Help Improve the BLM’s Big Game Plan!
Bureau of Land Management is considering alternatives to minimize and mitigate impacts to wildlife habitat, but more needs to be done to achieve the plan’s stated purpose.
Here's how YOU can help:
Join us in person or Zoom into the public meeting in Durango this December 7th to make your voice heard!
WHERE: Thursday, December 7th at the Durango Public Library from 5 – 7 pm.
Read more about the plan here.
Sample Comments:
- BLM’s draft Big Game RMPA is an opportunity to protect critical wildlife habitat, but doesn’t go far enough
- The draft RMPA only considers oil and gas impacts, while ignoring impacts from other industrial development, residential development, and recreation which are just as harmful to big game if not more so than oil and gas
- The draft focuses on mitigation by applying surface disturbance thresholds and allowing industry to compensate for impacts to herds with projects on private land. BLM should instead prioritize AVOIDANCE of impacts, then minimize unavoidable impacts to the greatest extent possible, before focusing on mitigation
- The draft includes many waivers, exemptions, and modifications to protections for big game habitat that would undermine the goals of the RMPA. These exemptions could even allow oil ad gas development near wildlife crossings, where the state has invested millions of dollars to protect both habitat connectivity and Colorado’s residents
- The BLM’s preferred alternative only applies to its surface estate, ignoring its responsibility to protect big game habitat overlying millions of acres of BLM mineral estate
- The BLM’s preferred alternative would still allow new oil and gas leasing in high priority habitat. Only alternative D would close some lands to new leasing, while still respecting valid existing rights
- The BLM should revise its draft to close oil and gas leasing on low and moderate potential lands in big game habitat, coordinate closely with CPW to identify and protect high priority habitat, eliminate waivers, exemptions, and modifications that favor industry over wildlife, and broaden the scope of its plan to avoid and minimize disturbance of all types on both BLM surface and mineral estates
Questions?
Contact Public Lands Program Manager John Rader at john@sanjuancitizens.org.
