The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) manages 264 million acres of the some of most magnificent public lands in the American West. Experiencing New Mexico's mesas and sage brush plains, California's rocky coast, Utah's redrock rock wilderness, Colorado's alpine peaks, or Arizona's canyons and deserts will explain why 55 million people visited BLM lands to recreate in 2006.
With a majority of BLM's land open in some form to off-road vehicles, The Wilderness Society is tremendously concerned about the BLM's inadequate consideration of quiet recreational users and healthy ecosystems. Our best opportunity to secure a sustainable approach to managing for quiet recreation, natural experiences, and healthy ecological conditions rests with the variety of planning documents related to its recreation program, which includes land use plans, travel management plans, strategic plans, and interpretive plans, to name a few. These plans each have a specific purpose that collectively shape the way BLM manages the land and its natural resources as well as the activities that occur on the land.
The two planning opportunities that hold the greatest potential to protect the natural resources and recreational opportunities that exist on BLM lands are the travel management planning process and the land-use planning process. The land use plan, or Resource Management Plan (RMP), establishes the goals, objectives, and standards for a specific planning area and identifies which areas of the landscape are to be preserved and set aside for natural, quiet recreation experience and which lands are for more intensive, high impact uses such as oil and gas development or off-road motorized vehicle use. While the RMP sets out the standards, goals, and objectives as they relate to various uses, including motorized recreation, the specifics of exactly how quiet, natural recreation as well as off-road motorized recreation are managed are fleshed out in the comprehensive Travel Management Plan (TMP). Any decision made in the TMP concerning recreation must meet the standards laid out in the more comprehensive RMP. It is important to participate in both of these planning processes in order to effectively engage in recreation planning on BLM lands.
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