Federal Land Policy and Management Act Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This Federal Land Policy and Management Act Essay example is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic, please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

After the bureau of Land Management (BLM) began formal planning for public lands under its charge in 1969, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976 was passed due to congressional dissatisfaction with BLM land and resource management. According to the BLM, “FLPMA is called the BLM Organic Act because it consolidated and articulated BLM’s management responsibilities.” The FLPMA is a BLM-specific law. The statute reduces agency flexibility, increases agency accountability to itself and Congress, and dictates an “intensive, but imprecise planning process” that requires “vast bureaucratic resources and produce[s] mountains of paperwork.”

Under FLPMA, decisionmakers at the BLM are required to consider the interests of all public land users before they determine how lands will be managed. The statute was ultimately designed to address natural scarcity of both renewable and nonrenewable resources (grazing, timber, minerals, recreation, wilderness, fish and wildlife, watershed, and so on).

Section 202 of FLPMA broadly guides land use planning and does not detail the steps by which BLM should generate and revise land use plans. Some of the more important management requirements of FLPMA for the BLM to observe principles of multiple use and sustained yield; use a systematic interdisciplinary approach (physical, biological, economic, cultural); give priority to the designation of areas of critical environmental concern; consider the relative scarcity of the values and alternatives for realizing those values; weigh longversus shortterm benefits; comply with pollution control laws; and coordinate with other federal, state, tribal, and local government entities.

Management of BLM Lands

As the largest land management agency in the United States, the BLM is responsible for 175 million acres (70 million hectares) in the lower 48 states. The FLPMA is in essence a guiding statute for the management of those lands. The FLPMA also mandated that the agency perform a roadless area review for the selection of Wilderness Study Areas, study the areas, “and make Wilderness recommendations to Congress by 1991.” After an incomplete review of only 25 million acres (10 million hectares), the BLM proposed 328 wilderness units totaling 9.7 million acres.

The FLPMA also requires that the BLM highlight the designation and protection of areas of critical environmental concern (ACEC). An ACEC includes lands where special management attention is required to prevent irreparable damage to important scenic values, fish and wildlife resources or other natural systems or processes. By the year 2000, the BLM had designated about 13 million acres of ACECs, with 5.9 million acres located in Alaska. Many of these ACECs are sensitive riparian zones around rivers or are important wildlife areas like the Big Morongo Canyon in California, which is a wildlife corridor, lambing area, and watering area for desert bighorn sheep.

The FLPMA’s guidance of BLM’s facilitation and management of public-lands livestock grazing is a very contentious issue between the BLM and conservationists, as many environmental advocates believe the BLM is understaffed and underfunded, leading to detrimental harm to the range resource. The FLPMA requires the agency to set grazing fees, analyze the value of grazing, grant 10-year grazing permits, and establish grazing advisory boards.

One of the more prominent outcomes of FLPMA was the creation of the California Desert Conservation Area (CDCA). The CDCA is a 25-million-acre southeastern California desert that has been heavily impacted by motorized recreation, mining, livestock grazing, utility corridors, illegal roads, and invasive species. The FLPMA recognized the CDCA as a highly vulnerable desert environment with unique ecosystems that are not only rare, but “extremely fragile, easily scarred, and slowly healed.”

The BLM’s management of this vast desert area has been marked by difficulties and public controversies since its inception. Multiple stakeholders interested in both the resource use and/or preservation of the CDCA have often clashed with each other and the BLM in the federal courts. In one such case in 2000, pressure and lawsuits from the Center for Biological Diversity resulted in the removal or restriction of cows and sheep on habitat for the desert tortoise, southwestern willow flycatcher, and Least Bell’s vireo. These settlements also closed 550,000 acres of the CDCA to off-road vehicles to protect the Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard, Pierson’s milk-vetch, desert tortoise, and other imperiled species. Included were 49,310 acres of the Algodones Dunes.

Bibliography:

George Coggins, Charles Wilkinson, and John Leshy, Federal Public Land and Resources Law (Foundation Press, 1993);
Dave Foreman and Howie Wolke, The Big Outside (Harmony, 1992);
National Research Council, Committee on Riparian Zone Functioning and Strategies for Management, Water Science and Technology Board, Riparian Areas: Functions and Strategies for Management (National Academy Press, 2002).