Secretary Salazar Establishes New Directorate For National Landscape Conservation System

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today issued a Secretarial Order elevating the Office of the National Landscape Conservation System and Community Partnerships in the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to the level of a directorate within BLM. This National Landscape Conservation System was established as an integral part of the Bureau of Land Management by the Omnibus Public Land Management Act of 2009, a bipartisan initiative that responded to the critical need, as the population of the West increases, to conserve open spaces that are a unique part of America’s heritage. As an integral part of the BLM’s multiple-use mission, conservation is a long-term investment that provides quality of life and economic benefits for current and future generations. The system contains many of our Nation’s most treasured landscapes, including scientific, historic and cultural resources, wilderness and wilderness study areas, wild and scenic rivers, national monuments, national conservation areas, and scenic and historic trails, among others. These lands are managed as an integral part of the larger landscape, in collaboration with the neighboring landowners and surrounding communities. The management objectives are to maintain biodiversity and promote ecological connectivity and resilience in the face of climate change. When consistent with the values for which they were designated, lands in the system may allow appropriate multiple uses, such as grazing, energy development and tourism...more

The Secretarial Order is available HERE.
The Secretary’s remarks are available HERE.

A lot of flowery words but not much else here that I can see at first blush. There are some troubling terms here, such as "ecological connectivity" and "climate change" but no laws are changed. Wilderness and National Conservation Areas will be managed by the laws that designated them, Wilderness Study Areas by Section 603(c) of FLPMA and so on.

The only thing new is the following:

Sec. 5 Organizational Changes. The BLM shall establish a new directorate, called the National Landscape Conservation System and Community Partnerships, to replace the Office of the National Landscape Conservation System and Community Partnerships. The BLM shall initiate the process to establish this directorate within 120 days of the date of this Order.

FLPMA calls for a Director, Associate Director and however many Assistant Directors the Secretary deems "may be necessary."

So their will be a new Assistant Director, the title of the office will change and the envirocrat appointed to fill it will now get paid more money to mismanage the land.