Another day, another public lands giveaway by the Bureau of Land Management. Guardians and allies filed extensive comments yesterday highlighting flaws in the BLM’s latest proposal to auction off our public lands in Montana to the oil and gas industry this June. More than 100,000 acres in southeastern Montana are on the chopping block, including the state’s iconic Tongue River Valley.
The BLM is stepping up the pace of federal public lands giveaways; in 2017, it auctioned off more than a million acres of public lands in six Western states for fracking, a number set to be eclipsed before the first half of 2018 is out. The agency is also urging state offices to forgo public comment periods on lease sales and cut the number of days the public has to protest these sales, definitively cutting the “public” out of our public lands.
Unless the BLM makes drastic changes to the proposal, Guardians plans to take further legal action this spring.
Read the press release.
