Interior unveils plans to roll back sage grouse protections

Interior officials said the six draft resource management plan amendments — including one that covers both Nevada and a portion of northeastern California — would give states more flexibility to administer conservation efforts to protect the threatened bird without hindering economic development.

“We are committed to being a good neighbor and respect the states’ ability to manage wildlife, while recognizing the tremendous investments of effort into improving greater sage grouse populations over the last decade,” Deputy Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement.

The revised management plans would cancel previous plans to ban mining activity on about 10 million acres of prime bird habitat across the West by designating the land as “sage-grouse focal areas.”

The release of the plans drew criticism from environmentalists and praise from Western governors who opposed the sweeping sage grouse protections enacted in 2015 on 67 million acres of federal land.

Several conservation groups made note of Bernhardt’s previous work as a lobbyist for the oil and gas industry while blasting the plans as a giveaway to companies eager to drill on public land.

“The Trump administration is taking a hard-won compromise and blowing it up, rendering already weak sage grouse protections virtually meaningless,” Randi Spivak, public lands director for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “It’s appalling that they want to remove restrictions on fossil-fuel development while claiming it’ll have no environmental impact.”

Added Jesse Prentice-Dunn, advocacy director for the Center for Western Priorities: “When you put an oil and gas lobbyist in charge of overhauling wildlife protections, this is what you get.”

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke launched the rollback of Obama-era sage grouse protections last year as part of a broader push to, in his words, “better balance conservation strategies and policies with the equally legitimate need of creating jobs for hardworking American families.”

U.S. Sen. Dean Heller and Rep. Mark Amodei, both Republicans from Nevada, praised Wednesday’s action, which Heller said would reverse “the Obama administration’s heavy-handed regulations” and return power to local communities.

Gov. Brian Sandoval, a past critic of the 2015 sage grouse plan, issued a more tempered response. He said he was looking forward to reviewing the revised conservation blueprint and collaborating with federal regulators.

“I trust that the Department of the Interior will continue to engage with and value the opinions of the impacted Western governors,” Sandoval said. “I am confident we can find success by working together.”

Millions of sage grouse once roamed the brushland from California and Oregon to the Dakotas, but development, livestock grazing and wildfires fueled by invasive grasses has reduced the bird’s population to fewer than 500,000 across 11 Western states.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to add the sage grouse to the Endangered Species List in 2015 based in large part on recently enacted protections and conservation agreements at the state and federal level.

Some experts have warned that weakening those protections could lead to the listing of the bird.

Contact Henry Brean at hbrean@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0350. Follow @RefriedBrean on Twitter.