With Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning in town this week, we think now is an apt time to reflect on the history of this public lands agency and what its future in the West should look like.

Stone-Manning is in town to address The Public Lands Foundation at its annual meeting, which is being held in Grand Junction this week. The Public Lands Foundation is made up of former and current BLM employees and other members of the public and it had been critical of moving the agency’s national headquarters here.

We cheered that decision when it was made by the Trump administration, which was later reversed by the Biden administration, instead establishing a western headquarters in Grand Junction. We were encouraged by the plans laid out by the BLM in a recent email and since then, even more jobs have been announced for the new western headquarters.

This is an extraordinary opportunity for Grand Junction and western communities to have our voices heard by the BLM, which manages the largest amount of federal land of any agency. But, how should it manage that land?

If you look at BLM’s history, its land management has evolved over time. It originally formed in the 1940s through a consolidation of the General Land Office and U.S. Grazing Service. The former was used for the disposal of federal land and the latter managed grazing leases on federal land.

The mission changed in 1976 with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. The act changed the BLM mission with a policy of retaining public lands and managing them for “multiple uses and sustained yield through land-use planning.”

We hear a lot about multi-use land management and we strongly support that philosophy. We should be able to share the use of the land between the energy industry, ranchers grazing cattle and recreational uses. This model has been extraordinarily successful.

Still, we hear less about the second prong of the BLM mission – the sustained yield. A sustained yield, to us, means a landscape that can support all these uses in a sustainable way. Is that what we see today? We don’t think so.

The West is undergoing historic drought and wildfire that is leaving the landscape degraded. We think the BLM, through its sustained yield mission, has a part to play in helping conserve the land in the West.

This doesn’t mean excluding oil and gas development or chasing UTV users off the trails. The BLM has a number of tools in its tool belt that can both protect the land it manages and provide access for the multiple users it manges for. It doesn’t have to be a one-size-fits-all approach.

This is why having a presence here in the West is so important. The BLM needs to hear from the people who live here and to have leadership living here as well.

We live here for a reason and for many of us, that’s because of the landscapes found here, which are often managed by the BLM. We’d like those landscapes protected, while listening to the perspectives and concerns of all the user groups represented in our community and across the West.

Grand Junction Daily Sentinel Editorial Board