Bureau of Land Management

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Bureau of Land Management
- BLM -

BLM logo
State level Federation
Supervisory authority Home Office
founding 1946
Headquarters Washington, DC
Authority management Neil Kornze
Servants approx.10,565 (2012)
Budget volume $ 1.232 billion (2012)
Web presence www.blm.gov

The Bureau of Land Management ( BLM ; German Landverwaltungsamt ) is an authority subordinate to the US Department of the Interior , which has been responsible for the management and commercial exploitation of public land in the United States since it was founded in 1946 . The BLM, headquartered in Washington, DC and around 10,000 employees, is responsible for an approximately 1,050,000 km² - non-contiguous - area (which corresponds to about three times the area of ​​Germany) mainly in the western part of the United States including Alaska . The main function of the BLM is the issuing of licenses for the production of crude oil and natural gas inland, for the extraction of mineral resources , the extraction of bulk raw materials such as gravel and the allocation of areas for grazing public land to ranchers . The agency had a budget of $ 1.232 billion in 2012.

Since the mid-1990s, large areas of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management have been placed under nature protection, so that the authority has also been one of the most important administrators of protected areas since then. The largest protected area of ​​the BLM is the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah , other large-scale national monuments and other protected areas are concentrated in particular on the Colorado Plateau .

prehistory

Although the BLM has only existed in its current form since 1946, the history of the federal authority goes back to the beginning of the 19th century, when the previous administration was founded. 1812, the US granted Congress the establishment of a - the Ministry of Finance assumed - General Land Office (General Land Office.) To public lands ( public lands ) to manage the federal ownership of the young American state. In the original Thirteen Colonies on the East Coast, which were detached from the British Crown in the American War of Independence (1775–1783) , there was no federal ownership, since the United States was only founded after the United States. The new authority was almost exclusively responsible for the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase and predominantly covered by the Great Plains in the central part of today's USA. In the middle of the 19th century, the area of ​​the western USA conquered after the war with Mexico (1848) was subordinated to the General Land Office , where today - especially on the Colorado Plateau , the Mojave Desert and in the Great Basin - the center of activities of the BLM lies.

In accordance with legal requirements, the agency oversaw land settlement and use, which Congress encouraged through far-reaching laws. In land grants , the federal government made land available to the states , Indian peoples , railroad projects , veterans of the armed forces of the United States and individual settlers under the Homestead Act . Forests were transferred to the United States Forest Service (USFS) and managed by them as national forests . The Mineral Leasing Act 1920 regulated the conditions under which leases for the extraction of natural resources - such as coal , crude oil or natural gas - were issued.

In 1946, the General Land Office was merged with the United States Grazing Service , an agency that had only been established twelve years earlier to manage the public grazing land , under the umbrella of the US Department of the Interior to form the Bureau of Land Management .

tasks

BLM Geodetic control point from 1950 in Colorado

The BLM is responsible for the administration and economic use of federally owned property, unless the areas are used for other purposes. It therefore oversees vast areas primarily in the western United States. Other major federal land administrations include the National Park Service (NPS) and the United States Forest Service . There are also the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Reclamation , authorities with similar responsibilities but much smaller areas. Unlike the NPS, which was given responsibility for the particularly attractive national parks and monuments (as well as other natural and cultural monuments) by the US Congress , and the USFS, which watches over the national forests, the BLM only had the remaining public lands. Most of these include inferior pastureland and desert regions, which were too unattractive for settlers and too unspectacular for the federal government for a natural monument declaration. Their sometimes high ecological value only became significant later.

In practice, the BLM is primarily responsible for the economic use of the land and is therefore the point of contact for ranchers , oil producers and mining companies , which quickly led the authority to corrupt its name in the Bureau of Livestock and Mining . Due to countless and sometimes contradicting laws, the land administration was difficult for the BLM, and on top of that, it was given insufficient powers to enforce its requirements. It only received this in 1976, when Congress, with the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, recognized the need to keep public lands in federal ownership for economic and ecological reasons and to create the necessary legal provisions for this. The National Landscape Conservation System , created at the time for nature conservation purposes under the umbrella of the BLM , however, had no major external effects for the next twenty years.

The Bureau of Land Management is often reproached for the consistent orientation towards the economic exploitation of the areas subject to it. In particular for its land policy in the US state of Nevada , more than 80 percent of which is public land owned by the BLM, the agency has come under fire because of its strict action against the Western Shoshone . For decades, the indigenous population has been resisting the progressive expropriation of the territory that was assigned to them in the Treaty of Ruby Valley in 1863 , but which in 1934 was subordinated to the predecessor authority of the BLM as "public land". The Shoshone, who live mainly from ranching in the semi-desert of Nevada, were therefore also bound to the fee for cattle grazing on the BLM land, but could not and did not want to pay them. In order to break the resistance of the Indians, the BLM carried out coercive measures, which went as far as the confiscation of livestock.

In the past, not only the indigenous population - including Mary Dann , who received the Right Livelihood Award, who died in 2005 - also environmental organizations have resisted gold mining , which has been increasing in Nevada since the 1960s and supported by the BLM through licensing . Due to the environmentally harmful mining methods used by the companies, they referred to the Bureau of Land Management's focus on economic efficiency , which could not be reconciled with the nature conservation mission of the authority.

Protected areas under BLM administration

The Wave in Vermilion Cliffs National Monument
California Coastal National Monument
Side canyon in the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument

During President Bill Clinton's tenure , the direction of the BLM expanded. He used his right under the Antiquities Act of 1906 to expel national monuments unilaterally and without the consultation or approval of the US Congress and the states concerned. Beginning in 1996 with the Grand Staircase-Escalante , the second largest national monument in the United States after the Misty Fjords in Alaska, and continuing in 2000, it designated vast areas of federally owned nature reserves , subordinating them to the upgraded National Landscape Conservation System of the BLM and thus largely withdrew it from future economic use. In mid-January 2001, a few days before the handover to his successor George W. Bush , he again expelled eight National Monuments, five of which were the responsibility of the BLM.

At the same time, the BLM strengthened its information and educational work based on the concept of nature and cultural interpretation by submitting an Interpretive Strategy in 1999 , which it implemented with some emphasis in the following years.

The Bureau of Land Management now has 18 visitor centers and manages a total of 16 National Monuments , some in collaboration with other federal agencies.

National monuments

In addition, the BLM's National Landscape Conservation System also includes eleven so-called National Conservation Areas , areas with a lower level of protection. Economic use is mostly limited here. Individual wilderness areas are interspersed in both the National Monuments and the National Conservation Areas ; these have a wilderness character and represent the strictest protected areas in the United States.

Web links

  • www.blm.gov Official website of the Bureau of Land Management (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Department of the Interior: Budget 2014 .