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For fast launch March 14, 2024
Media contacts:
Greta Anderson, Western Watersheds Venture, (520) 623-1878; [email protected]
Randi Spivak, Heart for Organic Range, (310) 779-4894, [email protected]
Steve Holmer, American Hen Conservancy, (202) 751-1412, [email protected]
Sarah Stellberg, Advocates for the West, (208) 342-7024 x209, [email protected]
CONSERVATION GROUPS GIVE A ‘THUMBS DOWN’ TO BIDEN ADMINISTRATION’S PROPOSED SAGE GROUSE PLAN
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Biden administration launched a draft modification at present for 77 land use plans throughout the Western United States meant to guard the imperiled higher sage grouse, an umbrella species whose survival is intricately linked to the well being of the huge sagebrush sea ecosystem. Conservation teams say the Bureau of Land Administration’s most popular different falls woefully quick of what’s wanted to stem the fowl’s downward inhabitants spiral. The plans have an effect on 69 million acres managed by the Bureau throughout 10 states.
“Stronger plans are wanted to offer the grouse with a greater probability of survival,” stated Steve Holmer of American Hen Conservancy. “Areas of Crucial Environmental Concern would provide hope that some habitat can be protected, however the popular different doesn’t designate them, and can do little to enhance restoration of the sage grouse, or to make a significant contribution to combating local weather change.”
The Bureau’s most popular different fails to designate Areas of Crucial Environmental Concern (ACECs), regardless of the popularity that this administration class would afford stronger conservation overlays for the species. Different alternate options proposed about 11 million acres of ACEC, however it is a fraction of the realm that conservation teams proposed in 2022.
“The habitat and the populations have been shrinking, the threats have been mounting, and the states and extractive industries have been whittling away at what had been already insufficient protections since 2015,” stated Greta Anderson, deputy director of Western Watersheds Venture. “We wanted sturdy management from Biden’s Bureau of Land Administration to present the sage grouse what the science says they want, throughout the broadest panorama attainable. The popular different right here shouldn’t be that.”
“The BLM’s most popular plan will fail these iconic birds as soon as once more and preserve them on an extinction trajectory,” stated Randi Spivak, public lands coverage director on the Heart for Organic Range. “This surprising plan enshrines the identical failed administration strategy because the prior plans. The BLM is aware of what it ought to do to save lots of these struggling birds but this does just about nothing to strengthen protections, guaranteeing the grouse will proceed their downward spiral.
“Regrettably, the present plans haven’t been sufficient to get well higher sage-grouse,” stated Sarah Stellberg, workers legal professional at Advocates for the West, who represented conservation teams in authorized challenges to the Obama and Trump-era sage-grouse plans. “Sage-grouse merely can not maintain the present tempo and scale of habitat loss. To have any probability of saving this fowl, we want stronger protections, not backsliding.”
Background
Higher sage grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) as soon as occupied a whole bunch of tens of millions of acres throughout the West, however their populations have plummeted as livestock grazing, oil and fuel and different improvement, mining, roads, powerlines and non-native species have unfold all through their habitat. The U.S. Geological Survey discovered that the inhabitants declined almost 80% between 1968 and 2023.
Reasonably than shield the fowl beneath the Endangered Species Act, in 2015 the Obama administration developed land-use plans that had been supposed to offer a regulatory framework for conserving the species’ habitat. The Trump administration weakened these plans to permit for extra disturbance and industrial exercise, however these amendments had been blocked by a federal courtroom, placing the 2015 plans again into impact.
The Biden administration acknowledged that the continued declines of sage grouse required extra protecting measures, and in January 2023 started the method to revise the 2015 plans.
Defending the higher sage grouse and its habitat advantages a whole bunch of different species that rely on the Sagebrush Sea ecosystem. This includes pygmy rabbits, pronghorn, elk, mule deer, golden eagles, native trout, and migratory and resident birds.
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