Policy Corner: The Public Lands Rule: The Significance of Conservation

Bryan Pride • June 5, 2025

Since April 2024, America's public lands had something they'd never had before: a rule that treated conservation as equal to all other land uses. The Public Lands Rule, introduced by the Biden Administration, formally recognized conservation as a legitimate practice of multiple use, putting conservation on equal footing with recreation, grazing, and resource extraction. Built on decades of management experience and guided by science, data, and Indigenous knowledge, it gives land managers tools to maintain healthy ecosystems while supporting all the diverse ways we depend on public lands. It acknowledges a simple truth: conservation must be valued equally to all other land uses. 


Now there is growing pressure to rescind it.


Why This Matters


The environment around us is free-flowing, it's not confined to state borders or county lines. When mining operations contaminate watersheds in Northern California, it impacts the local businesses who depend on healthy rivers downstream, the agricultural communities that rely on clean water, and the families who've been camping along those waterways for generations. The Public Lands Rule recognized this interconnected reality and gave land managers agency to address problems before they spread across California's diverse landscapes, protecting the long-term viability of grazing allotments, recreation areas, and rural livelihoods that all depend on healthy public lands.


This interconnected reality is exactly why the Public Lands Rule matters. The Rule is designed to ensure that the places we depend on, whether for weekend camping trips, or cattle grazing, stay healthy enough to support these uses long-term. When an area becomes overgrazed and doesn't recover, access to those grazing allotments is permanently lost, reducing ranchers' ability to maintain their livelihoods and harming local food production. Poor use or overuse of our public lands creates ripples of negative impact that hurt all communities. 


The Rule's main objective is simple but revolutionary: make sure our public lands stay productive for everyone who depends on them, rather than degrade them. The Rule created practical tools that built in accountability and prioritized future generations' access to healthy public lands. 


Restoration Leases: 10-year agreements allowing a variety of entities such as, conservation groups, tribes, and nonprofits to restore damaged landscapes—fires restoration, restoring wildlife habitats and cleaning up abandoned mining sites that currently scar some of our most beautiful public lands.


Mitigation Leases: A tool that allows land users or other entities to offset impacts from their activities over specified time periods, creating partnerships between different land users and conservation groups to address environmental impacts on public lands. 


Strengthened Protection for Critical Areas: Clearer guidelines for protecting Areas of Critical Environmental Concern—the most special and fragile places that often provide the best wildlife viewing, the cleanest water sources, the most pristine camping experiences and the richest biodiversity.


The False Dichotomy: Multiple Use vs. Conservation 


The main argument being used to encourage the rollback of the Public Lands Rule is "multiple use", the legal principle requiring Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands to serve many different purposes. The current Administration claims the Public Lands Rule hinders multiple uses of public lands. Why? The Rule calls for restoring degraded areas and making science based decisions. Contrary to their actual meaning, the current Administration interprets "restoring" and "science based decisions" as "locking up land". Land locking, where access gets completely cut off, is a real concern in some areas—it prevents both recreation and grazing. However, land locking is not what the Public Lands Rule promotes. In reality, it is promoting land healing. 


Take grazing for example. The Rule empowers BLM to use restoration leases in conjunction with existing grazing permittees to restore degraded rangeland. Monitoring who is grazing where and the number of permits issued for specific areas is a means to ensure sustainable grazing and prevent overuse. Many ranchers and land managers supported the Rule because they understand that healthy land is productive land. Overgrazing and environmental damage hurt their livelihoods too. 


The same principle applies to fire recovery. When public lands are damaged by sweeping wildfires, there is a need for active restoration: replanting native vegetation, stabilizing soils, removing hazardous debris. Restoration has to take place before safe recreation, grazing and other uses can resume. At times, restoration requires temporarily limiting access to burned areas as they recover. The goal is to allow for our lands to recover and heal before we start depending on them again with our multiple uses. Land restoration is not just limited to grazing or extraction; it is essential for recovering from wildfires. 


Whether it's grazing, recreation, or extraction, the Public Lands Rule isn't about stopping these uses, it's about understanding that healthy ecosystems are prerequisites for multiple use, not obstacles to it. You can't have sustainable grazing on degraded rangeland, quality recreation in fire damaged landscapes, or responsible extraction without considering long-term impacts


We Are Public Stewards


The Public Lands Rule represents a historic shift in how we value conservation, its potential rollback is a setback. But the vision it represents, conservation as a form of legitimate multiple use, remains essential and is not gone. As stewards of these 245 million acres, we have the power to practice conservation in our own actions and advocacy. Every time we practice Leave No Trace, support local businesses that operate responsibly on public lands, and make our voices heard in land management decisions, we're building the foundation for balanced stewardship that benefits everyone. 


Our public lands belong to all of us, which means we each have the power, and responsibility, to be good stewards of the lands we love. 


-Bryan Pride (bpride@tuleyome.org)

Certified California Naturalist

Policy Director

RECENT ARTICLES

Beavers, otters, and more – new Conaway Ranch game camera footage!

By Geoff Benn • June 4, 2026
A beaver at Conaway Ranch We’ve got new footage from our game cameras at Conaway Ranch! This camera site was chosen by 4 th graders from Dingle Elementary during a recent field trip to Conaway. The camera is near the otter slide we’ve previously filmed, but is a few feet away from the entrance to the slide, allowing us to film the animals as they approach. We saw beaver, otter, a fox, a raccoon, and more! Click here to watch the video . Tuleyome works with Conaway Preservation Group to offer educational programs at Conaway Ranch, including programs for K-12 groups and the general public. If you have any questions about the game camera footage or our programs at Conaway, please reach out to Education Associate Geoff Benn at gbenn@tuleyome.org.

Policy Corner: It’s Time to Fight for Our Public Lands

June 4, 2026
The current administration has released its proposed budget for the 2027 fiscal year. It proposes drastic cuts to our public land management agencies. The proposed budget would significantly reduce funding for the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), including a 34% cut to its total budget, a 27% staff cut, a 76% cut to the National Conservation Lands, which encompass 38 million acres of protected public lands, a 61% cut to recreation management (including campsites and trails), and total elimination of funding for cultural resources and wilderness management. It also would shift priorities towards extractive uses of public lands instead of conservation and clean energy. The administration’s budget would also drastically cut funding to the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), eliminate several offices, state and federal research stations (six in California) and transfer all fire fighting to BLM. Notably, in the face of all these cuts, the budget would increase funding for extractive industries; funding for timber sales would increase 450%. The reductions and policy changes would impair these agencies’ abilities to protect public lands, cultural resources, fresh water sources, and wildlife, while also impairing access to them and recreation on them. The President’s budget is now in Congress, where committees in both the Senate and the House of Representatives are amending and voting on the bills in preparation for full House and Senate votes. Now is the time to take action for our public lands and the environment by urging Congress to reject the proposed budget and maintain funding for BLM, USFS, and programs that protect and steward our public lands. Let your representatives know that you oppose the cuts to BLM and USFS and the rollbacks to our public land protections. And let them know why these special places are important to them. You can voice your opinions to Congress in multiple ways. You can: Call their offices Send a letter to Congress - we’ve pulled together a template for you to use, but don’t forget to let them know why public lands are important to you – download sample letter here Contact them on social media Meet with a representative in their District offices. Don’t know how to reach them, go to Congress.gov and find their phone numbers, addresses, district offices, websites and so much more if you’re interested. Now is the time to speak up for our public lands! Mary Lamborn (Communications Intern) and Sandra Schubert (Executive Director)

Monumental Questions - Another Monumental Vegetable?

By Kristie Ehrhardt • June 4, 2026
You betcha! Wild carrot, also known as Queen Anne’s Lace, is a common sight within the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument region. With its straight and sturdy stalk, bright green, frilly leaves and white, flat-topped flower clusters, it is identifiable even from the limited viewing scope of a traveling car. Queen Anne’s Lace ( Daucus carota ) belongs to the Apiaceae (carrot) family. All members of this family display flower clusters arranged in an upside-down umbrella shape called an umbel. It is native to Europe and is the plant that tasty cultivated carrots originated from. It was brought to North America for its medicinal purposes and has since naturalized across the continent in disturbed and natural areas in mountains, valleys and coastal areas. It can be so prolific that it outcompetes native plants and can also be mildly toxic to livestock. Queen Anne’s Lace is an herbaceous biennial (it doesn’t flower until its second year and then dies) that can reach up to four feet tall in optimum conditions. The stem of the plant is bright green, straight and sturdy and is covered in short, coarse hairs which is a very helpful identifier. I recently learned a clever and helpful quip that I will never forget: Queen Anne has hairy legs (referring to the hair along the stems of the plant)! The tiny, white flowers all originate from the same point and splay out in an airy, flat topped cluster (umbel). Another identifying feature is that oftentimes (but not always) the flower umbels often have a single dark purple flower in the center of the cluster. This purple flower is not always present but when it is it can be used to positively identify the plant as Queen Anne’s lace. The leaves are finely divided which gives them a lacy appearance and look almost identical to our cultivated carrot plants. Although wild carrots are edible, the whitish tap root isn’t as robust or flavorful as the cultivated carrots we are used to. Warning! There are plants such as poison hemlock that are incredibly similar looking so eating things in nature is never advised unless you can absolutely identify them! Poison hemlock has basically the same growth pattern as wild carrot however the stem of poison hemlock lacks the tiny hairs and mature plants have very definite purple splotches up and down the stems. All parts of poison hemlock are toxic but it is particularly potent in the seeds and roots. Poison hemlock is notoriously known as the poison that killed the Greek philosopher Socrates. Edible cousins of wild carrot include plants such as caraway, celery, parsley and parsnips. Although the root of the wild carrot plant is edible, contact with the sap may produce an allergic reaction in some individuals that are sensitive to it. Native pollinators such as butterflies and bees appreciate the abundance of flowers for their nectar. Wild carrot is currently blooming in all its glory so keep an eye out for it on your next trip to our favorite monument!