Viewpoint: BLM burning projects sound like a great idea
Tim Seaman
Healthy ecosystems are important to all Montanans. Unfortunately, a suite of projects which would meaningfully restore BLM lands in southwest Montana is now stalled due to a lawsuit by Alliance for the Wild Rockies.
Montana’s landscapes show evidence of human impact everywhere: invasive weeds, declining aspen woodlands, degraded streams, and conifer encroachment into natural grasslands due to a dozen decades of fire exclusion. The BLM’s Dillon Programmatic Vegetation Management Project seeks to restore healthy ecosystems through a variety of commonplace activities such as prescribed burning and cutting trees by hand or machine.
The lawsuit alleges violations of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a keystone environmental law requiring the review of federal projects. While NEPA provides a framework for federal project planning, it too often impedes important projects like this one. NEPA mandates a bureaucratic process where the environmental effects of proposed projects are analyzed and documented. An interdisciplinary team of resource specialists—botanists, soil scientists, foresters, wildlife biologists, and more—spend more than a year working together to plan and develop projects in a way that minimizes negative impacts.
The BLM’s project seeks to reduce the bureaucratic burden by using an approach called ‘conditions-based’ planning. Conditions-based projects allow more flexibility to implement the activity that makes the most sense for each site. This reduces the lengthy planning process, meaning more work can be accomplished on the ground while still analyzing the environmental effects of the proposal.
Litigants say that the NEPA process for this project didn’t adequately document all potential impacts to certain species. The reality is that dozens and dozens of pages of analysis were prepared by the BLM’s team of specialists, and reviewed by the Fish & Wildlife Service.
Their documentation includes nineteen pages of resource protection measures that minimize environmental impacts and ensure compliance with laws and regulations. The BLM’s specialists are experts in their fields, are passionate about the landscapes where they work, and want to see what’s best for the ecosystem and the community. They deserve our trust to manage the land effectively.
Alliance for the Wild Rockies says they’re fighting to save the environment, but vital ecological restoration work comes to a halt during their litigation. As people who care about our natural world, we should value on-the-ground progress instead of legal hair-splitting.