USA: BLM Removes Sage Grouse Protections in West

Trump Administration Slashes Sage Grouse Protections (Center for Biological Diversity)

The Trump administration released final land-management plans today that wipe out critical protections for imperiled greater sage grouse in seven western states. The new plans ? covering millions of acres of public land in Colorado, northeastern California, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming ? allow enormous new loopholes for fossil-fuel development that conservation groups say will doom the bird to extinction.

The new Bureau of Land Management (BLM) plans unravel greater sage-grouse protections approved in 2015 by western states and federal officials. That Obama-era agreement was intended to reverse the bird�s decline and prevent the need to list it as endangered. Among other things, the new plans will allow the BLM to lease hundreds of thousands of acres of high-priority sage-grouse habitat for oil and gas drilling. They also eliminate science-based habitat standards for grazing in sage-grouse habitat and make it easier for BLM officials to waive protective buffers around sage-grouse mating and nesting areas, called leks.

Read More.........