Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA)

After the bureau of Land Management (BLM) began formal planning for public lands under its charge in 1969, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA) of 1976 was passed due to congressional dissatisfaction with BLM land [Page 654]and resource management. According to the BLM, “FLPMA is called the BLM Organic Act because it consolidated and articulated BLM's management responsibilities.” The FLPMA is a BLM-specific law. The statute reduces agency flexibility, increases agency accountability to itself and Congress, and dictates an “intensive, but imprecise planning process” that requires “vast bureaucratic resources and produce[s] mountains of paperwork.”

Under FLPMA, decisionmakers at the BLM are required to consider the interests of all public land users before they determine how lands will be managed. The statute was ultimately designed to address natural scarcity of both renewable and nonrenewable resources (grazing, timber, minerals, recreation, wilderness, fish and wildlife, watershed, and so on).

Section 202 of FLPMA broadly guides land use planning and does not detail the steps by which BLM should generate and revise land use plans. Some of the more important management requirements of FLPMA for the BLM to observe principles of multiple use and sustained yield; use a systematic interdisciplinary approach (physical, biological, economic, cultural); give priority to the designation of areas of critical environmental concern; consider the relative scarcity of the values and alternatives for realizing those values; weigh long-versus shortterm benefits; comply with pollution control laws; and coordinate with other federal, state, tribal, and local government entities.