[Talk-us] US Bureau of Land Management Boundaries

[brad]

I'm going to start close to home, extend that to the state of CO, & see 
how it goes.
I've done quite a bit of recreating and boondock camping on BLM land and 
I've never come across any that are leased exclusively, altho I'm sure 
there are some.    It's more of a rarity, than 'most of'.

Politically, your comment that the inhabitants resent BLM ownership is a 
gross generalization.   I'd say that the majority of western inhabitants 
do not resent it.

On 1/8/19 9:15 AM, Kevin Kenny wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 7, 2019 at 10:05 PM Michael Patrick <geodesy99 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "Multiple uses under BLM management include renewable energy development (solar, wind, other); conventional energy development (oil and gas, coal); livestock grazing; hardrock mining (gold, silver, other), timber harvesting; and outdoor recreation (such as camping, hunting, rafting, and off-highway vehicle driving). ... 36 million-acre system of National Conservation Lands (including wilderness areas, wilderness study areas, national monuments, national conservation areas, historic trails, and wild and scenic rivers); protecting wild horse and burro rangeland; conserving wildlife, fish, and plant habitat"
>>
>> Also agriculture. Burning Man's Black Rock City is leased from BLM under an Special Recreation Permit (SRP). ... " crop harvesting, residential occupancy, recreation facilities, construction equipment storage, assembly yards, well pumps, and other uses." So, even though it might be BLM, it could also be under a 50 year lease to a commercial entity, so for all intents and purposes be regarded as private property - like massive solar ( 19 million acres  ) and wind ( 20 million acres  ) energy farms. I seem to recall a Nevada brothel was at one time operating on BLM land with a lease and permit - pretty much, as long as you don't leave the land damaged and it doesn't interfere with other planned uses, you can get a lease.
>>
>> Just saying, one class isn't going to do it. Mostly, 'exploited', not 'protected'.
> All that 'BLM land' says is 'this land is owned by the US Government'
> - generally because it was Government-owned at the time that a state
> was admitted to the Union and hasn't been sold since.
>
> Some BLM land - about 145,000 km² - is 'conservation land' in some
> way, and some small sliver is special recreation land.  But large
> amounts are simply leased, to mining and drilling companies, cattle
> ranchers and farmers, solar and wind energy companies, private
> residences, basically, any land use that the Government agrees to.
> Some, if not most of these leaseholds are exclusive, so that a ranch
> can run barbed wire, put up posters, and treat it as private property
> for as long as the lease runs and it pays the rent. (Some timber
> leases explicitly require public access in areas that are not actively
> being logged.)
>
> Given the political controversy surrounding the BLM (in some Western
> states, the BLM owns a majority of the land and the inhabitants resent
> it), I'd tend to steer away from a wholesale import. I would think
> that a pilot project could start with an import of land in one
> specific, limited category of particular public interest (such as
> wilderness areas or recreation areas) and use that to study issues of
> integration and conflation. Restricting to wilderness or recreation
> areas is also safer since these are relatively stable, rather than
> other land uses that could change entirely with the next leaseholder.
> Most other BLM land designations could be used only to inform
> landuse=*. The land in many cases does not enjoy any form of legal
> protection. It is simply owned by the government, and any protection
> is simply by the policy of the agency that manages a particular parcel
> and could change with the stroke of a pen.
>
> Clearly, no land use is 100% guaranteed stable, and the fact that
> something might change tomorrow is ordinarily not a reason to refrain
> from mapping it today. Nevertheless, given that the justification for
> an import is usually that the project lacks sufficient staff to map
> the features being imported, importing features that are known to be
> volatile seems imprudent.
>
> I say this as someone who has done imports from databases of
> government-owned land. In both the rework of New York State Department
> of Environmental Conservation lands, and the import _de novo_ of the
> New York City watershed lands, I restricted the import to particular
> categories. I specifically excluded New York City lands that are
> closed to the public (I could have mapped them as
> boundary=protected_area protect_class=12 access=private, but decided
> that they simply were neither sufficiently verifiable nor of
> sufficient public interest to pursue.) Similarly, I excluded several
> classes of New York State lands such as private conservation easements
> and the bizarre category of "Forest Preserve land underwater".
>
> It's much easier to go back later and import more than it is to
> recover from a botched import.
>
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