An oil well pump jack, one of hundreds operating in northeastern Utah on public lands overseen by the Bureau of Land Management. Jonathan D. Mallory / BLM Utah
This story was originally published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Since his January inauguration, Donald Trump has unleashed a bonfire of deregulatory concessions and promises to privatize natural resources for critical minerals mining, energy development, logging, and suburban sprawl. Federal lands, natural resources, and the mineral estate are being primed for development—or for sale.
The early moves of the Trump administration have evoked the specter of James G. Watt, the late Secretary of the Interior under Ronald Reagan, and a revival of that era’s Wise Use movement—an earlier push to dismantle environmental protections and make public resources available to private industries. With the assistance of current Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), agency budgets, experience, and expertise have been eliminated. When the dust clears, the Trumpian vision of energy dominance will have drastically reshaped the natural resource landscapes and ecosystems of federal lands and waters.
The twin ideas that the United States’ natural resource abundance in federal lands and minerals needs to be unleashed and that government gets in the way of industry and should be eliminated have a long history. In the 1970s the Bureau of Land Management began to implement the Wilderness Act and modify grazing laws under the Federal Lands Policy Management Act. These early efforts to bring conservation into public lands management angered ranchers, loggers, miners, and local officials in the American West. The resulting movement, known as the Sagebrush Rebellion, fought for more local control and less regulation from Washington.
The rebellion’s legacy continues to cast a long shadow over today’s political economy of public land use. Its resurgence under the banner of natural resource dominance reopens long-standing battles over the control and exploitation of natural resources offshore and across 640 million acres of federal lands.
Others have pointed out that Trump’s approach to public lands and natural resources closely hews to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint to dismantle government. But it also resembles the 1988 Wise Use Agenda—a neo-environmental manifesto that echoed many of the same ideas Watt championed during the Reagan administration earlier that decade.
Written by Watt biographer Ron Arnold and presented to President George H.W. Bush in 1988, the Wise Use Agenda aimed to make public and federal lands more accessible to logging, mining, and oil and gas interests while weakening environmental protections such as the Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, and Clean Water Act. The agenda echoed claims from the broader Wise Use Movement that were blatantly anti-environmental and viewed the natural world as a resource to be dominated. They proposed the “creation of a national mining system” and suggested amending the 1872 Mining Law to open wilderness areas and national parks to “mineral and energy production under wise use technologies,” all in the name of bolstering domestic economies and national security. Sound familiar?
The Wise Use Agenda also proposed selling off vast tracts of timber lands, offering extensive offshore energy leases, and using public lands for housing, and even entertained the idea of selling National Parks to private companies. They advocated giving legal standing to industries to sue environmental groups to recoup the economic costs of regulations, an idea reminiscent of the recent court ruling against Dakota Access Pipeline protesters.
The Trump administration’s approach to timber harvesting is one example of how its policy reflects Wise Use ideas. A March executive order—Immediate Expansion of American Timber Production—prompted Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to write a memo to the US Forest Service directing it to effectively declare 112 million acres or 59 percent of all national forest lands “to be in an emergency situation,” limiting public comment and environmental review of timber harvesting.
A directive was also issued to increase timber production by 25 percent across the agency. This will affect areas in the Pacific Northwest currently managed under the Northwest Forest Plan, as well as New England and the Great Lakes regions. Idaho has already told state agencies to prepare for more federal logging. This effort to rapidly increase timber extraction echoes the Wise Use Plan, which specifically called for opening up extensive areas of the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, another area poised to increase logging under the Trump administration.
On June 23, Secretary Rollins announced the Forest Service would rescind the “roadless rule”—a policy which has protected 59 million acres of forests in the western US and Alaska by prohibiting new road construction.
Many of these vintage Wise Use goals are precisely what the aptly named new National Energy Dominance Council, chaired by Secretary of the Interior Burgum, aim to do. In addition to undermining environmental review, the Dominance Council aims to boost fossil fuel exports and open more land up to critical minerals production.
The Council was established through one of the first Executive Orders signed in January by President Trump—Unleashing American Energy. That order, along with a dozen others, strips regulations on natural resource development and makes more federal land available for extraction, all under the guise of national security threats and shifting global resource demands stemming from the ongoing trade war with China and export controls on critical minerals.
In March, President Trump signed another Executive Order—Immediate Measures to Increase American Mineral Production—invoking existing laws to accelerate domestic mineral production. The next month, he followed up with an executive order aimed at accelerating a permitting process for deep-sea mining in both domestic and international waters.
In 1981, Interior Secretary Watt wrote a letter to Secretary of State Alexander Haig about a proposed United Nation’s framework—the Law of the Sea Treaty—to govern mining in international waters.
Formally known as United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and managed by the International Seabed Authority, the Law of the Sea is a global agreement on ocean ecosystem conservation and manages the development of resources, including who gets to mine where and how much. The Law of the Sea is based on the idea that the ocean’s deep water natural resources are the common heritage of humankind.
Watt wrote Haig to say he disagreed with the delegation’s position to sign the treaty, arguing that the United States would be disadvantaged without control over access to deep-sea mining sites. In the letter, Watt describes how “access to strategic and critical minerals” was one of President Reagan’s top initiatives and ceding to an international authority was a mistake. He opposed the treaty’s limits on how much could be mined, and rejected the notion that developed countries share technology with developing ones, a core concept in the treaty’s commitment to sharing common resources. Watt opposed anything that restricted mining, and the United States never signed the 1982 Treaty.
Back at Interior, Watt also abolished the Conservation Service of the US Geologic Survey and created the Minerals Management Agency (later the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management) to “streamline management” of resources in federal waters, pointing to the hundreds of millions of dollars at stake for deep sea mining companies.
Meanwhile at NOAA, pro-business and anti-regulatory Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige Jr. proposed interim rules for deep-sea mineral exploration in international waters. While NOAA did offer a few exploration permits back then, since the treaty’s passage the US has respected the Law of the Sea and has not issued permits since 1984, even though it is not a signatory.
Forty years later, the Trump administration is enacting Watts’ ambitions by executive order—Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources. The order authorizes federal approval to override considerations from the International Seabed Authority and permit deep sea mining exploration. Ocean experts have decried the move, calling it a gambit for “fool’s gold” and “the most expensive cobalt and nickel” on the planet and, in flaunting international agreements, comparable to piracy. Nevertheless, there remains considerable support for the idea, given the demand for metals for renewable energy and electrification.
The rebuke of the Law of the Sea Treaty reflects a disregard for its scientifically grounded approach and environmental safeguards. The deep sea is one of the last frontiers on Earth where scientists regularly discover new species. Some of these deep-sea oddities include dumbo octopus, sea cucumbers, gummy squirrels, sponges, and other understudied creatures of the low oxygen zone where it is too dark for photosynthesis. And yet these areas are precisely those being targeted for mining, before scientists even understand what’s down there.
The Canadian Metals Corp is seeking permits from the Trump administration to harvest polymetallic nodules in the Clarion Clipperton Zone a few hundred miles off the southeast coast of Hawai’i. The zone is a vast plain covered in small lumps of metal. Studies have found these deep sea metals may be a source of dark oxygen produced through seawater electrolysis, providing essential activities to sustain life in the deep ocean. Harvesting these nodules could prove to be an environmental disaster.
The energy and minerals sectors are reaping the benefits of loosened restrictions and review on land as well. Critical minerals mining projects are receiving preferential treatment in environmental review under the pretext of shedding reliance on China thanks to Executive Order 14241 and the direction of the Energy Dominance Council. A lithium mine proposed by HiTech Lithium, a subsidiary of Jindalee Lithium, on the Oregon side of the McDermitt Caldera, was initially given just a five-day review period for 30 miles of roads and 267 drill sites across 7,200 acres of public lands when it was first announced by the Bureau of Land Management. The review period was later extended to 30 days.
That mine, along with several others, was added to the FAST-41 list and will be overseen by the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, which means it will receive expedited environmental review and priority attention from federal agencies. The caldera is the ancestral home of the Fort McDermitt Paiute, Shoshone, and Bannock tribes, groups that oppose the mining projects because they are on lands considered sacred.
Review on such rapid timetables makes meaningful consultation on cultural resource impacts more difficult. On the Nevada side of the caldera, the Thacker Pass project is moving forward with the backing of General Motors despite alleged violations of international human rights law. Lithium developments across California, Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon have all been granted various regulatory exemptions, despite volatility in the lithium market and mixed policy signals, like the federal government undermining of electric vehicle adoption.
It’s not just lithium mines that stand to benefit from looser regulations and oversight. A gold and copper deposit on the Conglomerate Mesa in Inyo County, California could soon be explored by a subsidiary of K2 Gold, a firm that plans to develop an open pit mine to the detriment of the local ecology and cultural resources.
In February, following Executive Order 14156—Declaring a National Energy Emergency—the US Army Corps released a list and map of 700 projects that it seeks to exempt from its regulatory oversight using emergency procedures. This includes waiving several different Clean Water Act and Army Corps permits typically required for impacts to wetlands.
While the database lists at least 40 solar projects, the majority are fossil fuel-related infrastructure—pipelines, well pads, drilling sites, liquified natural gas terminals—as well as supporting infrastructure like transmission lines. It also includes the Pebble Mine in Alaska’s Bristol Bay watershed, a copper-gold-molybdenum mine that was denied a Section 404 Clean Water Act permit by the US EPA in 2003. The mine proposed to fill eight miles of salmon spawning habitat with mine tailings, and would have destroyed thousands of acres of wetlands.
In April, the Department of the Interior announced there would be no more Environmental Impact Statements across 3.5 million acres of public lands in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. This will eliminate public consultation for Resource Management Plans, which are the only way resource advocates can weigh in on agency decisions to open areas up to oil and gas drilling.
This will likely open the agency to lawsuits. The New York Times reported that the energy emergency declaration would be used to shorten and restrict environmental reviews, saying year-long processes would be shortened to 14 days, and two-year long processes would be completed in 28 days.
The Velvet-Wood underground uranium mine in southeast Utah, which will discharge radioactive wastewater into a nearby wash, will be the first test of these emergency procedures. The Bureau of Land Management is also allowing an Australian mining company to reopen the Colosseum Mine, which closed over three decades ago. It’s the latest project approved in the Mojave National Preserve, which is managed by the US Park Service.
The exemption and expediting of environmental and cultural resources for critical minerals projects will impact Native Americans most. Research from Morgan Stanley Capital International in 2021 found that 79 percent of lithium reserves in the United States are within 35 miles of Native American reservations, with nine active proposed lithium mines within 10 miles of reservations, according to an analysis by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University. Fast-tracking mining projects goes directly against the recommendations of the 1872 Mining Act reform Interagency Working Group and instead short-circuits effective critical minerals mining policy.
Even some of Watt’s more preposterous ideas, like building housing on public lands, have reared their ugly heads. The Trump administration asked Interior to study how to sell off 400,000 acres (625 square miles) of public lands for homes around several western states, a cause championed by Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee. The proposal suggested land around national parks could be sold for affordable housing in gateway communities. Secretary of the Interior Burgum even claimed selling off public lands for “freedom housing” could raise money for a sovereign wealth fund.
At his confirmation hearing, Burgum said, “not every acre of federal land is a national park or a wilderness area. Some of those areas we have to absolutely protect for their precious stuff, but the rest of it, this is America’s balance sheet.” Pointing to the multiple-use mission and embodying the wise use movement spirit, Burgum proclaimed, “this is the time of abundance, we can do all of it.”
So far these efforts have fallen short. An attempt to authorize the sale of 500,000 acres (782 square miles) of public lands in Utah and Nevada for housing as part of Trump’s spending bill was removed from the House version in May. An emboldened Senate proposed selling off 3 million acres (4,688 square miles) of Forest Service and BLM lands, but the provision was removed during the budget reconciliation process after it was struck down by the Senate parliamentarian and lost the support of four Republican Senators from Idaho and Montana.
A less conspicuous way that Burgum could “do all of it” is through land swaps. Land swaps are exchanges of federal property that developers want for other tracts that legally should be of similar value, although the mechanism is ripe for abuse and this has not always been the case in past swaps. A land swap between mining company Resolution Copper and the Forest Service for an open pit mine at a site sacred to the Apache Tribe at Oak Flat in Arizona was granted permission to move forward in April after years of litigation that followed its initial approval during the Obama Administration.
Land swaps under the Trump administration could be exempted from judicial environmental review and regulations, preventing such considerations from delaying projects in the future. A proposed nickel-copper mine in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters backed by Glencore subsidiary PolyMet also relied on a land swap approved in 2017, but ultimately had its wetlands permits revoked in 2023. Burgum’s Dominance Council has made the mine approval priority, which now may be easier in a context of diminished environmental protections.
Making land swaps easier, purportedly to expand housing, could also benefit luxury real estate developers and golf and ski resorts. At the tail end of the Biden administration, the US Forest Service agreed to exchange 3,855 acres in the foothills of Montana’s Crazy and Madison mountains for 6,110 acres of land that are considered less valuable for recreation and wildlife habitat.
One of the beneficiaries of the deal was the Yellowstone Club, an elite ski resort and gated community which counts Secretary Burgum among its owner-investors. The land swap cut off public access to the mountains by established trails, rendering much of the land—even if technically public—effectively private.
In another dubious signal, Secretary Burgum recently applauded the erroneous declaration that a dire wolf has been brought back from extinction.
In a statement posted to social media, Burham said:
The Endangered Species List has become like the Hotel California: once a species enters, they never leave. In fact, 97 percent of species that are added to the endangered list remain there. This is because the status quo is focused on regulation more than innovation.
It’s time to fundamentally change how we think about species conservation. Going forward, we must celebrate removals from the endangered list – not additions. The only thing we’d like to see go extinct is the need for an endangered species list to exist. We need to continue improving recovery efforts to make that a reality, and the marvel of “de-extinction” technology can help forge a future where populations are never at risk.
It turns out the animal is nowhere near dire wolf, but rather a genetically engineered gray wolf with about 20 gene changes. But this de-extinction claim will be used to further erode keystone environmental laws meant to protect endangered species.
It was later revealed that Burgum has personal ties to Colossal Biosciences, the company behind the so-called de-extinction.
Even more dire than the faux dire wolf is the Interior Department’s removal of protections for birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Following up on a policy enacted during the first Trump administration, the new policy asserts that the law does not apply to incidental or accidental killings and eliminates incidental take permits. This may sound trivial, but the requirement to obtain such permits offer greater protections and mitigations for birds, and allows the government to recoup costs of restoration and recovery from accidents, for example, by imposing fines for birds deaths caused by oil spills.
A draft rule from the Fish and Wildlife Service and Marine Fisheries Service would rescind the “harm” definition of a take under the Endangered Species Act. This would restrict the protections of listed species to direct harm and not include things like destroying, modifying, or degrading habitat. As has been the case for decades since the Pacific Northwest Plan and case law known as Babbitt versus Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Greater Oregon, when it was confirmed that clear cutting old growth forests, critical habitat for spotted owls, protecting habitat has been essential to the conservation and recovery of species.
This severe limitation on the scope of the Endangered Species Act would have implications for many species, from grizzly bears and spotted owls to monarch butterflies. Public comment on the proposed rule ended in May, but no final decision has been issued by the agencies.
Energy dominance and abundance. The most consistent and unrelenting theme of the Wise Use movement that remains today is the insistence that public controls on private behaviors are problematic and that environmental regulations must be weakened. This sentiment undergirds some of the talking points of the self-proclaimed abundance movement popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which proposes a new environmentalism focused on permitting reform and “building things” and shares the conservative scorn for red tape and community review they claim gets in the way of building housing and renewable energy.
The discourse of abundance adds fuel to DOGE’s fire by putting the blame on government regulation and public lands restrictions. This Venn diagram of anti-government sentimentality could be one reason why the dismantling of public agencies, environmental protections, and selling off public lands seems to have so much widespread appeal in this political moment. How this plays out on public lands reflects some of the other critiques of abundance that focus on its corporatism and lack of interest or concern about nature.
Regardless of the hopes and dreams of liberal-leaning abundance proponents, no industries will benefit more from federal land use policy changes, deregulation, and the elimination of tribal and community review than the oil and gas, petrochemical, mining, and coal industries.
The other industry that seems poised to grow in the next year under the energy dominance regime is the solar industry, which rebranded itself with the moniker after the election. A powerline to a solar project on public lands was approved in March, and the environmental assessment of the 270 MW Elisabeth I solar project in Arizona was approved in April. A number of other large utility-scale solar projects are on pace to be approved this summer, including the 700 MW Copper Rays, 400 MW Purple Sage, 300 MW Bonanza, and the massive 6.2 GW Esmeralda Seven solar projects in Nevada, as well as the 700 MW Ranegras Plains in Arizona.
While these projects are good news for clean energy otherwise mired in energy policy backlash, solar projects on public lands in the West tend to cause more environmental degradation and ecosystem impact than projects sited elsewhere.
While renewables like solar and geothermal may also benefit from the land use and permitting reforms via executive order, they will be hampered by other factors like tariffs, import restrictions, and the repeal of tax credits. Even oil and gas production will be throttled by tariffs and low oil prices. The same might be said for lithium, copper, and gold for that matter, where low prices are bigger obstacles than endangered species. For critical minerals development, it will always be challenging for upstarts in an industry dominated by a handful of companies.
The notable exception to relaxed rules, exemptions, and fast-tracking appears to be the wind industry, which currently is stalled by an Executive Order signed on inauguration day. Equinor quietly announced it was starting construction of the Empire 1 wind project in March. This was followed by a stop work order to the $5 billion project from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management that asserted problems with the review conducted by the Biden Administration. The administration reversed course and abruptly rescinded its decision a few weeks later, allowing the project to move forward.
The misuse and degradation of public lands because of relatively weak environmental oversight long predates the ascension of the Trump administration, DOGE, and Watt-reincarnate Secretary Burgum. These are lands claimed and managed in settler colonial and extractive contexts and embroiled in the Wise Use politics of the West after the Sagebrush Rebellion.
While our current moment echoes a lot of this past, something also seems different this time. The Wise Use Agenda played out in a different cultural moment and with different people making decisions in the courts. In 1983, Secretary Watt was forced to resign for mocking the diverse make-up of an advisory panel for new coal-leases. Animated by abundance sentiments this time around, Trump’s version of energy dominance could have an even-longer lasting impact on federal and public lands, including whether they remain public at all.