by Tom Kenworthy
Name a big issue that the Department of the Interior has been involved
in during the Obama and Clinton administrations, and more likely than
not David J. Hayes has been in the thick of it.
Now Hayes, who has served as the department’s number two in both
administrations, is leaving government service — but not before he
leaves his fingerprints on one more big initiative, and a critical one at that.
Historically, the Interior Department, especially its Bureau of Land
Management, which oversees energy development on some 700 million acres
of land, has tended to look at public land development projects like
mining and oil and gas in isolation, without enough consideration for
broad ecosystem effects stretching across large landscapes. That
orientation began to shift as the Obama administration ramped up efforts
to bring large-scale solar energy development to federal lands in the states in the southwest.
Instead of a piecemeal approach, project by project, Interior under
Secretary Ken Salazar devised a kind of super zoning plan, analyzing the
solar resources and the likely areas of conflict with wildlife and
other important uses of those federal lands across millions of acres.
The idea was to determine in advance which areas were best for
development and which would likely involve the most potential damage to,
and fights over, wildlife habitat, archaeological sites, and
longstanding recreation uses. Not only would that be good for the land,
but it would be good for the companies eager to build large solar energy
plants who were looking for more regulatory certainty.
That look-before-you-leap, landscape-scale approach is now going to be expanded. The Bureau of Land Management is issuing draft guidelines
for how its employees should develop and implement regional strategies
to mitigate the impacts of development projects; not just by finding
ways to compensate on its own lands, but also on other federal, state,
tribal and even private lands.
Of course the enviros like it because it "dovetails nicely" with their Equal Ground proposal.
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