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Last
February, I climbed into a Jeep and
rumbled up a rocky shelf road that took
me high above a breathtaking corner of
the Mojave National Preserve. At the top
was an old gold mine where an Australian
company had recently restarted
activities, looking for rare earth
minerals.
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The
National Park Service had been
embroiled in a years-long dispute with
the company, Dateline Resources
Ltd., alleging that it was operating the
Colosseum Mine without authorization and
had damaged the surrounding landscape
with heavy equipment. Dateline said it
had the right to work the mine under a
plan its prior operators had submitted
to the Bureau of Land Management decades
before.
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President
Trump had taken office just weeks before
my visit. Environmentalists told me the
conflict posed an early test of how his
administration would handle the
corporate exploitation of public lands.
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At
the time, observers weren’t sure how
things would shake out. Conserving
public lands is one of the rare issues
that’s popular on both sides of the
political aisle, they pointed out.
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Almost
a year later, it’s clear that the Trump
administration has sided with the
corporations.
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Trump
directed
the Department of Interior to inventory
mineral deposits on federal lands and
prioritize mining as the primary use of
those lands. He instructed officials to
dramatically fast-track permitting and
environmental reviews for certain types
of energy and critical minerals projects
— and designated
metallurgical coal a critical mineral,
enabling companies that mine it to qualify for
a lucrative tax credit.
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His
budget bill lowered the
royalty rates companies must pay
the government to extract coal, oil or
gas from public lands and provided other
financial incentives for such projects
while reducing the authority of federal
land managers to deny them.
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Under
the president’s direction, the DOI has opened up
millions of acres of federal land
to new coal leasing and moved to rescind
both the 2021
Roadless Rule, which protects
swaths of national forest lands from
extractive activities by barring most
new road construction, and the 2024 Public
Lands Rule, which puts
conservation and restoration on par with
other uses of BLM land like mining,
drilling and grazing.
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The
administration is seeking to roll back
limitations on mining and drilling for
specific pieces of public land,
including portions of the National
Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the watershed
feeding the Boundary Waters in
Minnesota and a buffer
surrounding Chaco Culture National
Historical Park in New Mexico.
Meanwhile, conservative lawmakers
overturned management plans limiting
energy development on certain BLM lands
in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota
and Wyoming.
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Altogether,
the Trump administration and its
legislative allies have taken steps to
reduce or eliminate protections for
nearly 90 million acres of public land,
according to
the Center for American Progress, a
progressive think tank. That
figure rises to more than 175 million
acres if you include the habitat
protections diminished by the
administration’s moves to weaken the Endangered
Species Act, the organization
notes.
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“All
of these things represent in some ways
the largest attack on our public lands
and giveaway to large multinational
mining corporations that we’ve seen
probably since the 19th century,” said
U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New
Mexico, who likened the level of
resource exploitation to “something like
what happened during the robber baron
era when there was no regulation or
protection for our communities or the
environment.”
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Stansbury
has introduced
legislation that would increase
the fees mining companies must pay to
sit on speculative claims on federal
lands and require those funds be used
for conservation. She told me it’s just
a tiny contribution to a larger effort
to push back against the
administration’s approach to initiate
extraction on public lands, which she
described as so frequent and pervasive
that “it’s a bit like whack-a-mole.”
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“So
much damage has been done, both
administratively and legislatively, over
the last 11 months since Trump took
office,” she said.
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As
for the Colosseum Mine, the DOI sided with its
operators back in the spring,
saying Dateline Resources did not have
to seek authorization from the Park
Service to keep mining. The announcement
was followed by public
endorsements from Trump and
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The
company’s stock value soared, and by
September, it had kicked off a
major drilling blitz.
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The
company has already uncovered high-grade
gold deposits. It’s taking a break for
Christmas, but is expected to
resume drilling in the new year.
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More
recent land news
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The
Pacific Forest Trust returned nearly
900 acres of land near Yosemite
National Park to the Southern Sierra
Miwuk Nation in a transfer partially
financed by the state, reports Kurtis
Alexander of the San Francisco
Chronicle. Members of the
Indigenous group were forced off their
ancestral lands during the California
Gold Rush, when state-sponsored militias
undertook efforts to exterminate them.
Some now hope the new property will
bolster their decades-long
push for federal recognition.
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California
State Parks is violating the
Endangered Species Act by allowing
offroaders to drive over dunes that
are home to western snowy plovers, a
judge recently ruled in a
long-running legal case over the use of
Oceano Dunes State Recreation Area along
the Central Coast. Edvard
Pettersson of the Courthouse News
Service reports that State Parks
will need a federal “take” permit to
continue to allow offroading at the
popular beachside spot.
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California
lawmakers introduced legislation to
conserve more than 1.7 million acres
of public lands across the state, in
part by expanding the Los Padres
National Forest and the Carrizo Plain
National Monument, according to
Stephanie Zappelli of the San Luis
Obispo Tribune.
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The
federal public lands grazing program
was created as a bulwark against
environmental damage but has been
transformed into a massive subsidy
program benefiting a select few,
including billionaire hobby ranchers and
large corporations, according to an
investigation by ProPublica and High
Country News. The three-part
series also found a
loophole allowing for the automatic
renewal of grazing permits
has led to less oversight over the
health of these lands.
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A
few last things in climate news
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President
Trump’s media company is merging with
a nuclear fusion energy firm in a
$6-billion deal that some
analysts have described as a major
conflict of interest, my colleague
Caroline Petrow-Cohen reports.
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House
Republicans pushed through a bill that
would overhaul the federal
environmental review process in a
way that critics say could speed up the
approval process for oil and gas
projects while stymieing clean energy, report Aidan
Hughes and Carl David Goette-Luciak of
Inside Climate News.
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The
iconic chasing-arrows recycling symbol
is likely to be removed from
California milk cartons, my
colleague Susanne Rust reports.
The decision exposes how used beverage
packaging has been illegally exported to
East Asia as “recycled” mixed paper,
violating international environmental
law.
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Wind
energy is again under attack from the
Trump administration, which this
week ordered all major wind construction
projects to halt. As The Times’ Hayley
Smith notes,
the White House has been consistent in
slowing down clean energy development in
2025, but offshore wind has been a
particular bête noire for the President.
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We’ve
published a comprehensive collection
of stories looking back on the wildfires
that burned though Altadena and
Pacific Palisades last January and all
that’s happened since, which
columnist Steve Lopez calls “one of the
most apocalyptic years in Southern
California history.” Check out After
the Fires here.
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This
is the latest edition of Boiling
Point, a newsletter about climate
change and the environment in the
American West. Sign up here
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And listen to our Boiling Point
podcast here.
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For
more land news, follow @phila_lex
on X and alex-wigglesworth.bsky.social
on Bluesky.
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