Biden proposal would let conservationists lease public land much as drillers and ranchers do

[KPN]

15. BLM is actually the only profit-making agency in the federal

government last I knew. Annual receipts returned to the US Treasury from leases (oil and gas, land leases — transportation corridors, communication sites) and sales (timber on the stump, saleable minerals like gravel, etc) and other fees (grazing, recreational, special use events, and sundry others) exceed the annual operational budget of the BLM. Leases for conservation purposes will do likewise. You are right; one thing this likely will do is make extractive, commercial uses compete economically with conservation (non-extractive) use. Commercial uses may wind up costing a whole lot more than they do currently.

To me, this is an interesting if not exciting concept. Conservation and recreation have always had to compete as unpriced values economically with extractive and commercial uses of land. The dollar is the common denominator, but there’s never been a dollar value that can be placed on, say a desert tortoise or desert tortoise habitat except in the case of private reserves on privately owned lands (the price of the land, for example).