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Press Releases Archives - Page 2 of 23
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January 9th, 2020FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Kya Marienfeld, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, 435-259-5440, kya@suwa.org
Laura Welp, Western Watersheds Project, 435-899-0204, laura@westernwatersheds.org
Mary O’Brien, Grand Canyon Trust, 435-259-6205, mobrien@grandcanyontrust.orgMoab, UT (January 9, 2020) – On New Year’s Eve, the Utah office of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced a five-year, $75 million-dollar financial agreement to support the continued destruction of pinyon pine, juniper, and sagebrush ecosystems throughout Utah.
The BLM committed up to $75 million dollars to the Utah Watershed Restoration Initiative (UWRI), a partnership of federal and state agencies and public land grazing and hunting interests. UWRI has clearcut and mechanically “treated” hundreds of thousands of acres of public lands in Utah in the name of restoration since its inception 12 years ago.
Recent scientific literature clearly outlines the risks associated with large-scale surface disturbing activities, such as chaining or mulching live pinyon pine and juniper forests, yet the BLM and UWRI have almost always ignored this information and instead forged ahead with an antiquated, unscientific approach to land management that more often than not converts the “treated” areas into exotic forage and invasive species.
“The BLM’s commitment to fund the Utah Watershed Restoration Initiative over the next five years represents the worst of the Trump administration’s war on science and refusal to acknowledge the global climate crisis we’re witnessing on a daily basis,” said Kya Marienfeld, wildlands attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “Rather than destroying large native ecosystems, the BLM should be working to preserve the ecological integrity of intact landscapes in order to mitigate the ongoing climate crisis. ”
“Utah’s public lands are forever scarred by 60 years of counterproductive vegetation removal projects, which have historically done little more than increase non-native forage for cattle,” said Laura Welp, Ecosystems Specialist with Western Watersheds Project. “These destructive projects are based on fundamentally flawed concepts and failure should be expected. Continuing down the current path of promoting large-scale pinyon pine, juniper, and sagebrush clearcuts that are driven by funding rather than science spells disaster for Utah’s remarkable public lands.”
“While a rare BLM project funded by UWRI is actually committed to diverse public input and species other than livestock and big game, most are hell-bent on clearing out pinyon pine, juniper, and sagebrush to make room for livestock forage, and then UWRI and land managers never look back when the land has been reduced to cheatgrass, tumbleweed, bare soil, and/or a feedlot of non-native forage grasses,” said Mary O’Brien, Utah Forests Program Director with Grand Canyon Trust.
“Not only does the agreement represent a gross misuse of taxpayer funding, it also supports a partnership that has continually ignored best available scientific information regarding the risk of large-scale surface disturbing activities and the need to bolster climate resiliency by maintaining native ecosystems in a hotter, drier desert Southwest,” added Marienfeld.
Additional Resources
More information, including recent scientific literature and reports on the risks of BLM’s vegetation removal program, is available here.
Link to this press release here.
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December 16th, 2019Offers public only 30 days, including over the holidays, to submit comments on a plan that has been years in the making.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Laura Peterson, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, 801-236-3762, laura@suwa.org
Soren Jespersen, The Wilderness Society, 970-819-7377, soren_jespersen@tws.orgSalt Lake City, UT (December 16, 2019) – On Friday, December 13, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) quietly released a draft travel management plan for the San Rafael Desert in Emery County, Utah that will forever change the area’s stunning and remote wild lands, turning it into a playground for off-road vehicles.
The San Rafael Desert travel plan is the first of thirteen travel plans that BLM will complete over the next six years as a part of a court-supervised settlement agreement with conservation and off-road vehicle groups. These thirteen travel plans will determine where motorized vehicles will be allowed in some of Utah’s wildest public lands, including the Dirty Devil, San Rafael Swell and Vermillion Cliffs.
The San Rafael Desert is a sublime area of Utah’s backcountry, encompassing the newly-designated Labyrinth Canyon Wilderness and wilderness-quality lands such as Sweetwater Reef and the San Rafael River. It features stunning redrock canyons, important cultural sites, and an outstanding diversity of native pollinators (bees and wasps). BLM’s draft plan would inundate this remote area with off-road vehicle routes, more than doubling the miles open to motorized vehicles from 300 miles to more than 775 miles.
Labyrinth Canyon, (c) Ray Bloxham/Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. Re-use with attribution permitted.
“The BLM’s draft travel plan is short-sighted and wholly fails to account for the diverse array of public land resources and user groups,” said Laura Peterson, staff attorney at Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “Rather than capitalize on an opportunity to develop a reasonable, manageable and forward-thinking travel plan that ensures public access while preserving the backcountry and minimizing damage, the BLM’s plan does exactly the opposite. It proposes to designate any cow path, wash bottom and line on a map as open to off-road vehicles. The BLM’s plan would open popular hiking trails to motorized vehicle use. It would designate routes that will bisect wildlife habitat, fragment wild lands and damage important cultural sites.”
Federal law requires BLM to minimize impacts to natural and cultural resources when designating motorized vehicle routes. This includes minimizing damage to soils, watershed, vegetation, wildlife habitat, and cultural sites; minimizing the harassment of wildlife as well as conflicts between different public land user groups; and minimizing impacts of motorized vehicle routes on wilderness values like naturalness and solitude. BLM’s San Rafael Desert travel plan falls woefully short of meeting its legal obligation.
“BLM’s draft plan is as one-sided as they come,” said Soren Jespersen, Senior Field Representative at The Wilderness Society. “The plan would nearly double the amount of motorized roads and trails in the San Rafael Desert including by adding miles roads that do not exist on the ground today. This isn’t travel management, it’s a travel free-for-all, and it’s not what visitors to the San Rafael Desert come to experience.”
The BLM is giving the public only 30 days during the busy holiday season to review its proposed travel management plan and submit written comments.
More information, including maps and photographs of currently-designated and proposed motorized vehicle routes, is available here.
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November 12th, 2019Fourth Time This Year BLM Has Suspended Leases in Utah; Feds Ignored Climate Change, Opened Scenic, Cultural Lands to Fossil Fuel Extraction
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Stephen Bloch, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, (801) 428-3981, steve@suwa.org
Landon Newell, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, (801) 428-3991, landon@suwa.org
Diana Dascalu-Joffe, Center for Biological Diversity, (720) 925-2521, ddascalujoffe@biologicaldiversity.org
Sarah Stock, Living Rivers, (435) 260-8557, sarah.livingrivers@gmail.comSalt Lake City, UT (November 12, 2019)― The Trump administration has pulled 130 oil and gas leases in Utah because the Bureau of Land Management failed to fully analyze greenhouse gas emissions and the potential harm to climate from fossil fuel extraction. It’s the fourth time this year that the agency has suspended leases for drilling and fracking in Utah ― after the leases were sold ― because they violated federal law.
The BLM’s latest decision to put a temporary hold on leasing activity comes in response to a September lawsuit filed by the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, Center for Biological Diversity, and Living Rivers. The agency pulled the leases from auction in late September.
“The Trump administration’s BLM is writing the textbook on how to make an uninformed and unlawful leasing decision,” said Stephen Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “Utah BLM’s formula has been to lease as much public land as possible, as quickly as possible, and with as little analysis or public involvement as possible. Unsurprisingly, this approach to oil and gas leasing is unlawful.”
The 130 oil and gas leases encompass some of the most scenic, wild and culturally and archaeologically rich public lands in the United States.
Most of the leases are in areas designated by the BLM as having “wilderness characteristics,” which means they’re natural, undisturbed and provide outstanding opportunities for solitude and quiet recreation. This includes the Bitter Creek, Desolation Canyon, Dragon Canyon and White River areas in the Book Cliffs region of the Uinta Basin, and the Eagle Canyon area in the San Rafael Swell.
Eagle Canyon in southern Utah, an area with wilderness characteristics at issue in the litigation.
“The BLM’s uninformed rush to align itself with the Trump administration’s oil and gas ‘energy dominance’ agenda has repeatedly — and unsurprisingly— backfired,” said Landon Newell, staff attorney with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “The agency has tripped over itself in its haste. This is a legal mess of the BLM’s own making.”
Because of challenges brought by conservation groups, the BLM this year has been forced to pull back leases covering more than 300,000 acres of public land in Utah. More information on BLM’s other retracted leasing decisions can be found here, here and here.
“This is another setback for the Trump administration’s irresponsible, illegal decision to lease these beautiful public lands for fracking and drilling,” said Diana Dascalu-Joffe, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “BLM officials are starting to recognize the error of their rush to ignore climate science and public health to unleash a fracking frenzy. Now the administration must acknowledge the irreparable harm these irrational decisions have on our fragile climate.”
“Both human and wildlife communities in the rural regions of the arid west are getting hammered by reckless oil and gas development. We have no choice but to intervene,” said Sarah Stock, program director with Living Rivers. “Oil and gas development on our federal public lands is contributing massively to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. This will almost surely deplete the amount of water available in this region, adding great challenges for water managers and ecosystems in the coming years. The BLM needs to think through the full impact of development before leasing these precious lands.”
In March 2019 a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that the BLM had failed to properly analyze the impacts of its oil and gas leasing program on greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. This landmark decision requires the agency, for the first time, to provide a detailed accounting of these impacts in each leasing decision. This court ruling has had broad ramifications in Utah and across the United States.
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Living Rivers is a nonprofit environmental membership organization, based in Moab, Utah. Living Rivers promotes river restoration and seeks to revive natural habitat and the spirit of rivers by undoing the extensive damage done by dams, diversions and pollution on the Colorado Plateau. Learn more at www.livingrivers.org
The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, based in Salt Lake City, Utah, is a nonprofit environmental membership organization dedicated to the preservation of outstanding wilderness found throughout Utah and the management of wilderness-quality lands in their natural state for the benefit of all Americans. Learn more at www.suwa.org
The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 1.6 million members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places. Learn more at www.biologicaldiversity.org
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November 8th, 2019Agency may hand over an alleged right-of-way to the state of Utah as it considers unprecedented public land giveaway
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 8, 2019Contacts:
Alison Heis, National Parks Conservation Association, 202.384.8762
Steve Bloch, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, 801.859.1552
Jen Ujifusa, Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, 202.266.0473
Anne Hawke, Natural Resources Defense Council, 646.823.4518
Jennifer Dickson, The Wilderness Society, 303.650.9379(Salt Lake City): The Interior Department announced today that it is considering giving away the United States’ interest to a 10-mile gravel road in the southwest corner of Utah. This is a trial balloon that, if successful, would open the door for the Trump administration to cede control to tens of thousands of miles of dirt roads and trails to the state of Utah, a state notorious for its anti-public lands agenda. The move could affect claimed rights-of-ways in national parks, national monuments, and wilderness areas.
Interior is relying on a controversial and unlawful tool known as “recordable disclaimers of interest” (RDIs) to cede title and control over federal public lands to the state of Utah and its counties. The state of Utah and its counties have filed more than twenty federal lawsuits over its 14,000 alleged rights-of-way. Those claims are brought under an obscure provision of the 1866 Mining Act, known as “R.S. 2477.” The Trump administration is trying to use RDIs to throw in the towel in that federal court litigation.
“If there was ever a case of the camel’s nose under the tent, this is it” said Stephen Bloch, legal director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. “If the state of Utah succeeds with this first disclaimer it has thousands of similar claims blanketing Utah’s redrock country waiting in the wings. And make no mistake about it, if Utah secures title to these federal lands the state has been outspoken about its intent to pave these dirt roads and trails in an effort to take control of public lands and stop wilderness protection.”
The George W. Bush administration was the first to attempt to use RDIs to give away public lands. In 2003, the Interior Department issued regulations to guide the use of RDIs to cede control over claimed state and county R.S. 2477 rights-of-way. These regulations are contrary to a longstanding congressional prohibition, in place since 1997, on any such rules. Initial attempts by the Interior Department in the 2000s to issued RDIs in Utah were withdrawn.
“National parks could be next on the chopping block,” said Kristen Brengel, senior vice president at the National Parks Conservation Association. “Today’s move by the Interior Department poses a real and immediate threat to national parks in Utah and across the West. Every cowpath and two-track can be claimed as a road and given away to virtually anyone under this regulation. Our national parks could be criss-crossed with roads in places where visitors enjoy the natural beauty and cultural sites.”
The Department’s Bureau of Land Management is giving the public only 30 days during the busy holiday season to review its proposal and submit written comments. BLM may approve the state of Utah’s RDI application as soon as February 2020.
“You can’t undo this kind of damage to our public lands legacy,” said Bobby McEnaney, director of the Dirty Energy Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “Interior has a duty to act as a steward of the lands and resources we all own—managing them and holding them in trust for future generations. Instead, the Trump administration is brazenly liquidating cherished places in a mercenary fire sale to a state that admits it will exploit them. It’s a reckless move that leaves all of us ecologically poorer.”
The 10-mile claimed R.S. 2477 right-of-way that Interior is proposing to give away is located in Washington County, in southwestern Utah. Maps depicting of the state of Utah’s claimed R.S. 2477 rights-of-way in Washington County are available here and here. Almost every county in the state of Utah has hundreds if not thousands of miles of claimed R.S. 2477 rights-of-way that could be given away through the RDI process.
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October 25th, 2019Read More »Decision protects park resources, promotes visitor safety