Trump admin kills rule making companies pay for public land damages

Wild critters are having a rough time under the Trump Administration.

After the administration proposed dramatic changes to the decades-old Endangered Species Act last week, on Friday the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) canceled an Obama-era rule that made industries pay for damages inflicted onto refuge lands.

In short, the "Mitigation Policy" allowed a company, say a mining operation, to damage certain resources as long as the company committed to improving nearby land -- to compensatefor the damages done.

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The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) -- which oversees the most public land in the nation -- tossed out a similar rule on Tuesday.

"This change is exactly what it appears to be -- the administration is removing frameworks that sought to establish a consistent methodology to hold companies accountable for damaging public lands (in the case of BLM) and adversely impacting wildlife and habitats (in the case of FWS)," Caitlin McCoy, an environmental law expert at Harvard University's Environmental and Energy Law program, said over email.

It's not as if any company now has free-reign to destroy public lands while seeking resources or engaging in disruptive activity on these lands. When a company applies for a permit to use or work in public areas, the Fish and Wildlife Service will still try to avoid any adverse impacts to wildlife habitats, said McCoy. Sometimes the permit will be altered to avoid destruction of habitats; a last resort would have been requiring a company to improve land somewhere else to pay up for their damages.

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But companies no longer have to pay.

Pronghorns at the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge in Wyoming. Credit: Tom Koerner/USFWS

The Fish and Wildlife Service, in their decision, said this Obama-era rule "is inconsistent with current Executive branch policy," which seeks to "better balance conservation strategies and policies with job creation for American families."

The Trump Administration, then, is being quite candid about prioritizing the use of public lands for resources, over the conservation of wildlife habitats or protection of other resources, like water and fossils.

This aim was perhaps most evident when, in December 2017, Trump flew to Utah to announce slashing the size of Bears Ears National Monument -- previously protected by President Obama -- by over one million acres, decreasing the monument's size by 80 percent. This opened the fossil-rich land back up to development, or exploitation of resources.

In the realm of the Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees animal refuges all over the nation, the killing of the land mitigation rule could very well mean more damaged land, with little effort to minimize this harm, said McCoy.

Lacking a coherent mitigation policy, "it is likely [the government] will shrug and say that these impacts are the 'cost of doing business/making progress/creating jobs/a healthy economy' and that's it," she said.

"If there is unforeseen massive destruction, maybe they will pursue some kind of enforcement action for natural resource damages, but short of that, it is unclear." 

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