Interior Department to Overhaul Obama’s Sage Grouse Protection Plan

The Trump administration will seek to reconsider an Obama-era blueprint for protecting the greater sage grouse, a move that could lead to new mineral leasing, grazing and other commercial activities across the quirky bird’s Western habitat. The Interior Department intends this week to publish a formal notice of intent to amend 98 sage grouse habitat management plans across 10 states, according to multiple agency and state officials who have been briefed on the effort. Those plans, completed in 2015, were adopted after a decade of negotiations among conservationists, sportsmen and extraction industries as well as federal, state, local and tribal authorities. The agency’s decision is not entirely unexpected. Earlier this year, Ryan Zinke, the interior secretary, ordered a review of the sage grouse plans, in part to determine whether they were hindering energy production. A task force recommended changes that could loosen protections for the bird. Environmental activists say reopening the plans, as opposed to making adjustments administratively, threatens to dismantle protections altogether. But oil and gas industry leaders hailed the move as overdue. “I’m happy to see that it looks like it’s coming out,” Kathleen Sgamma, president of the Western Energy Alliance, said of the Interior Department notice. She called the state plans developed under the Obama administration a “deeply flawed” one-size-fits-all approach that exaggerated the threats posed by natural resource extraction...more