the Bureau of Land Management, for both current and future generations.
It’s not easy, but it is vital to get that balance right. Our challenges are urgent and growing, including bigger, hotter wildfires; longer droughts; invasive weeds; and watersheds struggling with less water. This comes as visitors seek recreation and renewal at record rates — that young couple was just two of roughly 82 million annual visitors.
We work hand-in-hand with the public, and while most agree that we have a shared responsibility to manage public lands for their health and with an eye toward the future, we often hear differing ideas on how best to get there. Listening to the public and incorporating diverse ideas makes our work better. We are grateful for every interaction and humbled by the opportunity to serve such an important mission.
Working together with the public, we’ve accomplished a lot in the last three and a half years.
In the Public Lands Rule, we recognize what Congress told us nearly 50 years ago: that conservation is equal to other uses of our public lands. We commit ourselves to be guided by assessments of landscape health, and through restoration and mitigation leases, we provide opportunities for Americans to work on conserving and improving our public lands, not merely extracting resources from them.
We are putting people to work restoring vital landscapes and watersheds in the West through the Biden-Harris administration’s historic Investing in America initiative.
For example, we’re investing more than $27 million in Utah in 2024 and 2025 to improve habitat for wildlife, clean up abandoned oil wells and mines, and restore streams and rivers to allow for longer flows through hot summer months.
Funding is being focused on conserving landscapes around the Upper Bear River, northeast of Salt Lake City, where we are working with others to conserve healthy, intact sagebrush. In Color Country Converging, near St. George in southwest Utah, we are responding to a more than 500% increase in visitation to public lands since 2013. There, we are improving recreation infrastructure and access and addressing impacts to wildlife habitat.
This comes in addition to the remarkable investments made possible by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to address drought and wildfire, clean up abandoned oil wells and mines and improve access to recreation. This body of work is a true investment in our country and our future.
We’re leading the way to a clean energy economy, surpassing our clean energy goals and crafting thoughtful policy to guide the work. Our Renewable Energy Rule and Western Solar Plan provide the responsible approach we need to realize the Biden-Harris administration’s vision for a clean energy transition. We have already surpassed the goal enshrined in law of permitting 25 GW of clean energy by 2025 — enough to power 12 million homes — and now we are processing 66 proposed projects that could more than double that amount.
We’ve updated antiquated oil and gas regulations because traditional fuels will continue to play an important role during the transition to clean energy. Through updated royalty rates, meaningful bonding requirements and thoughtful guidance on where best to develop these resources, we are discouraging irresponsible actors, better protecting communities and wildlife and ensuring fair returns to American taxpayers.
We’re becoming the recreation agency the public expects us to become. We’ve crafted a blueprint for 21st-century recreation, a major shift in how the agency prioritizes and supports outdoor recreation.
We’re publishing land use plans that truly and responsibly balance all uses across our public lands rather than allowing one industry or one extractive use to dominate.
We’re doing all of this as we honor the federal government’s trust responsibility to tribes in deeper and more meaningful ways, through incorporating indigenous knowledge, engaging in co-stewardship and ensuring respect for and protection of sacred sites.
There are two reasons I’m so confident we will continue to succeed in our charge to take care of the health of our public lands and waters as we deliver important resources to the American public. First, BLM employees are the most pragmatic, can-do and dedicated bunch of public servants I’ve ever had the honor to work with. Our nation is indebted to them. Second, the American people’s love of public lands is growing, and it endures. That young couple’s engagement story will doubtless be told for generations. Multiply that by 82 million people who visited BLM lands last year, and that’s a heck of a charge to do right by the lands and people we serve.
Tracy Stone-Manning was confirmed as the 19th director of the Bureau of Land Management in September 2021. She has served as chief of staff for former Montana Governor Steve Bullock and as the director of Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality, where she led numerous conservation efforts.