This article was originally published by Inside Climate News and is republished here through the Climate Desk collaboration.
As oil and gas production in the U.S. continues to reach record highs, the margin of Westerners who support public land conservation over increased oil and gas development also continues to climb.
In a new “Conservation in the West Poll” released February 19 by Colorado College, 72% of respondents from eight Western states said they would prefer their member of Congress to emphasize protecting clean air, water and wildlife habitat while boosting outdoor recreation over maximizing the amount of public land used for oil and gas drilling.
The figure marks a 2% increase from last year’s poll, and only 24% of those surveyed expressed interest in more oil and gas drilling and mining on public lands. The 48-point margin in favor of conservation is the highest in the poll’s fifteen-year history.
“The consensus favoring public lands conservation remains consistent and strong in the West,” said Katrina Miller-Stevens, an associate professor at Colorado College and the former director of the State of the Rockies Project, which runs the annual polls, in a statement. “Westerners do not want to see a rollback of national monument protections and there is no mandate for oil and gas development. Voters from all political ideologies are united in support of public land conservation in the West.”
Colorado College worked with Lori Weigel of New Bridge Strategy, a Republican pollster, and Dave Metz of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, a Democratic pollster, to survey 3,316 respondents, most of whom identified as politically conservative or independent. The poll, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, included at least 400 voters each from Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. Just under 40% of the survey-takers said they supported President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” platform.
The results come at a time when politicians in the nation’s capital and across the West are drumming up expansive, divisive plans for public lands.
Last Friday, the Trump administration fired over 5,400 employees across the departments of the Interior and Agriculture, most of whom worked for the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service. The date of the firings have led them to be called a “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” a reference to the murders in Chicago nearly a century ago by gangsters working for Al Capone.
Since taking office, Trump has appointed people with close ties to the oil and gas industry to lead key federal agencies overseeing public lands. His secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, who ordered last week’s Interior Department firings, was previously the governor of North Dakota, where he joined industry lawsuits to halt or overturn Biden-era regulations on oil and gas production. The Associated Press reported that he has relationships with several oil and gas executives and lobbyists.
Kathleen Sgamma, who, as Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management would be responsible for stewarding hundreds of millions of acres of public lands, has spent close to two decades lobbying for oil and gas companies across the West.
Lawmakers in Utah and Wyoming have demanded the federal government give control of public lands in their states, including areas protected by the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, back to state legislatures. Neither initiative went very far — Utah’s was rejected by the courts and Wyoming’s failed to make it out of the state’s Senate after a series of dramatic revotes.
“A lot of the actions that the Trump administration has taken or has proposed to take are pretty far out of step with what Westerners want to see in terms of our public lands,” said Rachael Hamby, policy director at the Center for Western Priorities. “Westerners care about public lands a lot and want to see them protected.”
No more than 40% of residents in any of the eight states offered approval for state-based land grabs, and an overwhelming majority of Westerners — 87% — supported career officials at various federal departments making decisions regarding public lands; only 9% wanted to see elected representatives appoint new officials “who come from other industries and may have different perspectives” on public land, water and wildlife decisions.
“A lot of the actions that the Trump administration has taken or has proposed to take are pretty far out of step with what Westerners want to see in terms of our public lands.”
Nearly three-quarters of Westerners agreed with federal efforts to combat climate change, though state-by-state levels of approval varied widely. Of the respondents from New Mexico, which has voted for Democrats in all but one presidential election since 1992, 77% backed federal action to combat climate change; in Wyoming, the only state where a majority of respondents said they supported President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda, 52% of those surveyed said they agreed with federal action on climate change.
Just under 90% of those surveyed expressed a desire to keep national monument designations implemented in the last decade in place. The new administration has begun to review those monument designations, and Trump shrunk some of them during his first term.
Other measures enjoying broad support across the West included giving private landowners the ability to conserve their land through conservation easements, using nature-based solutions to improve water quality and allowing the use of controlled burns to thin overgrown forests and lower the threats posed by wildfires.
As a new administration sets a different direction for public lands, Hamby warned that diverging from Westerners’ preferences would carry consequences.
“If elected officials are straying too far from what their constituents want to see,” she said, “they’re going to have to answer to their voters.”
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