- - Welcome to the Landscape, your show about America's parks and public lands. I'm Aaron Weiss with the Center for Western Priorities, where I just watched the solar eclipse with a bunch of kindergartners through eighth graders. It was, uh, definitely the best fun I'm gonna have this week watching, uh, watching their expressions and getting to photograph. Such a very cool event. - And I'm Kate Retinger in Salt Lake City.
I'm sad to say I missed the eclipse, but I am looking forward to seeing all of your videos and pictures of it on Instagram. So send those my way at Western priorities. - Alright, turning from the sky to the earth. Let's do a little news here. The Biden administration has finalized a mineral withdrawal that protects over 200,000 acres of public land in Colorado's Thompson Divide. The Thompson Divide is located in the central part of the state.
The withdrawal stretches from around Paonia all the way up to Carbondale. This is a 20 year withdrawal that will prevent new mining or oil and gas activity in the area. Of course, it won't affect existing active leases within that withdrawal area. This withdrawal has tons of support. It has been a decade plus long effort involving ranchers, hunters, outdoor enthusiasts, environmental advocates, and of course elected officials who have all been advocating for protecting the Thompson divide.
Over 70,000 people wrote comments supporting the mineral withdrawal. Uh, and I, I think you do have to give a shout out here to Senator Michael Bennett and John Hickenlooper for leading the way first with their core act, and then pushing President Biden, uh, and the Interior Department to get this mineral withdrawal done. So great job by everyone all the way around. - Also in the news this week, the Bureau of Land Management has finalized two really important rules.
The first is the Renewable Energy Rule, which updates regulations to incentivize and expedite wind and solar energy development on public lands. This rule is really important and will help expedite the renewable energy transition by creating a streamlined process for development in priority areas identified by the BL M's. Solar programmatic update. We spoke to the Wilderness Society's Justin Muse about that update in February, so you can go back and listen to that if you want.
Next up, the BLM has finalized its oil and gas rule, which codifies fiscal reforms passed in the Inflation Reduction Act, as well as raises bonding rates. This will help ensure taxpayers receive fair compensation for drilling on public lands and don't get stuck cleaning up messes made by the oil and gas industry. The rule also directs BLM to prioritize oil and gas leasing on lands with high drilling potential and away from areas with high ecological and recreational value.
This rule is the final step in a much needed overhaul of the federal leasing system, and we are so excited that it's finally done. We're expecting more rules to drop next week. So stay tuned. We'll go over all of these rules in an upcoming episode. Today we're joined by Trout Unlimited, CEO, Chris Wood. Chris has led Trout Unlimited for more than two dec.
Uh, Chris has led Trout Unlimited for more than two decades, following a career as Chief Policy director at the US Forest Service during the Clinton administration. Chris, thanks for being here. - It's great to be here, Kate, good to see you and Aaron, too. - Awesome. So let's just start off with, um, an easy question, a softball, what is Trout Unlimited? What kind of work do you guys do on the ground?
- So we're a conservation organization, um, that's comprised primarily, but not exclusively of people who love to fish. And, um, our mission is to recover and care for rivers and streams that are so important for trout and salmon so that our children can enjoy them in the future. - Enjoy. So tell us a little bit about what that actually, um, means in terms of policy work, uh, lobbying gr on the ground activities.
- So we are, you know, it's interesting when you look across the pantheon of conservation organizations, there are many who do policy and advocacy and litigation. The Sierra Club, NRDC, wilderness Society, I could go on. And then there are a whole host of ones that do, uh, on the ground habitat restoration, ducks Unlimited, pheasants Forever, national Wild Turkey Federation and so on. There's only one organization that does both, and that's Trout Unlimited.
And what we try to do is to leverage the goodwill that we create in thousands of communities across America by caring for and recovering rivers and streams and engaging communities in that work.
We try to leverage that goodwill into advocacy, whether it's for a campaign like an effort to stop a boneheaded mine in Southwest Alaska in Bristol Bay, or an effort to pass common sense legislation that would make it easier for people who had nothing to do with the creation of historic mine pollution to clean it up. So that's essentially our business model is, and it's, it's a tenuous one.
And there's a reason that many organizations don't do both things because, um, often, uh, when you're doing policy advocacy and you're doing litigation, you know, often not always, doesn't always have to be, but often it's, uh, uh, you know, can, can create an us versus them dynamic.
You know, there's a lot of people who are really frustrated with Trout Unlimited right now because we're advocating to take out the four lower Snake River dams that could potentially affect our ability to work in their communities to do restoration. But we've managed to navigate that line for, you know, more than 60 years now. And, um, it's, it's, it's, uh, it makes things interesting.
- So, as you think about that balancing act, both the policy side and the habitat side, what are the biggest threats right now facing rest Western rivers and watersheds? How much of, is it, much of it is driven by policy? How much of it is just cleaning up bad stuff in the past? - It's such a great question, Aaron. There's, there's a couple of answers. There's sort of this umbrella threat of climate change.
You know, trout are sort of the, uh, you know, they're the, um, the, the fish canary in the coal mine, if you will. Uh, because, you know, scientists have predicted that if some of these temperature models are accurate, we could see up to 60%, uh, decreases in native, uh, trout in the Rockies. And, and so what part of what we do to, uh, counter that is we help to recover the natural resilience of rivers and streams through restoration.
So these are systems that have been afflicted with development for 300 years, and we, what we do is we go in and we ident, we protect, reconnect, and restore these river systems. We basically make an effort to, for those systems that are intact, we make sure that they stay intact in perpetuity knowing that fish have to move through connected systems.
So even if you protect roadless areas in a headwater system or designate a wilderness, those fish still need to move in response to flood, fire and drought. So we work to reconnect these systems as well, and that, that work takes, uh, a whole, uh, host of, uh, different, uh, meanings. It could be in systems like the Klamath in Oregon and Wash Oregon and California.
We've already taken out one of the four Klamath dams and we're, we'll have the three others removed in the next two years, which will open up 450 miles of habitat for salmon that haven't been able to access those waters for over a hundred years. It can be that complicated. That was a 23 year endeavor.
Um, uh, but it could be as simple as replumbing some of these rivers so that when you've got, like in coastal Oregon, you know, the, these are, uh, salmon and steelhead that don't actually have problems with dams. They're coastal systems. What they have problems with are the highways along the coast with, and every time a creek that a salmon wants to run up goes underneath the road, they put it through a culvert, which is a pipe. And oftentimes that pipe can become separated from the creek.
It can actually be, it just literally is too high and it's not connected to the system any longer. And so we'll go in and replace those culverts with either, uh, arch list, culverts, or bridges so fish can move back up into those systems. And as of now, we've restored about 140 reconnected, I should say, about 140 miles of an ultimate goal of about 180 miles of habitat for those coastal stocks in partnership with a whole host of others.
Um, and then finally, the, the, the bread and butter of our organization, uh, especially at our chapter level, we have 400 chapters of volunteers across the country, is to conduct restoration. And that, um, restoration often occurs in the valley bottoms, which were historically the most biologically productive portion of the landscape. But that we settled, you know, we rode it and we timbered and we mined, and, you know, we did all those things.
And so by helping to protect, reconnect, and restore these priority waters that we've identified this national network of priority waters around the country, there's about 200 of them. We believe that we can help to build resilience into these systems so that they're better able to withstand the floods, the fire, and the drought that is gonna come, um, regardless of whether or not we stop emitting carbon tomorrow. Um, so that's essentially the work that we do.
We're not as active on the, uh, uh, policy side of climate change simply because there's not a lot of activity right now. But what what we do is we work more on the, basically our whole conservation model is, uh, effectively, um, an adaptation strategy helping these systems to adapt to a change in climate. But, and, and that's, so that's climate change.
And the reason that we try to make this very tactile is that, um, climate change is one of those issues where it's like, taxes, oh, climate change, what are you gonna do? And our job is to help regular, uh, community members understand whether they're members and supporters of TR Unlimited or not, that no, there are concrete actions that you can take today that will help not only to, you know, make fishing better in the future, but they're gonna help these communities.
Because when you protect a headwater system, you're diminishing downstream water filtration costs. And when you allow, when you reconnect a river to its floodplain, you're diminishing the energy of the next flood downstream on the bridge or the other, or the road or the infrastructure that's there. And when we do the kind of watershed scale restoration that we do in hundreds of watersheds around the western United States, we're creating family wage jobs in rural communities.
So, uh, those are some of the, the, some of the kinds of work that we do relative to climate change. But trout are very unique in that they're, um, as I said earlier, they're, they're, they're, they're an indicator species. And, um, as trout fair, so do we . And so we try to engage as broad a constituency in our work as we can. Whether or not they fish, uh, is really less important than that. They care about clean water, uh, and fishable, swimmable rivers.
- Well that sounds like a lot of work and also a lot of money. Um, , how do you fund most of these projects? And, and I know that there was a fair amount of money in the infrastructure law that passed a few years ago for e ecosystem restoration, so I'm curious if you're leveraging that funding as well. It's - Great question, Kate.
Um, in a, in a significant way, we are, we have secured about $130 million in, um, either inflation reduction act or bipartisan infrastructure law funding to do that kind of work that I just described, ecosystem resilience, watershed restoration. And that's probably only the beginning. Um, we have long worked with the federal agencies that are required to disperse this funding.
Uh, the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, they're all long, long time partners of Trout Unlimited. And so, uh, to date, we've secured about 130 million. Um, and I would say that of our restoration work, public funding, and that means, uh, federal and state, um, probably comprises about 75% of our restoration funding. Um, and but that 25% is really important. That's private philanthropy.
And that's what, you know, I I like to tell our supporters that you allow Trout unlimited employees to become alchemists because they can turn your $10,000 contribution into $150,000 in federal funding or state funding. And, and so, um, that's about the mix. I'd say it's about 75, uh, 25. And then we have, uh, for our broader policy work that is largely, obviously it's not funded by public funding.
The policy work is either all, uh, private philanthropy, whether we're advocating for the Clean Water Act rules or, uh, to modernize the mining laws or to pass Good Samaritan legislation That's either, uh, either, uh, private philanthropy or foundation funding. - Hmm. So Chris, I wanna just go back and touch on the infrastructure law funding again. What, like, I'm curious, just in terms of the scale, has it sort of, has it like turbocharged the work you're able to do?
Or is that an overstatement? - Turbocharged, I'm gonna write that down . It's exactly what it's done. So, so just to give you a sense of the turbocharging, we're sort of strange. Our fiscal year starts April one. Um, and we do that because of a, our field season is in the summer and we don't want the staff to have to, you know, stop their work in the field to, uh, get budgets together.
But, so we're gonna finish this fiscal year somewhere around $85 million, and we're projecting, uh, next year to be around 130 million. So that's the kind of turbocharging it's provided. It's, it's allowed a dramatic, it's really, it's truly a once in a career for me. I could say generation, 'cause I've been working about a generation, but it's a once in a career opportunity.
And I remember back in, in 2008, I was on the Obama transition team, and there was talk of a, a big package, a big infrastructure package. And I remember it came in just short of a trillion dollars. And I was employed by Trout Unlimited. I was running our conservation programs at that point, and our government affairs VP and I tried desperately to build in ecosystem resilience, you know, natural resources, infrastructure as an element to that law.
And we failed. But Congress did it this time and they did it in a really significant way. And, you know, over the next three or four years, you know, barring, you know, political consequences for that funding gets clawed back. We have an opportunity, like we've never had to help, as I said earlier, to recover the resilience of these rivers and streams that we to depend on so much.
- You know, that's, it's interesting because we often think of the IRA as the climate bill, but obviously the infrastructure law has a lot of, of implications for, you know, improving our climate as well, which is really cool. Yeah. - Well, just to that point, Kate, you know, we, we secured a 40,000,005 year, $40 million agreement with the US Forest Service.
If you looked at all of the native fish, fauna, trout and salmon fauna in the west, and then you looked at the Greenlands on a map, there's almost a perfect overlay. And so I think 7 million of that was infrastructure funding and the balance came from the Inflation reduction Act. So it's just a, it's a tremendous opportunity. It's, it's a once in a career opportunity to, you know, make hay while the sun is shining.
- You mentioned abandoned mines earlier, and obviously this is something we're all aware of, living in the West, you drive down I 70 in Colorado, you drive through any state highways in Arizona and you, you see the remains of mines sitting there by the side of the road. But how big of a problem is it? Give us a sense of the scale, uh, as far as watersheds and rivers go. How many are, are threatened and, and what do we need to do to, to mitigate these issues? And is it getting worse with time?
- Thanks Aaron. Yeah, so just to give you a sense of the scope and the scale, EPA estimates that 40% of western headwater systems, higher order systems that are up in the mountains are deleteriously affected by these abandoned hard rock mines. And to be clear, these aren't Superfund sites, these aren't mines where the government can go find a polluter and hold them accountable. The, the, - These are old, the old timey prospector era. - These are old timey prospector era mines.
And I'll tell you a story. I just recalled this 'cause I wrote about it recently when I came to, I came to Trout Unlimited, I just a quick correction, Kate. I actually have only led it since 2010, but I've been here, uh, since I worked at the Forest Service in 2001. And I remember we, we, I came over, excuse me, readjust, promulgated this thing called the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. It protected 60 million acres of land.
And so I was sort of high on this idea that we can do this conservation at scale because we had been able to, you know, get that regulation passed in 18 months and protected 60%, or I'm sorry, 60 million acres, you know, 2% of the American land mass. It was amazing. So I came to tu full of these big ideas, and the biggest was, oh, we're gonna be able to, we're gonna be able to pass a law to make it easier to clean up abandoned mines. They, they negatively affect 40% of Western headwater streams.
There's about 500,000 of 'em out there. Not, not all are created equal, but about 110,000 pollute water. And we went to, and we found, and there's, we can talk more about this, but there's, uh, provisions of the two of the most important laws in America for stopping pollution and holding polluters accountable. The Clean Water Act in c the Superfund law actually provide a profound disincentive for would be good Samaritans organizations like Trout Unlimited who wanna go out and make things better.
We had nothing to do with the creation of the pollution, but you know, remember I talked about the Forest Service lands and native fish, when you look at where abandoned mines are, and then you look at where trout and salmon are, it's another perfect overlay . And so I thought, well, this'll be a no-brainer.
Let's go out and find a site where we can model the work that we wanna do, and then we can take that back to Capitol Hill and convince them of the righteousness of our cause and how common sense it is. So we, we, we went to Snowbird Ski and Summer Resort, you guys have probably heard of Snowbird, and it's between, uh, Provo and Salt Lake City. And so we wanted two population centers that were nearby, and they had a bunch of old abandoned minds.
And I remember I took a trip out there and I walked the field with our engineer who was gonna do the cleanup. His name was Ted. And Ted seat said, you see those, uh, dirt bike trails over there? And I said, yeah, I can see 'em. And they were going over these mounds and he says, those are tailings, the lead levels in those tailings are 1100 times the federal standard. And so kids were riding their dirt bikes over these tailings, kicking up dust obviously, and breathing in it.
And, and in that creek down below, uh, it's called American Four Creek, there were these Bonneville cutthroat trout, which is an imperiled, uh, trout species, um, that we, we care a lot about. And so we, uh, we went to the EPA, this is during the Bush administration, and we said, Hey, we'd like to clean these things up. And um, the problem is that EPA is a wonderful regulatory agency, but what they're not is a permitting agency. They're not accustomed to allowing, uh, an organization like ours.
So, so Snowbird was technically responsible for these mines cleaning these up there wasn't because it's their land now because it was their land. Right, exactly. Once you acquire the land, you buy a liability - Including all the problems on it, okay? - Yep. Including all the problems. And, and that's part of the problem for a wouldbe Good Samaritan, once you go in and touch that mine, even if you make things materially better, you become part of the chain of custody.
- So now it's your problem too, - , and, and either the government can come after you, which frankly is unlikely or more likely someone who lives in the area, just a citizen could file a citizen suit under the Clean Water Act. And four, you could spend a couple hundred grand to make it 90% better, and then, but it might be 5 million to build a wastewater treatment plant to make it a hundred percent better. And they could sue you and you could lose that case.
So we, we started negotiating with the EPA and the EPA is a great partner. I'm not casting aspersions on them, but there was a, a moment in time, and my friends at EPA don't like when I tell this story, but there was a moment when there were about 14 EPA and Department of Justice lawyers on the phone negotiating with me who, whose law experience encompasses taking four Stanley Kaplan courses before I dropped out of the LSATs.
Um, and then our general counsel and the lead negotiator for the EPA actually said to us, we're giving you a better deal than we've given any other PRP ever potentially responsible party. And, and our point was, but we're not responsible.
And so what this Good Samaritan legislation that you asked about, uh, Aaron would do is it would, it's a pilot program because we've, I thought foolishly 20 years ago, this was gonna be an easy lift and that we'd be able to convince the Congress of, as I say, of the righteousness of our way. And, uh, I was wrong. So we, we gave up on the big permitting program, and instead it's a pilot of 15 projects where you have to come up with a plan of operation.
It goes through notice and comment under nepa. It's not exempt from NEPA or anything, and then it goes to the EPA for approval. So if, and if you do what you said you were gonna do, even if you don't get to a hundred percent of water quality standards, um, you can do that project and walk away. Now that said, if you make matters worse, you are liable. So this is, this isn't, you - Do have to, you do have to make it better. At least it's, you've, - You've gotta make it better.
You have to do what you said you were gonna do when you've gotta make it better. And it has to be measurable. And as of now, tha thanks to the leadership of, uh, senators Heinrich, a democrat from New Mexico, and Rich, a Republican from Idaho, we have 36 co-sponsors, half Democrats, half Republicans on that bill in the Senate. And we're about to introduce it in the house. Um, and I feel as confident as I've ever felt that we'll get this done. It's a bill that has a seven year time horizon to it.
And the idea is that over seven years we'll get these 15 projects done and then come back to Congress and say, look, we can do this. Let's take it to scale. Let's begin to make it so that our, again, our rivers are more drinkable, fishable and swimmable. - That's really exciting. So you, you have a good feeling that that's gonna pass? - I do. I do. And I, I actually think it, it, it may or may not be part of a broader package.
One of the challenges we have in this country is that unlike every other commodity that is produced off public lands, there's no either tax or royalty on the production of minerals from public lands. So, uh, unlike coal, say, uh, they have an abandoned mine Land fund, which is part of the surface Mine Coal Reclamation Act that abandoned mine. Land Fund has generated over 11 billion, I think it's $12 billion in funds.
Basically it's a tax on the production of coal that go into an abandoned mine land fund, which communities across Appalachia and in places like Colorado and Wyoming and other Montana, other coal mining states out west have used to clean up abandoned coal mines. We don't have an analog like that with hard rock funding. So hard rock mining rather.
So part of the challenge is to try to modernize and, and, and we may wanna talk about this a little bit, but there's an a, a demand right now to build, to, to build more of these. So-called critical minerals or rare earth mineral mines, uh, to power the clean energy future. And I think there's a grand bargain that's just waiting to be had where we could pass common sense legislation like the Good Samaritan legislation, which there's almost nobody opposed to it.
I mean, there's, there's no constituency for Yellow Rivers , right? There's no, no lobby group is advocating for more orange rivers in, in the west. Um, but if we could modernize the 1872 mining lawn and create attacks a royalty on the production of minerals, and perhaps allow a little more discretion into the process where you decide where to mine, we could probably make it a little bit easier or facilitate the development of these critical minerals in the right places.
And I'm optimistic that not only will we get good Sam done, but that we can come up with that grand bargain to better meet the needs of the country while protecting the environment. - So you did mention critical minerals and just the, this need to, to mine more in order to power the renewable energy transition. Um, obviously earlier you mentioned climate change as one of the biggest threats to Western watersheds.
So, um, I'm curious where you fall on this question of new mining, because obviously mining mines are one of the biggest threats to watersheds. Climate change is one of the biggest threats. How do you balance the trade off there and what do you see as, um, how do you, how do you think that the conservation community should be thinking about this issue of new mining? - It's, it's a great question, Kate. I mean, the mining in America has to happen.
It has to happen. Or we have to accept the fact that it will happen in third world countries where they don't have environmental standards and they're forcing children to go into, mines literally barefoot to mine without any child labor laws. We import right now 60% of all of our critical minerals from China. And that's simply not sustainable. And, you know, so, so what we try to do, you know, try to unlimit it is sort of an we're equal opportunity conservationists.
We'll work with anybody who cares about conservation. And what I think needs to happen is we have to get the industry to agree that first of all, there should be a royalty. And second of all, there should be some discretion lent. Right now, the 1872 Mining law says we we're, we're operating mining in this country on a law that was passed when Ulysses s Grant became president. He was president for two terms. This is passed in his first term.
And so, you know, what, what we need to do is convince the industry that they should be subject to a royalty. And I'm not an expert in what the royalty should be, but we needed to clean up the legacy of bad, of not bad mines, of mines from history where bad things happened and people were well-intentioned. I don't think they knew what they were doing, but you know, we've got a tremendous legacy of pollution to attend to. And a royalty would help with that.
And the second thing we need the industry to do is to agree that there should be some places where you can't mine, because right now, under this law that was passed when Ulysses Es Grant was president, if the minor, if the company can actually prove that they can make a profit, the agency is not allowed to say no to the mine, whoever the relevant regulatory agency is.
And that's ludicrous because there are sacred sites, there are drinking water supplies, you know, there are just areas that are culturally or environmentally sensitive or significant that these agencies should be able to say, these lands are not suitable for mining at this time. They can't do that today.
But in return for giving those two things up, I think the, we ought to be willing to say that there's probably some way to expedite the permit process in places where you're not gonna have that kind of degradation to crucial resources so that we can provide the critical minerals and rare earth minerals that we need to, you know, power up our iPhones and allow the battery charge to hold longer or allow the, the solar panels to, um, extend their charge.
You know, there, there's a whole host of reasons we need these minerals. And I think if we go about this in a thoughtful way, we can strike a, a really reasonable compromise that allows for the protection of cr critical areas while also allowing expediting mining in areas that, you know, will help us with the clean energy transition. - Chris, as you were talking, I remembered something that I learned about, about a year ago.
Um, the, the Earth MRI, the USGS is currently undertaking this effort to actually figure out where all of the minerals are underground in the us. Um, and it seems like that would be really useful to do the type of planning that you're talking about. Um, you know, the BLM is work, working on a plan right now that would expedite solar permitting in areas with a lot of sun. So do you see something similar to that being a solution here? - Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
Um, we actually have done some of that mapping that sh Trout Unlimited that shows where the known critical minerals are. Granted we're not geologists by and large, but that shows where the critical minerals are and then where the, you know, the high conflict areas are likely to be.
And again, sort of like I used to work for the chief of the forest services I mentioned earlier, and he would, he would always say that, you know, there's, there's, uh, there's three kinds of issues about, he said about 10% of the issues are red light issues where you just don't agree with the person across the table.
And he said there's probably 20% that are green light or uh, uh, yellow light issues where, you know, you know, we can probably figure out a, a path forward, but it's not, we're not in total agreement. And then the balance are all green. And this to me feels like a yellow light issue.
If we could, again, sit down with the industry, find out what the, uh, I mean I met with a mining company, CEOI don't know, um, two and a half months ago, and they told me it's taken them 20 years to try to get a mine constructed in one of their Western states. That shouldn't be the case. They shouldn't have to waste all that time and money.
We should, we should give the agency managers the ability to say because, because they don't have the ability to say no. Now what they do is they stall and that just wastes everybody's time and it wastes money. So give them the ability upfront before these companies have sunk millions and millions of dollars, give them the ability to say, no, this is not a good place to mine. This is a sacred site for a local, for an indigenous tribe, and we're not gonna allow you to mine here.
Okay? The mining company can then say, fine, I'm not gonna spend the next 19 years then trying to get in here. I'm gonna go put my resources somewhere else where I know I've got a, an either an orange or, or a yellow or a or a green light. And that's what the 1872 Mining Law doesn't do.
And what I, what my, my friends in the industry, and I don't say that sarcastically, they, the mining industry is supporting a lot of our abandoned mine cleanup 'cause they don't wanna do it 'cause they don't wanna be part of the chain of liability. So they give it to us. But , but you know, I i I tell 'em that the 1872 mining law is the biggest bugaboo. It's the, it's the anvil around your neck. It's what's dragging them down.
'cause number one, it doesn't allow them to deal with these legacy sites, which gives the industry a bad name. And then number two, it makes it harder to permit these mines moving forward, especially when they're in really controversial places. So I do think that there's a grand bargain that's just waiting to be had there. Um, but I'm an, I'm an angler and anglers are by definition optimists. So - . Alright, so, alright, so help me understand the optimistic path forward here.
And I'll apologize on the front end for the length of this setup, but, uh, I wanna make sure that folks who are listening understand the political landscape right now.
Because the other bit that's in play here is what's known as the Rosemont decision, which is a big court ruling affecting mining, new mines everywhere that says, uh, mining companies cannot just dump their tailings on a mining claim if there are not also valuable minerals there that has upended the mining industry, but is in fact a strict reading of what 1872 Mining law says. So on the one hand right now, you have a legislation that would essentially reverse the Rosemont decision.
Take us right back where we were before, that's being backed by Senators Rich and Cortez Masto. So bipartisan legislation there to undo Rosemont and restore the status quo. You have legislation to reform 1872, put a, uh, permitting process in place, put a royalty in place, and that's being backed by, uh, Senator Heinrich and Chairman Alva in the house.
It doesn't seem to me looking at that, that there's a whole lot of middle ground there, but you seem to be more optimistic than I am that somehow all of that could come together and result in a bill that gets passed. Uh, and then I I will just note it happens to be an election year. There's not a whole lot of time left in Congress. Uh, so walk me through the optimistic path forward here - And, and then a miracle happens - And then a miracle happens. Yeah, .
- So, uh, not only does the, you know, and, and I consider Senator r and, uh, Senator Cortez masto to be friends, but not only does their bill undo Rosemont and es reestablish the status quo pre Rosemont. - Yeah, it's, it's worse in many ways. Yeah, - , it's actually worse. And I testified on this not long ago, it, it could potentially allow for mining in otherwise, uh, withdrawn ar with areas that have been withdrawn from mining.
So when I testified, uh, before, uh, Senator Cortez Masto, um, I was alongside a gentleman from the mining community who also testified, and obviously we were opposed to her fix and he was supportive of it. And she came over after the hearing and said, would you two work together and come up with a solution here? And, and we did that in good faith, and I think we've actually come up with a solution that would fix Rosemont for the industry. But my point here is that's a give, right?
That's a give to allow this clean energy economy to move forward, et cetera. It would be, i, if I were in the industry, and I'm obviously not, I mean, I, I work for a conservation group, but if I were in the industry, I would be saying, you know, let's, let's look at the royalty question. Let's argue about what the right royalty should be. We're making money hand over fist. Let's look at whether there is some place where we can allow in the process, where we can allow discretion.
It could be that Congress passes a law that says the Secretary of Interior, upon passage of this bill may use the following three criteria to withdraw lands from mining for 10 years, and then it's revisited every 10 years. Right? We, there, there, there, there is a way to thread this needle. Um, and I, I think we're in that moment right now. Now there's a great distance between Senator Heinrich's Mining reform bill and you know, where the industry is today.
But I think with the combination of Rosemont and Good Samaritan and, uh, the, the potential to fix the discretion issue and to fix the royalty issue, I think we're in a moment that we haven't been in in a long time. And, you know, I hope it's something that comes together. It will have to come together quickly because I think people like, uh, Senator Joe Manchin will be important to making this happen. And, um, and this could happen under the broader umbrella of permitting reform.
And Senator Manchin is retiring, uh, at, at the end of, uh, this term and, or, or at least he's not running again. I shouldn't say he's retiring, but, um, you know, I think the moment is now, if we're gonna do this, come up with this grand bar.
I don't think where I've testified about mining reform, probably in my 20 years as a conservation or as a nonprofit conservationist, I've probably testified on mining reform seven times and we're never gonna get the bill that, you know, the conservation community would want. But I think we can get a compromise, you know, where we, we give on Rosemont, they give on royalty.
You know, we settle in the middle on Good Sam, you know, we find some logical way to create some level of discretion where agency managers early in the process to help the industry early in the process say, no, this is not an appropriate place to mind.
I mean, I, I just, again, I believe in my heart of hearts there's an absolute compromise that's right here in front of us that will allow us to reduce our reliance on countries like China who are gonna, they're gonna use the fact that we need 60% of, of our critical minerals from their country. They're gonna use that to control us. They're gonna limit supply chains to us. You know, it's not like things are easing with tech China. They're becoming more and more tense.
And so in order for America to control its own destiny, destiny and to deal with these, um, these issues of climate change and in the transition to a clean energy future, I don't see how we do it without conducting domestic mining in America. So let's, let's as conservationists, let's try to get something for that. - All right. So just to mix fish and foul here, you're saying the trout folks are telling me to watch lame duck - . That's pretty good, .
- Alright, so what keep your eye after on what happens after the election? That's the, the short of answer. - Yeah, maybe. So - all right. - I don't have, look, this is, I I feel like I'm a voice in the wilderness on this one. I, I, it's not like I've got this cabal of senators who are like, yeah, - , - But we're working on it. - But, but you're - Optimistic. We're working on it. Yes. - All right. One final question for you before we let you go.
Um, why, you mentioned earlier that as an angler, you're an optimist, and I'm curious, why do you think anglers make such good conservation advocates? Why are you able to sort of, you know, walk into worlds almost as you do at Trout Unlimited? - Oh, such a good question. So it's interesting. I'll, I'll just, I'll take a, the long road to get to your answer.
Um, when I was at the US Forest Service doing this, so-called Roadless Rule, uh, one of my jobs was to take all the meetings that the chief of the Forest Service, they call their, the head, head of the agency, the chief, um, in fact, my brothers, uh, made a card up for me that said Chris Wood shaman on it, um, because they thought, they thought the chief title was so funny, . But, um, one of my jobs was to take all the meetings that the chief didn't wanna take.
Uh, and we heard from everybody, all the regulated community, the miners, the oil and gas community, the timber interests, all of them. And then we heard from the environmental community all the, you know, landscape of environmental groups that you'd imagine we didn't have a single me. And, and, and by the way, when I say he had me take all the meetings he didn't wanna take, that was all the meetings, .
- Um, - And, um, the single interest we didn't get a meeting request from was the hunting and angling community, not one. And they stood to gain the most from the roadless rule because fish and wildlife benefit the most from protecting those 60 million acres of high quality wilderness quality, really, um, backcountry areas.
And so when I left the agency, I, I said, and I know, obviously I know a lot, I'm a hunter and an angler myself, and I know how passionate we all are about these landscapes and, and protecting them because we're in them. We're, we're literally in them. We have a, I honestly think that sportsmen and women have this visceral connection to the land. It's not, it's not abstract, it's based on our experiences with our family and friends and alone in the woods or on the river.
And, um, I wanted to find a conservation group where I could create an analog to the environmental community, but made up of hunters and anglers. And, and that's why I ended up coming to Trout Unlimited. Um, at the time we were, uh, we, we had about 30 staff, 25 of whom were in the headquarters office. Today we have 370 staff, uh, about 30 are in the headquarters office. We put our people where the resources are.
And, um, I think to answer your question directly, Kate, I think the reason that anglers are such effective advocates is because we're out there on the water every day, and we completely understand how polluted rivers impact fishing. And we understand how when you have a healthy stream side area where you've got shading of the stream and you've got large trees that are falling into the stream, that's where the biggest fish typically hold behind.
Um, so it's been, it's been really heartening and, and I think hunters and anglers are, um, a more conservative lot than perhaps most people that, um, uh, belong to environmental groups.
And while it's vital that we work together, I think we can have conversations, um, with people like Senator Rich and Senator Manchin, that, um, whether you're just coming in from a, we have the shared perspective of hunting and fishing and a shared value system, and it just makes it easier to talk about some of those, you know, those yellow light and maybe even some of the red light issues.
Now, I, I haven't quite convinced Senator Rish of the wisdom of taking out the four lower Snake River dams, but I'm not giving up on them. - I think that's where we're gonna leave it. Chris Wood, CEO of Trout Unlimited. Thank you so much for all of your perspective today, and we will keep our eye on that legislation and the hope for maybe finally overhauling that 1872 Mining law, - Kate Herron, it was a pleasure to be with you. Thanks for having me.
- We've got some more great news to end this episode. In addition to the Thompson Divide Protections, the Biden administration has published a final rule to curb methane waste on public land. The Bureau of Land Management's methane waste rule requires oil and gas companies to reduce venting and flaring of methane fix leaks, and reimburse taxpayers when companies waste methane, rather than capturing it and sending it to American homes.
Methane is the main component of natural gas and a major climate warming pollutant. So this is a big deal. People have been working to curb methane waste on public lands since the Obama administration, and we're incredibly grateful to the Biden administration for getting it done. Watch out this month for a number of other federal rule makings or regulations that will affect public lands. And stay tuned for an episode on that in the next few weeks. - Well, that is it for today, folks.
Like Kate just said, we are anticipating a busy month of rule makings. Kate, also, you just talked to a bunch of reporters at the Society of Environmental Journalism Conference about this. Uh, they have a pretty good sense now of what's going on. - Well, that was certainly the goal. Um, they asked really smart questions and we gave them some resources including a one pager and with a lot of the rules we're expecting as well as a rundown of the rulemaking process.
If anybody is interested in seeing that, um, you're welcome to email us podcast@westernpriorities.org. And like I said, um, we're planning to run through those rules on an episode here of the landscape. So stay tuned for that. - Well, thanks again to Chris for taking the time to chat with us. And thank you for listening to the landscape.