Sportsmen seek room for wildlife amid drilling push

Sportsmen's groups see the White River plan as a key opportunity for BLM to enhance protections for backcountry lands that nourish big game and imperiled birds like the greater sage grouse. The Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership has mobilized hundreds of Colorado sportsmen and more than a dozen hunting- and fishing-related businesses to lobby BLM to set aside nearly two dozen backcountry conservation areas (BCAs) under the field office's jurisdiction, totaling about 230,000 acres. The BCAs would be managed primarily for wildlife and nonmotorized recreation. Oil and gas development -- wells, pipelines and new roads -- would be either banned from the surface or tightly restricted. "We want a tool that considers backcountry lands as one value in multiple use," said Joel Webster, who directs the Roosevelt partnership's Center for Western Lands from Missoula, Mont. "BLM has few tools in [the] administrative process for protecting special places." The partnership is mobilizing sportsmen across the West to urge similar BCAs in lands under the jurisdiction of BLM offices in north-central Montana, eastern Idaho, southern Oregon and central Nevada, among other places. It sees a major window of opportunity as BLM updates RMPs covering 123 million acres, Webster said. RMPs are the blueprints BLM relies on to decide where and how the public lands may be used, be it for drilling, all-terrain vehicles, hikers, hunters or wildlife. The sportsmen's effort comes as BLM also pursues a major overhaul of its planning process, a move aimed at updating RMPs more frequently and with an eye toward landscape-scale planning and mitigation...more