BLM could lift protections on some public land in the region
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is considering lifting a set of land protections that could potentially open millions of acres in Alaska to mineral entry and state management. Some of the lands that could lose this federal protection in the Seward Peninsula are next to the state land that Graphite One is exploring for the site of a potential mine.
The Seward Peninsula Subsistence Regional Advisory Council heard about this possibility during its meeting in Nome last week. The council voted to sign a letter to the state’s BLM director urging the agency to retain federal protections on these lands, known as D-1 lands, in order to support subsistence resources in the Seward Peninsula.
The public land orders that created protections for these D-1 lands were put in place when the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, or ANCSA, passed in 1971. These orders were meant to reserve undeveloped land for claims by Native corporations and the state. But over the last two decades, BLM has been reevaluating these lingering protections, as ordered by Congress.
“They were put in place to give the Secretary of the Interior the opportunity to review whether they should be retained for the public good,” Suzanne Little of Pew Charitable Trusts told the subsistence council last Thursday. “And there are some people who say that they have served their purpose and it’s time for them to be lifted. Senator [Lisa] Murkowski is one of those people.”
Little has been providing support on this issue to the tribes in the Bering Sea and Interior Tribal Commission. The 13 million acres of D-1 lands in the tribes’ region include large swathes around the Yukon River, Kuskokwim River and Unalakleet River. The Trump administration had prepared new land orders that would revoke the D-1 protections in this region and in four other areas, totaling 28 million acres. The D-1 land in BLM’s Kobuk-Seward Peninsula planning area was also included in this plan. It contains large chunks in the Kigluaik and Bendeleben Mountains, including areas adjacent to the site of Graphite One’s proposed mine on state land.
Some of those D-1 lands are topfiled, meaning they were claimed by the state but were unavailable at the time of their selection. If some of these D-1 protections orders get lifted, the state could take over management of some of these lands. This could have implications for subsistence users in the region. As Little noted, the state does not legally prioritize subsistence in the same way that the federal government does.
The D-1 land orders have also prohibited certain forms of mineral extraction. Without them, these lands could be opened for mineral entry, meaning they would be available for the location of mining claims.
Tom Sparks, the associate field manager for the BLM Nome Field Station, told the council that lifting these protections wouldn’t necessarily mean an immediate influx of mining.
“There’s a bunch of laws and regulations about what it takes to actually mine on public lands,” Sparks said. “You have to have a valid discovery. There’s a lot of regulations that weren’t in place a long time ago when these public land orders were put in place. There’s a long road that you have to go through in order to actually mine.”
Sparks also noted that there has not been much mining on federal land in the region.
“I can count the federal claims on about two hands,” Sparks told the council. “There really isn’t a lot going on in the federal lands concerning mining in our region, and the reason for that is because most of the lands with high mineral potential are not owned by the federal government. They’re owned by the Native corporations and the state of Alaska.”
The Seward Peninsula has recently been the subject of great interest in its mineral potential. The U.S. Geological Survey and the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys have been undertaking surveys this year to map potential deposits of graphite and other minerals deemed “critical” by the federal government.
Before these D-1 protections can be lifted, BLM under the Biden administration is considering potential impacts. The agency is preparing a draft of an environmental impact statement, or EIS, which it hopes to publish in mid-December. Once that draft is released, the public will have 60 days to submit comments.
Little said that this environmental impact statement process was started because there was a recognition that the plans to revoke D-1 protections did not consider climate change impacts or impacts to subsistence resources.
The letter that Little drafted for the Seward Peninsula Subsistence Regional Advisory Council to sign said that subsistence users in the Seward Peninsula region “will be significantly impacted” if the D-1 protections are lifted.
“D-1 lands support large contiguous landscapes our communities have traditionally used for millennia, the same lands fish and wildlife need for species migration and adaptation to our rapidly changing environment,” the draft said. “Communities that depend on caribou, salmon, moose, and other subsistence resources are already encountering reductions in populations…As climate change continues to increase pressure on our resources, we believe it is in the public interest to protect intact lands and waters as a precautionary and preventative approach to resource decline and in support of peoples’ way of life.”