The Senate Just Protected More than 1M New Acres of Public Land
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Senator Mitch McConnell praises the new conservation bill.
On Tuesday, the Senate passed a landmark public lands bill that extended protections to more than one million acres of public lands. Voting 92 to 8 across partisan lines, this bill is a huge win for those of us who care about protecting our cherished public lands for future generations. The bill designates 1.3 million acres of land as wilderness in Utah, New Mexico, Oregon, and California and permanently reauthorized a federal program to pay for conservation.
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In a rare moment of bipartisanship from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican celebrated the bill, telling the NY Times: “It touches every state, features the input of a wide coalition of our colleagues, and has earned the support of a broad, diverse coalition of many advocates for public lands, economic development, and conservation.”
In addition to the new wilderness designation, Death Valley and Joshua Tree National Parks will expand, 370,000 acres of land surrounding North Cascades NP and Yellowstone NP have been permanently withdrawn from mining claims and three new national monuments are now to be administered under the National Parks Service: the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Miss., the Mill Springs National Monument in Kentucky and the Camp Nelson National Monument in Kentucky. The Land and Water Conservation Fund, a 1964 federal program designed to use offshore oil and gas royalty fees to pay for onshore conservation was also permanently reauthorized. It expired on Sept 30, 2018, and was historically only renewed a few years at a time.
