FORT COLLINS, Colo. — Two Western governors on Tuesday warned the Trump administration against changing a plan that protects a ground-dwelling bird across the West, saying it would send a message to states not to bother working together to save other imperiled species.
Colorado Democrat John Hickenlooper and Wyoming Republican Matt Mead said a 2015 conservation plan designed to save the greater sage grouse was the product of long negotiation among state and federal governments, conservation groups, industry and agriculture.
“If we go down a different road now with the sage grouse, what it says is, when you try to address other endangered species problems in this country, don’t have a collaborative process, don’t work together, because it’s going to be changed,” Mead said. “To me, that would be a very unfortunate circumstance.”
Hickenlooper said, “We are both very concerned that the new administration is going to take away all the guide rails that allowed this collaboration to exist.”
They appeared together at an energy conference at Colorado State University.
The 2015 plan is designed to protect the bird without putting it on the Endangered Species List, an outcome that most states try to avoid because it usually brings strict restrictions on oil and gas drilling, mining, agriculture and other activities to protect habitat.
But Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said in June his department would consider changing the plan to give states more flexibility to allow mining, logging and other economic development. Environmentalists have said the planned revision was just a back-door attempt to open up more land to mining and drilling.
Millions of sage grouse once lived across the U.S. West, but development, disease, livestock grazing and an invasive grass that encourages wildfires has reduced its numbers to fewer than 500,000.
The 2015 plan covers 11 states and had the approval of the Obama administration. It took years to negotiate and was hailed as a model for saving a species through cooperation, rather than the hammer of the Endangered Species Act.
