The House took the important first step to pass H.R. 2016, the National Landscape Conservation System Act, which consists of 10 percent of BLM's lands in over 866 individual conservation units including National Monuments, National Conservation Areas, Wilderness, Wilderness Study Areas, Wild and Scenic Rivers, National Scenic and Historic Trails and other designations.

While this bill is just a simple Congressional stamp of approval on a conservation system created administratively under the Clinton administration, it gives much deserved recognition and increased status to the 26 million acres of the BLM’s crown jewels. These places protect wildlife in landscape scale and watershed size chunks across the American west, including some of the most spectacular hunting and fishing opportunities including places with Gold Medal trout streams and world-class mule deer, bighorn sheep and elk hunting.

Read more about H.B. 2016.