The Trump administration opened thousands of acres of land in Nevada and New Mexico in oil and gas drilling, geothermal development and hard rock mining, reversing the protections that President Joseph R. Biden Jr. established in the last weeks of his inauguration.
Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins announced the decision Friday as part of a wide-ranging emergency order to allow logging of more than half of the national forest, or nearly 113 million acres. Rollins said the movement was designed to increase the production of wood. Critics said the government is supporting the private industry at the expense of the environment.
The idea of the logging announcement was a meaningless addendum. The agency has also ended its protection covering federal lands in Nevada and New Mexico to “help the production of critical minerals.”
On Monday, the agency confirmed that the affected land was in Nevada's Ruby Mountains. Nevada's Ruby Mountains, approximately 264,000 acres were protected from the development of oil, gas and geothermal energy.
The US Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, said in a statement that it “is removing the burdensome Biden-era regulations that curb energy and mineral development, stimulate rural communities, and reaffirm America's role as the global energy power.”
The Biden administration has enacted protections that are expected to last for 20 years for both regions, in response to the demands of Native American tribes and communities. Legislators from both countries said they were furious and vowed to fight the move.
“The Trump administration's decision is a betrayal of trust,” Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, said in a statement. “This kind of top-down decision-making is not even an attempt to discuss or hear about the affected communities, but it's the very wrong thing about this administration.”
Ralph Vigil, organizer of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance, an environmental nonprofit, said the mining industry would hurt the area's outdoor recreational economy.
“No one in this community wants a extraction industry or a threat to our fork,” he said.
Sen. Katherine Cortez Mast, a Nevada Democrat, wrote on social media site X:
Biden has prioritized the fight against climate change, restricted drilling, mining and other activities on 674 million acres of public land and federal waters.
President Trump has argued that climate change, an established scientific fact, is a hoax. He directs federal agencies to reverse all policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions that heat the planet. Instead, he wants to increase the demand and production of fossil fuels, including public lands and federal waters.
Trump has also evoked wartime powers to increase production of so-called critical resources, including uranium, copper, potash, gold, and “other elements, compounds, or materials,” considered important by the National Energy Council, created by the President.
Ruby Mountain has no known oil or gas reserves. In 2019, the Forest Service concluded that oil and gas leases were not viable there. At the time, environmental groups called it discovering a victory over the Trump administration's efforts to expand drilling.
Russell Courman, executive director of the Nevada Wildlife Federation, said he fears that the oil company will try to lease Mount Ruby's package anyway. He calls the area the “throb of Nevada's outdoor recreation,” and lives in the state's largest mule deer population. There was a bipartisan effort in Nevada to protect the area.
“Out of Nevada forces are now deciding how public land is managed,” Courman said.
The land in the Upper Pecos basin was of interest to hard rock miners, which extract minerals such as rocks and copper. In the 1990s, runoff from closed mines was contaminated by the Pecos River, affecting local water supply. In 2019, Australian businesses applied for permission to carry out exploratory drilling of gold, copper, zinc, lead and silver. It sparked movement to protect the area forever.
