Barely two weeks into his second presidential term, Donald Trump has already dramatically changed the policies governing public lands, outdoor recreation, and the environment.

On Monday, January 20, Trump renamed the country’s highest peak, 20,310-foot Denali, to Mount McKinley, replacing the indigenous title with that of the 25th president of the United States. The same day, Trump the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, the 2016 international treaty to battle climate change. He on oil and gas leasing within the state’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He requiring the National Marine Fisheries, Bureau of Reclamation, and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to begin pumping water from California’s San Joaquin Delta across the state—a move that could jeopardize endangered fish. And Trump announced a , which has a within the National Park Service.

These moves echo ones that Trump made during his first presidential term: like the controversial downsizing of Utah’s Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments by almost a million acres apiece and the different climate, water, and wildlife protections.

But critics may forget that, during his first term, Trump also signed into law a pair of very significant conservation bills. In 2019, the John D. Dingell, Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act created 1.3 million acres of Wilderness and ten new Wild and Scenic River segments. It also increased the size of three national parks. Then in 2020, Trump encouraged the passage of the , which funneled $9.5 billion towards the infamous National Park Service (NPS) maintenance backlog. It permanently allocated $900 million annually to the Land and Water Conservation Fund, the nation’s single largest source of outdoor recreation infrastructure funding.

What will the second Trump administration mean for public lands, the environment, and outdoor recreation? Nobody knows for sure. But we’ve taken a look at the decisions Trump has already made, what he’s said he’ll do, and a wish-list created by personnel from the previous administration, to make an educated analysis.

Hiring Personnel Who Appreciate Outdoor Rec and Industry

One of the former president’s first personnel nominees for his upcoming administration was North Dakota governor Doug Burgum to lead the Department of the Interior. The agency controls some 500 million acres of public land and oversees the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Critics have labeled Burgum a champion of the oil and gas industry, having led the state with the third-largest oil production and publicly criticized the Biden administration’s efforts to . At the same time, Burgum is himself an avid horseman, hunter, skier, and hiker and has been a booster of outdoor recreation in North Dakota, creating the state’s Office of Outdoor Recreation and allocating $1.2 million in grants for trail building.

Trump is also expected to name Burgum the administration’s energy czar, following through on his campaign promises to increase oil and gas production as a way to curb energy costs. Burgum’s nomination drew praise from the energy and mining sector. “He recognizes that affordable and reliable energy along with American mineral production are critical to growing our nation’s economy,” Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association told .

Conservatives argue that increased mining and domestic fossil fuel production could spur economic activity, but conservationists are bracing for the environmental blow. “Public lands are beloved and vitally important to people in this country. The first Trump administration treated these places like they’re meant to be dug up, drilled, or sold off for profit,” David Seabrook, interim president of the Wilderness Society, said in a press release.

Despite Burgum’s alignment with the oil and gas industry, other sources within the outdoor recreation community told şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř that the North Dakota governor represents a best-case-scenario nominee from the Republican administration. “Governor Burgum has shown a commitment to supporting outdoor recreation as an economic driver and a meaningful way to connect communities,” said Jessica Turner, president of outdoor recreation trade association Outdoor Recreation Roundtable, in a press release. “As an avid outdoorsman, we are hopeful that the governor’s long-time admiration of Teddy Roosevelt and deep understanding of business will help support and grow the recreation economy.”

According to Cody Schulz, director of North Dakota Parks and Recreation, which oversees the state’s new office of outdoor recreation, Governor Burgum is “an incredibly curious and collaborative leader who encourages his personnel to make decisions based on data.”

Schulz says that Burgum’s efforts to improve outdoor recreation in North Dakota stem from his own passion for the outdoors, and from an understanding that the industry can be an important economic driver. “Conservation and outdoor recreation infrastructure draws both visitors and new residents to North Dakota,” he says.

Burgum’s data-driven approach offers a ray of hope for fans of the Bureau of Land Management’s new Public Lands Rule, which considers recreation on equal footing with extractive industries like grazing and oil and gas when making land use decisions.

Moving the BLM Back to Colorado

In 2019, the Trump administration relocated the agency’s headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado. The relocation was touted as a practical move to get managers closer to the lands they managed and seen as a way to attract workers who may not have been able to afford D.C. ‘s notoriously expensive cost of living.

Eventually, the BLM’s headquarters was returned to D.C. by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in 2021. According to a 2021 Government Accountability Office report, collapsing the D.C. office drove out the agency’s most experienced employees and the number of vacancies. Out of 176 staff told to relocate, only 41 accepted their reassignments and the rest left their positions.

Tracy Stone-Manning, who was appointed by Biden in 2021 to lead the BLM, called the move “wildly disruptive,” in a . “It’s years of opportunity cost when we could and should be focused on the work of the bureau, for public lands and the American people, and we had to instead focus on rebuilding the bureau,” Stone-Manning said.

Lawmakers in Colorado, , have said that they support moving the BLM headquarters back to Grand Junction.

Taking Aim at Environmental Policy

The downsizing of Bear’s Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments was one of the former president’s most high-profile decisions on public land. While the cuts were reversed by the Biden administration, it’s possible that Trump will again shrink the monuments. Utah Republican Representative John Curtis told The Salt Lake Tribune he .

The first Trump administration championed mineral extraction and land development as a way to pump revenue into local economies and return power over protected lands to states. The administration also weakened several bedrock environmental laws. Probably most significant were alterations to protections afforded by the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA).

In 2017, Trump’s EPA , which afforded protections to seasonal wetlands and streams, particularly prevalent in the arid, but recreation-rich western United States. Then in 2019, the administration changed the Endangered Species Act, removing protections for threatened species and making it more difficult to add additional species to the list. Agencies would also be allowed to conduct economic assessments when deciding whether a species warrants protection.

More subtle, but arguably more problematic, was the weakening of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), the law that requires an environmental review and public comment period for every major project. It’s used on everything from major timber sales to ski resort development.

Jon Jarvis, director of the Park Service under President Barack Obama, said NEPA helped guide multiple policies during his time with the NPS, from the relocation of wolves to Yellowstone, to the altering traffic flow in Yosemite. “Sunlight is a great disinfectant, and many of these agency plans would now be done in the dark,” Jarvis told şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř.

Trump’s Interior Department made several other controversial moves during his first administration that directly impacted outdoor recreation. In 2017, the department made a unilateral decision to increase admission prices during peak seasons at the nation’s most popular national parks from $30 to $70. There was so much furor about the decision that the administration canceled those plans five months later.

Then in 2020, the department issued an order that allowed for e-bike use on any federal trail where regular bikes were allowed. Cycling advocates and at least one advocacy group applauded the decision that would allow better access for cyclists who rely on e-bikes. “The Secretarial Order will help get public lands visitors out of their cars and beyond congested visitor centers and parking lots,” wrote the cycling advocacy group People For Bikes at the time. More than 50 other recreation groups, however, formally objected to the policy, saying that the decision had been made without any study on its impact on wildlife and visitor safety.

This year, the Park Service ruled that it would make decisions on up to individual park units on a “case-by-case basis.”

Creating Fewer National Monuments

Some Western conservatives would like to see the administration spearhead an effort to repeal or weaken the 1906 Antiquities Act, which allows a president to create new national monuments. The law has been used in some 300 instances by presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to George W. Bush to protect millions of acres of federal land. Some of the nation’s most popular national parks began as monuments, including the Grand Canyon, Joshua Tree, and Grand Teton.

Only Congress can repeal a law in the United States, so abolishing the Antiquities Act would require a majority of both houses to want it gone. Given pro-monument public sentiment, that seems like a long shot.

More likely is a severe weakening of the law through the Supreme Court. Published in April 2022 by the conservative think tank The Heritage Project, the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, known colloquially as “Project 2025,” outlines the steps such an effort might take. The document calls for a “downward adjustment” of the nation’s national monuments, and then directs the republican President to “vigorously defend the downward adjustments it makes to permit a ruling on a President’s authority to reduce the size of national monuments by the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Throughout his campaign, Trump repeatedly distanced himself from the document. But authors of Project 2025 have noted that other prominent conservatives support weakening the Antiquities Act. In 2021 Chief Justice Roberts signaled that he is looking for a case whose verdict could be used to curtail the ability of presidents to create large monuments.

It may also mean the loss of a Biden-era protections like a 10-mile oil exploration moratorium placed around New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon National Historical Park to help protect Native American antiquities, and one on 221,898 acres of Forest Service and BLM land on Colorado’s Thompson Divide, just northwest of Crested Butte. The latter was the result of years of work by an unlikely coalition of ranchers, hunters, anglers, mountain bikers, off-road vehicle users, and environmentalists to protect the habitat of elk, bear, deer, moose, mountain lion, and a pair of endangered species: Colorado River cutthroat trout and Canadian lynx. The Project 2025 document specifically targets both protections.

Also on the chopping block may be Biden’s public land order to Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area for 20 years. The decades-long fight over proposed copper and nickel mines adjacent to the wilderness area was seemingly settled in 2023 with the order. At issue were concerns that mine waste would flow directly down the Kawishiwi River into the waterways of the nation’s most-visited Wilderness Area (some 165,000 visitors annually.) Project 2025 calls for that order to be reversed despite recent polling that shows 69 percent of Minnesota for the Boundary Waters.

All of these potential rollbacks fly in the face of what many Americans want, says Jenny Rowland-Shea, director of public lands for The Center for American Progress, a progressive research and advocacy group. She cites a , which found that 78 percent of Western voters want more emphasis on conserving wildlife migration routes, providing highway crossings, and limiting more development to protect wildlife habitats. According to the study, just 20 percent of voters want more emphasis on economically productive uses of land such as new development, roads, ranching, or oil and gas production.

“The United States is actually producing record amounts of oil right now,” she says.

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For more than a century, the Bureau of Land Management has prioritized the interests of miners, ranchers, and the oil and gas industries in management decisions on the 245 million acres acres of public land for which it’s responsible over conservation and recreation. No longer. Thanks to a new rule issued by the Biden administration, the agency must now balance development needs with the management of “landscape health.”

Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland said the , “Helps restore balance to our public lands as we continue using the best-available science to restore habitats, guide strategic and responsible development, and sustain our public lands for generations to come.”

The rule was first proposed in April, 2023, and was the subject of five public hearings and a 90 day public comment period. A statement issued by BLM says that “the vast majority” of the resulting 200,000 comments supported the change.

The Public Lands Rule has three main components: Promoting restoration of public lands and waters, supporting informed decision-making for responsible development, and protecting landscapes.

To restore public lands and waters, the rule directs the agency to identify areas in need of restoration, and to develop plans to make that restoration happen. These decisions will be made based on the health of specific areas, benefits to local communities, and opportunities to work with non-profits, local governments, and state agencies.

The rule also creates a framework for something the BLM is calling a “mitigation lease,” which will allow developers or users to offset impacts their actives have on public lands managed by the BLM. For example, a company can get a permit to build on a wetland if they restore another one. While similar mechanisms exist on state and private land, this will be the first time such mitigation practices will be possible on federally-managed public land. Mitigation leases will enable entities that want to mine, ranch, drill, or similar to offset the environmental impacts of those activities, and continue to achieve permitting even as the agency must now consider those impacts more critically. Mitigation leases can’t conflict with existing activities in areas where they’re issued, so shouldn’t adversely impact activities like off-roading, hunting, or camping.

The Public Lands Rule also creates a “restoration lease,” which will allow state agencies, non-profits and similar to take over conservation activities on certain slices of public lands managed by the BLM. The agency offers deer and elk habitat as an example, explaining that a restoration lease would allow a state fish and game agency or species-specific non-profit (like the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation) could direct its funds to restoring habitat for those species on lands it manages. Again, those leases cannot interfere with existing uses.

While the BLM already uses broad information systems to support its decision-making, the Public Lands Rule seeks to combine tools used to inform livestock grazing and forest health into a single toolset that will then be implemented across all types of lands and permitting. This will also result in more transparency for the public, enabling you and me to better make our voices heard in public hearings and comment periods.

A major part of that expanded use of information will, for the first time, be Indigenous Knowledge. This is also a major win for Haaland, who is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and has made it a priority to expand the role of Indigenous people in an agency that once worked to remove them from their land.

One of the major focuses of the Public Lands Rule is protecting areas that are already in good—or natural—shape. The BLM says the rule will work to, “maintain intact lands to help support wildlife, habitat connectivity, old-growth forests, and ecosystem function.”

“This rule honors our obligation to current and future generations to help ensure our public lands and waters remain healthy amid growing pressures and change,” states BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning.

Predictably, the oil and gas industries, and the politicians they pay for are apoplectic—even though domestic production of those energy sources has reached a record high during the Biden administration. Again, the Public Lands Rule does nothing to restrict already-permitted activities on lands managed by the BLM, nor rule out future energy leases.

“With this rule, President Biden is allowing federal bureaucrats to destroy our way of life,” Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) claimed in a statement promising to bring legislation to Congress challenging the Public Lands Rule’s legality.

“These conservation leases seem to be designed to preclude energy development on federal lands,” said Kathleen Sgamma, President of the Western Energy Alliance, and oil and gas lobbying group. Sgamma says she plans to challenge the rule in court.

“As stewards of America’s public lands, the Interior Department takes seriously our role in helping bolster landscape resilience in the face of worsening climate impacts,” stated Haaland. “Complemented with historic investments from President Biden’s Investing in America agenda, we are implementing enduring changes that will benefit wildlife, communities and habitats.”

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Land ownership lines wind drunkenly in a tangle of squares, rectangles, and zig-zags in central Wyoming. The area’s recreationists have learned to live with “no trespassing” signs. They know red and blue placards on the North Platte River signify where anglers and boaters can legally cross land. They pine over thousands of acres of untouchable public land surrounded by uncrossable private property.

But soon Wyoming residents will have almost nine more miles of North Platte River access and more than 75,000 additional acres of accessible public land after the Bureau of Land Management announced its largest land purchase in the state’s history. The chunk of land, which includes the purchase of more than 35,000 acres of a private ranch adjacent to 40,000 acres of previously inaccessible BLM and state land, sits just southwest of Casper, Wyoming, in the center of the state. The property is a rolling mix of bluffs and coulees, sagebrush flats and grasslands.

“This isn’t a little place,” says Jeff Muratore, a longtime central Wyoming resident and avid hunter of the land that will soon be opened. “It’s big, and it’s full of all kinds of terrain from the lowlands near the river to country that elk would roam in.”

Wyoming lawmakers talk openly about transferring federal lands to the state. Public land owned by the state is limited by law, which means if the state acquires more land it must then sell an equal number of acres. It’s not always a friendly place for public land, despite many people flocking here for recreation. So if the BLM can open 75,000 acres in Wyoming, then maybe it can happen anywhere. Perhaps slowly picking up chunks of land and signing easement deals isn’t just a dream. Maybe the painstaking process of working with thousands of private landowners over more than a dozen states is a solution to opening millions of acres of landlocked public land across the West.

“The priority now is to get more of them so we can establish a record of success,” says John Gale, Conservation Director for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers (BHA).

, mapping company onX and the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership released a showing that more than 9.5 million acres of federal land in 13 western states are permanently inaccessible to the general public. Anyone who has looked at land ownership maps to find a spot to hunt, fish, camp, or hike has seen those chunks of green or yellow with no discernible access point. But the sheer volume sent shockwaves through the outdoor community, and it’s even more alarming now, during a time of unprecedented crowding.

“We’re not making any more land, and our population is increasing,” says BLM director Tracy Stone-Manning. “But we do have the ability to open up land and open up access to the growing population.”

Those transactions cost a lot of money, though, sometimes tens of millions of dollars. And private landowners ready to sell don’t want to wait a decade for Congress to decide to act.

So outdoor groups pushed for full funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), which finally passed in 2019 as part of the John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation, Management, and Recreation Act. The same legislation included a wonky directive to federal land management agencies: and blocked or heavily restrict to the public that could be opened for improved hunting, fishing, and other recreational access.

The BLM did as it was told. In 2020, BLM officials asked people to nominate applicable parcels. Thousands of responses came in, and the agency narrowed it down to about . The nomination process is

more people recreated outside in 2020 than they did the previous year, a record high for outdoor participation on a finite amount of land. So more open land seems like a universal positive, right?

Maybe, but with caution, says Yufna Soldier Wolf, a tribal advocate for the Indigenous Land Alliance of Wyoming. Lands blocked to the public are, in some ways, also protected from the public. All of the public land we call ours was tribal ancestral land, largely stolen outright or through broken treaties. The recently purchased Wyoming land was used by the Northern Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, Dakota, and other High Plains Tribes.

“When you talk about management of the land, a part of that is the consultation process. What if you run into human remains? What if someone wants to put a trail in here? What if they want to set up an ORV trail?” says Soldier Wolf.

On the other hand, lands blocked from the public are also blocked from tribes, says Jesse Deubel, New Mexico Wildlife Federation’s executive director.

The state of New Mexico will soon to the public through the purchase of the L Bar Ranch west of Albuquerque. The Pueblos of Acoma, Laguna, Zuni, and Hopi Tribes all supported the land deal because it would open up access to more than 1,000 important archeological sites that had been blocked.

Stone-Manning understands concerns about Indigenous sites and, more broadly, issues of using public land responsibly. The BLM went through the federal environmental and cultural resources review process for the Wyoming purchase as it does all land deals. And the agency works with tribes to identify and protect important areas.

The BLM also needs more resources, she says, including funding for more education and enforcement. Right now, only 250 law enforcement officers patrol 245 million acres of land.

“[If we say] we don’t want to allow people in there because people will wreck it, then that is an admission of failure,” Stone-Manning says. “And we can’t accept that failure.”

While the Wyoming deal had been in the works long before the Dingell Act, it shows the power of agreements between a willing buyer and seller, Stone-Manning says.

Groups like BHA are interested in addressing other challenges presented by gridlocked land. The group raised more than $70,000 to fund the legal expenses of four Missouri hunters accused of trespassing in Wyoming. The hunters “corner crossed,” which means they stepped (using a ladder) from one parcel of public land to another at a place where four pieces of land meet. The four were found not guilty, but in most of the West, and one BHA and other groups hope will be settled in favor of public land users.

BHA also recognizes the risk of antagonizing private landowners by forcing them to allow corner crossing, Gale says. Conservatives in red states like Wyoming tend to push back against the federal government, especially when it comes to creating more public land. It’s why successful deals using LWCF money to purchase land from private owners who want to sell (like the one in Wyoming) feel like a bright spot in a West filled with more people and less trust.

“It is a finite number of lands that are landlocked,” Stone-Manning says, “and if we keep chipping away at it, we will eventually solve the problem.”

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