For those of you scoring at home, you may have noticed the Biden administration’s lackluster performance in the arena of public lands and wildlife conservation. Using baseball as a metaphor, the Biden team had a few brilliant moments in an otherwise forgettable four years that, in its confused approach, reminds us of Abbott and Costello’s famous 1945 “Who’s on first” routine.
Under Biden’s leadership, public lands management was largely business as usual, with big business rather than the public interest getting the major policy focus. Lines were drawn on the map, but few bold initiatives were attempted. Big, new national monuments were designated – a major achievement – and Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments were restored to their original glory. Dams came down on the Klamath River, largely the result of congressional action, but the dams on the Columbia River system and blocking the Colorado River at Glen Canyon still stand. Sage grouse populations continued to decline, and the sagebrush sea was victimized once again by a bungled federal planning process. The blight of livestock overgrazing continued under Biden just as under Trump I, and ranchers paid a fee of $1.35 per cow-calf pair per month, the lowest price allowed by law. The administration’s conflicted approach to fossil fuels mirrored its rhetoric, at times exalting the need to transition away from fossil fuels, other times boasting about record oil production. Initially slamming the breaks on oil and gas leasing, Biden relaxed this policy, and in March 2024 his administration bragged that the “United States produces more crude oil than any country, ever.” The Biden administration gave lip service to environmental ethics, and took a nuanced approach to permitting the destruction of lands and wildlife. That distinction made little difference on the ground. Overall, the Biden team was as ineffective at protecting the environment, despite their pro-conservation rhetoric, as the first Trump administration was at ordering its destruction.
Home Run
Restoring Bears Ears and Grand Staircase National Monuments
The original Bears Ears National Monument was designated for 2 million acres of federal protection by President Obama at the request of the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition, to protect a rich trove of cliff dwellings and rock art sites. Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument was designated in 2000 by President Clinton to protect geological wonders, the staircase of progressively older sedimentary strata that form spectacular rims and cliffs, with slot canyons and slickrock landscapes. Both were gutted by the first Trump administration, with more than half the acreage eliminated, but Biden restored every acre to protection. Monument Management Plans rolled out under Biden have been milquetoast, but the restoration of these spectacular Monuments is the signature conservation achievement of the Biden presidency.
Extra Bases
Avi Kwa Ame and Sáttítla National Monuments
These two National Monuments strongly reflect the importance of sacred landscapes to Indigenous peoples – the Yuman-speaking tribes of the Mojave Desert and the Pit River Tribe of what is now northern California. Both monuments protect ecologically rich areas worthy as national treasures.
Withdrawing Colorado’s Thompson Divide from Drilling
Of all the spectacular public lands threatened by the bulldozers and drilling rigs of the oil and gas industry, Colorado’s Thompson Divide was the one that got picked for long-term protection. Across the Crystal River from the Maroon Bells – Snowmass Wilderness, these highlands offer important elk habitat. They got a Secretarial Withdrawal that blocks future oil and gas leasing.
Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary
California’s Central Coast is the homeland of the Chumash Tribe, a seafaring nation inhabiting the coast and offshore islands. This marine sanctuary’s footprint was shrunk to accommodate offshore wind development proposals, and the designation will allow existing offshore oil leases to be drilled, but future leasing will not be allowed.
Base Hits
Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni and Chuckwalla National Monuments
While the first was rushed, and the second was a last-minute call, both of these monument designations were solid conservation successes.
Listing the wolverine under the Endangered Species Act
The Fish and Wildlife Service called this one according to the science, which they seldom do for highly-politicized large carnivores. Wolverines are extremely rare, live in the remotest and least-populated mountain ranges, and seldom tangle with domestic livestock. That made it an easy call to skip the customary political meddling. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service deserves kudos, and we saw no evidence of political tampering.
Swing and a Miss
The Conservation Rule
Conservation professionals were mystified about whether the Conservation Rule was a victory or not. It largely sidestepped the big issues, squandering the opportunity to define ‘unnecessary or undue degradation’ with vague and toothless definitions. Language on Areas of Critical Environmental Concern might be the silver lining here, but the failure to undertake an Environmental Impact Statement for the new rule was a questionable call, and now the whole thing is tied up in court. This curveball was seemingly designed primarily to facilitate industrial development with offsetting mitigation, a scheme that has never worked. The Conservation Rule’s publicity rollout claimed that, for the first time, the rule put conservation on an even footing with commercial uses. But from a legal perspective, Congress had already put conservation on an equal footing in 1976 when its Federal Land Policy and Management Act defined “multiple use” as “recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish, and natural scenic, scientific and historical values; and harmonious and coordinated management of the various resources without permanent impairment.” All it would take to fulfill that promise was to order the Bureau of Land Management to comply with federal law. The Biden administration failed to make it so, instead embarking on a rulemaking that only muddied the waters.
Climate Policy
Biden bet big on utility-scale renewable energy projects on public lands, committing to energy production hundreds of thousands of acres of endangered species habitat, instead of siting distributed renewable production in cities, where the electricity is used and where the wildlife habitats were destroyed generations ago. In contrast to the full-bore effort to fast-track public lands for industrial wind and solar, distributed renewable projects could have put solar panels over parking lots, rooftops, and irrigation canals. These only got a modest push through the Inflation Reduction Act, with $7 billion earmarked, which is a lot of money but far short of the Apollo project it deserved to be. If all the effort to fast-track industrial-scale corporate projects had been redirected into rooftop solar for the taxpayers, the Biden legacy wouldn’t be such a missed opportunity to empower disadvantaged communities with free electricity. The Biden team also had a curious approach to fossil fuels, using land-use plans to close sensitive lands to oil and gas leasing where oil and gas potential is minimal, but leaving open the lands that have the biggest deposits of fossil fuels (and therefore the biggest climate impact). That’s a win for lands and wildlife but an accelerant for the changing climate.
Point Reyes National Seashore
The Biden administration inherited a sellout of the public interest on Point Reyes National Seashore, a Trump proposal that locked in ecologically damaging beef and dairy cattle for the long term. Biden’s team finalized it, instead of sending the Park Service back to the drawing board. Conservation groups weren’t having any, and sued, forcing a settlement that erased their failure.
Wild Horse Policy
The Biden administration had an opportunity to chart a new course on wild horse management on public lands, but didn’t. Instead, they followed the livestock industry’s same old “Path Forward” of eliminating and suppressing wild horse populations for the benefit of sheep and cattle operations, while conveniently overlooking massive rancher impacts on wild horse Herd Management Areas in favor of blaming comparatively scarce wild horses for land health problems.
Left on Base
Ending Oil and Gas Leasing on Public Lands
Early on, the Biden administration announced a bold policy initiative to close public lands to future oil and gas leasing. Keeping fossil fuels in the ground is a perfectly sound policy decision based on the multiple-use legal requirements, because if leasing federal minerals ended today, millions of acres of the most productive federal oil and gas fields would keep pumping on leases that are “held by production” by oil corporations until the minerals run out. But after a series of industry lawsuits yielded mixed results, the Biden administration pulled in its horns and acquiesced to a resumption of new oil and gas leases, albeit at reduced levels.
Unfinished Grazing Regulations
A 2024 analysis of the western federal domain showed that instead of correcting longstanding livestock-driven land health problems, the Bureau of Land Management instead presided over a continued deterioration of land health across the West, with invasions of flammable cheatgrass continuing to take over the once-healthy sagebrush sea. In 2021, the Trump administration handed off a draft plan that included an alternative that could have markedly improved the lax management of cattle and sheep on public lands, but the Biden administration couldn’t muster the courage to finish the job and reform seriously problematic mismanagement of public lands. The Forest Service wasted their time revising their handbook on grazing allotment management under Biden, and we wish they hadn’t. It locked in bureaucratic standard operating procedures and utterly failed to do anything to improve a broken and neglected agency program that blights 74 million acres of national forests and grasslands with excessive numbers of cattle and sheep. Overall, it was status quo for an industry that pollutes streams, grazes off elk and deer forage, and demands the elimination of any native wildlife species that gets in its way.
Cliven Bundy’s Trespassing Cattle
Did the Biden administration hold the Bundy Ranch in contempt of court, forcing the removal of their illegal cattle from Gold Butte National Monument? Nope. They sidestepped the controversy and kept whistling in the dark. Desert tortoises and other desert wildlife continue to suffer as a result. While Biden’s Department of Justice got jailtime for some January 6thinsurrectionists, the Bundy Ranch remains in contempt of court for the 2014 removal orders, their livestock pillaging the desert tortoise habitats of Gold Butte National Monument.
Ending Coal Leasing
The coal industry is dying out as more and more states turn to renewables based on the inescapable conclusion that fossil fuel combustion is causing the climate disruption that spawns massive tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, and drought, costing state and local government billions. The Biden administration put in place a policy to end coal leasing on public lands and federal minerals, a wise choice given that the taxpayers bear the brunt of the massive costs from coal combustion. But they did it in the twilight of their administration, after an election that augurs a rapid reversal in policy.
Failing to Kick Hammond Ranches Off Public Lands Once and For All
In 2014, Hammond Ranches Inc. lost their federal grazing leases, after their principals were found guilty of setting fire to public lands in a greedy and pyrrhic effort to increase forage for their cattle. The first Trump administration pardoned the Hammonds, letting them out of prison early and re-issuing their revoked grazing permit in an eleventh-hour surprise move. A legal challenge ensued, forcing the Biden administration to reverse the grazing permit, but they never completed the process of re-allocating the grazing leases, putting the incoming Trump administration to render the final decision.
Male Sage Grouse battling it out in Wyoming’s Red Desert. Photo: Erik Molvar.
Errors
Sage Grouse Plan Amendments
Why the Biden administration even bothered to roll out new plan amendments for the West-wide habitats of the greater sage grouse (and the smaller habitats of the ESA-listed Gunnison sage grouse) is a mystery. They didn’t do a good job, and botched the opportunity to close loopholes and shore up biologically inadequate habitat protections left over from the Obama administration’s 2015 plans. Instead, they split the difference between the Trump gutting of sage grouse protections – which had successfully been blocked by environmentalists’ lawsuits – and the weak Obama plans. Their efforts for the Gunnison sage grouse, as it continues the downward spiral toward extinction, are plan protections even weaker than those established for its more widespread cousin. Instead of rigorous protections to save the sage grouse and help dozens of other declining wildlife species, the public got a gutshot compromise adopted in the name of dubious “durability.”
Willow Drilling Project
There really is no discernible strategy or explanation for the Biden administration’s green light for a Texas oil corporation to drilling and produce a massive oil deposit on Alaska’s Arctic coastal plain. Boneheaded.
West-wide Solar Plan
The administration’s Solar Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement targets millions of acres of prime sage grouse habitat, portions of key migration corridors, pristine habitats for desert tortoises and other endangered species, and key conservation landscapes like Wyoming’s Red Desert for destruction. Unlike Trump’s energy dominance agenda, the Solar PEIS would destroy lands and habitats for renewable energy rather than fossil fuel production. That helps with climate disruption. But from a biodiversity standpoint it is every bit as senseless, and every bit as harmful. It’s just a different favorite sector of the energy industry that gets anointed the destroyer of public lands.
Wolf Conservation
Early in his administration, President Biden appeared on the children’s program Brave Wilderness, seeming to commit his administration to strong conservation for recovering wolf populations. His administration failed utterly to deliver on that promise. Based on the best available science, re-listing wolves in Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming is a no-brainer in the face of bloodthirsty state policies. Unfortunately, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could find no brain, botching the opportunity for a clean conservation success and to put anti-wolf states under federal oversight. Not only did the Biden administration fail to protect wolves in the states that matter most, but they sought to overturn a major conservation victory by appealing the ruling that reversed the Trump administration’s nationwide de-listing of wolves. Under the Biden team, USFWS was more interested in conversation than conservation when it came to wolves, launching a doomed and foolhardy collaborative effort to guide wolf recovery. A kindergartener could tell you that giving trophy hunters and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association a controlling interest in wolf recovery is one of the most monumentally foolish ideas of all time. The collaboration now faces euthanasia, benefitting wolf recovery.
The Final Score
You can see from the paltry successes and numerous failures that the Biden administration had a losing gameplan when it came to land and wildlife conservation. Its climate policy, more of a focus for the administration, similarly suffered from muddled efforts and questionable resolve.
Conservation-minded voters found little to cheer for under the Biden administration, and opponents of conservation – Big Oil, the livestock lobby, and coal-fired utility corporations – must be celebrating in their board rooms at the Biden administration’s repeated failure to step up to the plate. A lack of clear-eyed leadership, too much triangulation and pandering to anti-conservation interests, and collaborating with opponents of conservation instead of delivering for conservation allies prevented a clear-eyed and effective conservation approach. There were some good people appointed to positions of responsibility, and they were frustrated. There were also some appointments of ineffectual leaders that made little sense. Though a lost opportunity, it does provide useful object lessons for future administrations on the futility of caving in to chase the mirage of durability. The Biden administration let far too many high, hanging curveballs sail past without a swing.
Conservation has sworn enemies, and they aren’t shy about swinging for the fences. Trump has already bragged about “unleashing” the oil industry – maybe the one American industry that needs to be kept on the tightest leash – in the service of “energy dominance.” For the environment, Biden presided over a losing season, leaving it up to the nonprofit environmental groups to step up to the plate.
