The Push to Unprotect America's Wild Lands: Industry Groups Want WSAs Gone
For decades, the Bureau of Land Management's wilderness system has operated on a tiered framework — a layered set of protections stretching from raw, congressionally designated Wilderness at the top, down through Wilderness Study Areas and finally to Lands with Wilderness Characteristics. It is a structure built through litigation, legislation, and decades of hard-fought compromise. Now, in the summer of 2026, a coalition of oil and gas associations, hard rock mining lobbies, ranching organizations, and off-road vehicle groups has moved in unison to dismantle that structure from the ground up — and the Trump administration handed them the pen to do it.
A review of public comments conducted by the Center for Western Priorities finds that drilling and mining associations, ranching groups, and off-road vehicle advocates are asking the Trump administration to weaken protections for congressionally designated Wilderness, eliminate Wilderness Study Areas, and cut off the wilderness designation pipeline on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management — effectively inviting industry and motorized-recreation groups to rewrite the agency's instructions for managing these areas.
The comment period, which closed in mid-August, was the culmination of a process that conservation advocates say amounted to an open invitation for extractive industries to redraw the rules governing millions of acres of American public land. The comment period for all three manuals closed August 14. What came in during those weeks reads less like a policy dialogue and more like a wish list from the boardrooms and trade associations that have long chafed at the restrictions wilderness protections impose on their operations.
What Are WSAs — and Why Do They Matter?
To understand what's at stake, it helps to know exactly what a Wilderness Study Area is and where it sits in America's public land hierarchy. The three manuals under review — Manual 6320, covering Lands with Wilderness Characteristics; Manual 6330, covering Wilderness Study Areas; and Manual 6340, covering land Congress has formally designated as Wilderness — correspond with different levels of legal protection and status for public lands managed by BLM. LWCs are the least protective: BLM can designate or release them entirely through its own land-use planning process, with no say from Congress.
According to the Wilderness Society, BLM has identified roughly 69.6 million acres of LWCs that don't overlap with existing WSAs. The overwhelming majority of WSAs were created pursuant to a one-time, congressionally mandated wilderness review. WSAs occupy a critical middle ground in the system — they are areas that have been identified as having wilderness qualities and are held in a form of protective limbo, awaiting a final Congressional determination on their fate. During that waiting period, agencies are required to manage them in a way that does not impair their wilderness character.
Manual 6340 describes BLM's responsibilities for managing and protecting designated wilderness areas to preserve wilderness character, including administering public purposes of recreational, scenic, scientific, educational, conservation, and historical use in accordance with the Wilderness Act. WSAs exist precisely so that future generations — and future Congresses — retain the option to make those designations. Eliminating them doesn't just open land to development today; it forecloses the possibility of protection tomorrow.
What the Comment Record Actually Shows
The review of comments submitted to the BLM's three open dockets paints a clear picture: each major industry category targeted a specific tier of the system for rollback, and together they covered the full spectrum of protections.
Mining Interests: Strip the Designation Pipeline
The American Exploration and Mining Association asked BLM to treat LWCs and WSAs as "temporary administrative classifications, not permanent designations" and to eliminate any land with mining potential from future WSA or LWC designations. In practical terms, this would mean that any time a geological survey found extractable mineral value beneath a landscape, that landscape would become ineligible for wilderness-level consideration — regardless of its ecological qualities or its value to the American public. It's a formula that would, over time, systematically hollow out the wilderness pipeline wherever resource deposits exist, which is to say across vast swaths of the American West.
This position isn't surprising given the broader federal posture toward mineral extraction in 2026. The Trump administration has moved aggressively to open federal lands for mining and drilling across multiple fronts. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum confirmed during a House Committee of Natural Resources meeting that the administration was committed to overturning a mineral withdrawal and granting mining leases; separately, the Department of Agriculture initiated the process to cancel a 2023 mineral withdrawal established by the Biden Administration, which had placed a 20-year moratorium on mining in a contested watershed.
Ranching Groups: Immediate Release of All WSAs
Livestock interests weren't content with nibbling around the edges either. The Public Lands Council, representing ranchers who graze livestock on public land, recommended "all existing WSAs be immediately evaluated for release." The implication of the word "immediately" is significant — it strips away the deliberative, stakeholder-driven process that has historically governed the resolution of WSA status. Rather than working through the slow machinery of Congressional review, the ranching lobby is asking the executive branch to unilaterally fast-track the release of protected land into general BLM management, where grazing permits, motorized access, and resource extraction become permissible.
The irony is that grazing itself is not prohibited in most WSAs. The restrictions that WSA status imposes are targeted specifically at activities that would permanently alter the wilderness character of the land — road building, mechanized use, drilling, and mining. Ranchers operating under existing permits can and do graze cattle in many of these areas today. What the Public Lands Council is really after is the removal of any constraint on new activities and the elimination of any future pathway to designation that might impose stricter limits on their operations.
Off-Road Vehicle Advocates: Attack the Legal Foundation
Perhaps the most legally aggressive position in the comment record came from off-highway vehicle groups, who chose not just to argue policy preferences but to challenge the statutory authority underlying the entire system. Colorado Offroad Trail Defenders and a joint filing from the American Motorcyclist Association and One Voice argued BLM's legal authority to inventory and protect wilderness-quality land lapsed when a one-time, congressionally mandated inventory period ended in 1991, and that the agency has no statutory basis to keep designating new protected areas.
The Utah Public Lands Alliance, an off-highway vehicle industry group, called for "resolving and releasing the remaining WSA estate" and a mandatory, recurring process to review and release LWCs. A mandatory, recurring release process would be the functional opposite of conservation — it would institutionalize a ratchet that clicks only in one direction, toward open access, with no mechanism to ratchet back toward protection.
The argument that BLM's inventory authority expired in 1991 has been floated in legal circles for years and has never been successfully litigated to a conclusion favorable to the OHV position. But in the current political environment, it doesn't need to win in court to have effect — it simply needs to appear in an administrative manual revision and be adopted by an agency whose political leadership is sympathetic. That's a much lower bar to clear.
The BLM's Three-Manual Framework: A Target-Rich Environment
BLM solicited input earlier this summer on revisions to three manuals that together govern nearly every acre of land in the agency's wilderness system and pipeline — those classified as Wilderness, WSAs, and Lands with Wilderness Characteristics — effectively inviting industry and motorized-recreation groups to rewrite the agency's instructions for managing these areas. By opening all three dockets simultaneously, the agency created an opportunity for a coordinated assault on every tier of the system at once, from LWCs that have never been formally protected to congressionally designated Wilderness areas that have carried the highest level of statutory protection since Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act in 1964.
The Bureau of Land Management sought public comment on potential updates to BLM Manual 6340 — Management of Designated Wilderness Areas — and indicated it was interested in receiving information and recommendations regarding whether updates, clarifications, or other revisions to existing policy may be appropriate. Even inviting comment on revisions to the manual governing congressionally designated Wilderness sent a signal that nothing was off the table. That category of land is supposed to be the most durable protection in the American system — it requires an act of Congress to designate and, in theory, requires an act of Congress to undo. Using an agency manual revision to weaken how that land is managed, without touching the underlying statute, is a more subtle but potentially just as damaging approach.
Southern Utah in the Crosshairs
While the comment record touches public lands across the entire West, conservation advocates have been especially vocal about the specific threat to the canyon country of southern Utah — one of the most biologically and geologically significant landscapes on the continent, and one that has been the focal point of public lands battles for half a century.
"Some of the nation's wildest places are at risk from the Interior Department's latest ploy," said Steve Bloch, Legal Director for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. "Southern Utah's redrock country — a wild landscape beloved by Americans for generations — is especially at risk and in the crosshairs of this effort. This analysis confirms that the Trump administration has not only invited the fox into the henhouse but it's helping to line up the chickens for slaughter."
Utah has been a battleground for public land access and protection fights for decades, with an especially contentious set of fights over Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. The WSA fight adds another front to that war. Utah's canyon country holds a disproportionate share of the West's remaining WSAs, and the Utah Public Lands Alliance's call for resolving and releasing "the remaining WSA estate" is, in geographic terms, largely a call to open that redrock country to off-highway vehicles, mineral exploration, and other uses that wilderness-quality management currently prevents.
A Broader Pattern of Public Lands Rollbacks
The WSA fight doesn't exist in isolation. It is one thread in a much larger unraveling of federal public land and conservation policy that has accelerated sharply in 2026. Twenty states and the District of Columbia filed two lawsuits in federal court to challenge the Trump administration's rollback of protections for endangered species and wildlife. The Trump administration has initiated a series of regulatory changes that opened the habitats of imperiled animals to drilling, farming, logging, and other commercial activities.
Separately, the U.S. Forest Service took another step toward rescinding the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, a bedrock conservation measure enacted 25 years ago to prevent industrial logging and roadbuilding across 45 million acres of national forestlands. The Trump administration wants to gut the rule and open up 45 million acres of roadless forest to clear-cutting and other harmful development enabled by roading.
Advocates point out that these are the places where grizzlies raise their cubs, where trout streams run cold, and where more than 25 million Americans get their clean drinking water. Once a road is cut through these forests, those values don't return. The same logic applies to WSAs. Once a WSA is released from protective management and a well pad or a two-track trail is punched through it, the wilderness character that made it worth protecting is gone — often permanently.
The OHV Question: Access Versus Character
For American men who spend weekends on trails — whether on foot, on a mountain bike, on horseback, or behind the wheel of a side-by-side — the WSA fight raises a question worth sitting with honestly: who benefits from the elimination of wilderness-quality protections, and at what cost?
The off-road vehicle community is large, passionate, and economically significant. OHV recreation generates billions of dollars annually and is a genuine part of Western outdoor culture. But the argument that WSA restrictions are the binding constraint on OHV access doesn't hold up under scrutiny. "This is an example of the Trump administration taking the public out of public land management," said Scott Fitzwilliams, the former U.S. Forest Service supervisor for the White River National Forest. He noted that travel management plans can be challenging and time-consuming, but were something "you grind through" and find a compromise for, finding a blend of motorized and non-motorized areas. "To dismantle that in short order, with no one else and little opportunity for public engagement is very frustrating," he said.
"Opening up areas to motorized use without analysis, without engagement to the public, has the potential to have the quickest and most adverse impacts to resources," Fitzwilliams added. For hunters and anglers — constituencies that overlap heavily with OHV users in the West — those resource impacts are not abstract. Degraded watersheds mean fewer trout. Fragmented habitat means deer and elk pushed off their historic ranges. The case for wilderness-quality management is, at its core, a case for the kind of intact, functioning landscapes that produce the game and fish that draw millions of American men outdoors every year.
It's worth noting that neither hunting nor fishing are prohibited in wilderness study areas. In the past, sportsmen's organizations have opposed the wholesale elimination of wilderness study areas. The traditional sporting community's skepticism of wholesale WSA release is rooted in exactly that understanding — that wild, unroaded country is productive country, and that motorized access, however appealing in the short term, has a way of diminishing the qualities that made a place worth visiting in the first place.
Historical Parallels and the Long Arc of Western Land Policy
Every generation in the American West has faced some version of this fight. The Sagebrush Rebellion of the late 1970s and early 1980s saw Western states and industry groups push hard for the transfer or loosening of federal land management. The movement produced political heat but ultimately failed to fundamentally restructure the federal land system. A second wave crested during the 1990s and early 2000s under the banner of the "Wise Use" movement, which similarly sought to prioritize extraction and motorized access over conservation.
What makes the current moment different is the degree of executive branch alignment with industry's goals. Previous pushes were largely legislative and legal — they required winning votes in Congress or favorable rulings in federal courts. The current approach, using agency manual revisions and comment periods to rewrite management policy, operates below the level of congressional action and can move faster and with less public visibility. Fair public land policies start with conversations among stakeholders, not unilateral action. The comment record on these three BLM manuals suggests that the conversation being had is a narrow one — dominated by the voices of those who stand to gain commercially from reduced protections.
In Montana, the dynamics play out in concrete and specific terms. More than 1.1 million acres of public land in Montana are still considered WSAs. Senator Steve Daines has claimed that at least 700,000 acres of that had been designated "unsuitable" for wilderness by their managing agencies, and argued that returning those lands to general management would allow more hazardous fuels removal, motorized access, and forest management. But critics have noted that the "unsuitable" designations in question were themselves products of a Trump-era planning process. The plan was not developed during "a 5-year collaborative process," as claimed, but under the direction of the first Trump administration, which ignored substantial public input made during scoping. When the draft plans were returned and published, all three heavily emphasized natural resources extraction.
Local Communities and the Public Engagement Question
Across Eagle County, Colorado, the stakes are similarly concrete. Areas in Eagle County targeted by the DOI review include Castle Peak and Bull Gulch, which are WSAs, as well as LWCs at Pisgah Mountain, Deep Creek, and at the base of the Flattops. These are places where local residents hike, hunt, ski in winter, and draw their water — landscapes woven into the fabric of regional identity and economy in ways that don't show up easily in an oil company's production spreadsheet.
The history of successful WSA resolution suggests that when the process is done right — when it involves real stakeholder engagement and reflects the full range of public values — workable outcomes are achievable. The impetus to protect one Nevada area came from a working group representing a diverse range of public land users, including livestock grazing permittees, private landowners, sportsmen, off-road vehicle enthusiasts, federal, state, and local government officials, and wilderness advocates. The group suggested boundaries that protected an incredible resource while releasing some acres for ranching, water users, and motorized recreation. The result was bipartisan legislation that became law in 2014. That kind of outcome is precisely what a rushed, industry-driven manual revision process forecloses.
What Comes Next
The comment period closed on August 14, 2026, and the BLM is under no obligation to act on the comments in any particular way — or to respond to them at all before revising the manuals. Conservation organizations are watching closely for any formal proposed revisions and are expected to challenge legally any changes that they argue exceed the agency's statutory authority or violate the Wilderness Act. The Interior Department has also opened parallel comment processes on wilderness manuals governing the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service, though those were not included in the Center for Western Priorities analysis.
The deeper question hanging over all of it is what Americans — particularly the men and families who camp, hunt, fish, hike, and ride across the Western landscape — actually want from their public lands. Polling consistently shows broad public support for conservation, for wilderness protections, and for the idea that some places should remain wild not because they have no economic value, but because that wildness is itself a value, one that belongs to everyone and can't be extracted, bottled, or sold.
The BLM's manuals are not glamorous documents. They don't make headlines the way monument reductions or drilling lease sales do. But they are the machinery through which policy becomes reality on the ground — the specific instructions that BLM field offices follow when a mining company files a claim adjacent to a WSA, or when an OHV club petitions for a new trail through a stretch of wild canyon. Rewriting them at industry's request, without meaningful conservation input, is not a technical exercise. It is a fundamental choice about whose America the West is going to be.
