USA: BLM Removes Sage Grouse Protections in West

Trump Administration Slashes Sage Grouse Protections (Center for Biological Diversity)

The Trump administration released final land-management plans today that wipe out critical protections for imperiled greater sage grouse in seven western states. The new plans ― covering millions of acres of public land in Colorado, northeastern California, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming ― allow enormous new loopholes for fossil-fuel development that conservation groups say will doom the bird to extinction.

The new Bureau of Land Management (BLM) plans unravel greater sage-grouse protections approved in 2015 by western states and federal officials. That Obama-era agreement was intended to reverse the bird’s decline and prevent the need to list it as endangered. Among other things, the new plans will allow the BLM to lease hundreds of thousands of acres of high-priority sage-grouse habitat for oil and gas drilling. They also eliminate science-based habitat standards for grazing in sage-grouse habitat and make it easier for BLM officials to waive protective buffers around sage-grouse mating and nesting areas, called leks.

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