During remarks at an energy conference last year, an energy industry conference, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told oil, gas and mining executives that “if someone was sending me revenue, they [aren’t] the enemy. They [are] the customer.”
To some extent, Burgum’s statement is accurate. Energy use is an integral part of our daily lives, and as long as society’s energy needs continue to grow, energy development will grow alongside it. Energy development is also a legitimate activity under the guise of multiple-use mandates for managing our public lands.
However, the generation of direct revenue is not what makes energy industry executives the customer. All Americans are owners of the nation’s public lands and its natural resources—including oil, natural gas and other energy sources. So in that regard, we are all customers and beneficiaries of any products and services provided by our public lands.
It is not productive dialogue to frame conservation as being at odds with energy development. Nor is it productive to vilify services driven by our own societal needs. It leads to a dangerous rhetorical dichotomy that weakens the ability of professionals to influence or minimize the adverse impacts of energy development on wildlife populations and their habitats. The repeal of the 2024 Public Lands Rule on May 11 provides a perfect example.
The Public Lands Rule
When the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued the 2024 Public Lands Rule, placing conservation squarely alongside grazing, energy, recreation and other multiple uses in federal land management decisions, it felt like a long-awaited and much-needed recognition of the work wildlife professionals were doing. The symbolic resonance of the rule reverberated across TWS’ membership, and less than two years later, its removal has now landed with a resounding and understandable thud across much of the wildlife profession.
Many within the profession and beyond are now concerned not only about policy outcomes but also about what the Public Lands Rule repeal signals for the future of conservation in the United States. As wildlife professionals, though, we owe ourselves, our natural resources and the landscapes we steward a clear assessment of what repealing the rule really means. Despite the political rhetoric, durable policy tools remain at our disposal, and understanding them will enable us to better focus on the challenges ahead.
The narrative matters and it can mislead
The Public Lands Rule introduced meaningful changes. It formally placed conservation on equal footing with extractive and recreational uses on public lands, expanded ecosystem resilience as a management standard and introduced new tools, such as restoration and mitigation leasing.
Since the Public Lands Rule repeal, a powerful narrative has taken hold: conservation itself has been “canceled,” “killed,” “eliminated,” “abandoned” and “stripped” as a legitimate consideration in public land management. This interpretation, though, is not exactly accurate. Neither the Public Lands Rule nor its repeal alters the underlying legislation upon which the rules are based: the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA).
The truth is more nuanced. From its enactment in 1976, FLPMA has required the BLM to manage public lands on “the basis of multiple use and sustained yield” and to “prevent unnecessary or undue degradation” of public lands and their various resource values. The quality of scientific, scenic, ecological, environmental and wildlife values are specifically listed within the law as resource values to be managed without permanent impairment. Further, FLPMA specifically mentions that the “harmonious and coordinated management of various resources” does not necessarily mean “the combination of uses that will give the greatest economic return or the greatest unit output.”
These legal mandates remain intact. The Public Lands Rule repeal removes the regulatory framing that elevated conservation as a more explicit “use” under FLPMA’s multiple-use mandate, but it does not remove conservation-related mandates from the text of FLPMA, nor does it bestow preferential treatment to public land uses that produce the greatest revenue.
If we accept the narrative that conservation has been erased, we risk something more dangerous than a policy rollback. We risk increasing polarization of public opinion, moving us further away from the harmony envisioned in FLPMA land management decisions. Perhaps more importantly, we risk doing real damage to the morale of wildlife professionals across agencies, NGOs, academia and private industries who work every day to support conservation on public lands distinct from the political rhetoric.
The real challenges ahead
While the underlying foundation of FLPMA remains intact, the broader and more subjective text of the law does not provide as clear a backing for conservation as the prescriptive guidance of the Public Lands Rule. Combined with the political rhetoric that frames conservation as an illegitimate use of resources on public lands, the wildlife community faces a heightened risk of losing influence in federal land management planning—if we allow that to happen.
The following are ways the repeal creates real challenges for wildlife professionals:
Greater pressure on discretionary decision-making: Without the rule’s explicit elevation of conservation, more weight will fall on local planning teams to ensure ecological and wildlife values are meaningfully integrated into management decisions. Recent federal staff cuts and reorganizations could exacerbate the pressure by limiting local capacity to adequately assess complex environmental impacts, making informed decisions more difficult and harder to defend.
Loss of emerging conservation tools: The absence of restoration and mitigation leasing removes a flexible mechanism that could have accelerated large-scale wildlife habitat work. The rule applied uniform, landscape-level health standards to all public lands, requiring standardized monitoring and data collection. Without these tools, BLM may return to a more fragmented leasing and assessment approach that makes it harder to track ecosystem-wide decline or apply adaptive management.
Potential for increased imbalance: In light of the political rhetoric and without a clear regulatory counterweight to energy development and other extractive resource uses, wildlife professionals may need to work harder to ensure that considerations for wildlife and their habitats are not marginalized during land management planning and decision-making. Regional interpretations of FLPMA may also emerge in the absence of clear federal guidance on conservation in land management planning, resulting in inconsistent standards across the nation and greater risks of litigation.
It’s important to remember, though, that despite these challenges, the Public Lands Rule was still a developing system that had yet to be fully implemented. As a result, wildlife professionals are not starting from a position of sudden institutional loss with the repeal of the Public Lands rule. Rather, we are returning to a framework of conservation on public lands that we have effectively worked within for decades.
Moving forward without losing our way
The repeal of the Public Lands Rule is not a reason for despair, nor is it a time for complacency. The wildlife profession has an opportunity to lead with confidence and professionalism by rejecting narratives that diminish our role or the tools we still possess; by leaning into science, data and field expertise in every planning and permitting process; by strengthening collaboration across different sectors; and by advocating clearly and constructively for conservation outcomes within existing frameworks.
Wildlife conservation on public lands has always depended on more than rules. It depends on the people committed to carrying it out across all sectors. The same individuals working to support conservation under the Public Lands Rule are the same individuals working to support conservation today. As divisive narratives take hold on the national stage, it’s important that those divisions don’t fracture the diverse entities and relationships necessary to support conservation work on the ground. Ultimately, the regulatory structure and boundaries of FPLMA will evolve. Courts will consider novel legal questions, new administrations will alter their rules and Congress will tweak the statute’s text.
Aldo Leopold reminds us:
“We shall never achieve harmony with land, any more than we shall achieve absolute justice or liberty for people. In these higher aspirations, the important thing is not to achieve but to strive.”
Conservation requires constant adaptation and care. Regardless of the challenges before us, our collective responsibility remains the same: to strive toward harmony with the land. Public lands belong to all Americans, and so does the responsibility to steward them wisely. If we are all customers, then we are all stakeholders in the outcome. The task before wildlife professionals is not to win a transient political argument, but to ensure that science, stewardship and conservation continue to have a seat at the table, regardless of which narrative dominates the moment.
The perspectives in this article were shaped by TWS’ Position Statement on the Use of Science in Policy and Management Decisions and Energy Development and Wildlife.
Read the text of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.
