On Mon, Jan 7, 2019 at 10:05 PM Michael Patrick <geodes...@gmail.com> wrote: > "Multiple uses under BLM management include renewable energy development > (solar, wind, other); conventional energy development (oil and gas, coal); > livestock grazing; hardrock mining (gold, silver, other), timber harvesting; > and outdoor recreation (such as camping, hunting, rafting, and off-highway > vehicle driving). ... 36 million-acre system of National Conservation Lands > (including wilderness areas, wilderness study areas, national monuments, > national conservation areas, historic trails, and wild and scenic rivers); > protecting wild horse and burro rangeland; conserving wildlife, fish, and > plant habitat" > > Also agriculture. Burning Man's Black Rock City is leased from BLM under an > Special Recreation Permit (SRP). ... " crop harvesting, residential > occupancy, recreation facilities, construction equipment storage, assembly > yards, well pumps, and other uses." So, even though it might be BLM, it could > also be under a 50 year lease to a commercial entity, so for all intents and > purposes be regarded as private property - like massive solar ( 19 million > acres ) and wind ( 20 million acres ) energy farms. I seem to recall a > Nevada brothel was at one time operating on BLM land with a lease and permit > - pretty much, as long as you don't leave the land damaged and it doesn't > interfere with other planned uses, you can get a lease. > > Just saying, one class isn't going to do it. Mostly, 'exploited', not > 'protected'.
All that 'BLM land' says is 'this land is owned by the US Government' - generally because it was Government-owned at the time that a state was admitted to the Union and hasn't been sold since. Some BLM land - about 145,000 km² - is 'conservation land' in some way, and some small sliver is special recreation land. But large amounts are simply leased, to mining and drilling companies, cattle ranchers and farmers, solar and wind energy companies, private residences, basically, any land use that the Government agrees to. Some, if not most of these leaseholds are exclusive, so that a ranch can run barbed wire, put up posters, and treat it as private property for as long as the lease runs and it pays the rent. (Some timber leases explicitly require public access in areas that are not actively being logged.) Given the political controversy surrounding the BLM (in some Western states, the BLM owns a majority of the land and the inhabitants resent it), I'd tend to steer away from a wholesale import. I would think that a pilot project could start with an import of land in one specific, limited category of particular public interest (such as wilderness areas or recreation areas) and use that to study issues of integration and conflation. Restricting to wilderness or recreation areas is also safer since these are relatively stable, rather than other land uses that could change entirely with the next leaseholder. Most other BLM land designations could be used only to inform landuse=*. The land in many cases does not enjoy any form of legal protection. It is simply owned by the government, and any protection is simply by the policy of the agency that manages a particular parcel and could change with the stroke of a pen. Clearly, no land use is 100% guaranteed stable, and the fact that something might change tomorrow is ordinarily not a reason to refrain from mapping it today. Nevertheless, given that the justification for an import is usually that the project lacks sufficient staff to map the features being imported, importing features that are known to be volatile seems imprudent. I say this as someone who has done imports from databases of government-owned land. In both the rework of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation lands, and the import _de novo_ of the New York City watershed lands, I restricted the import to particular categories. I specifically excluded New York City lands that are closed to the public (I could have mapped them as boundary=protected_area protect_class=12 access=private, but decided that they simply were neither sufficiently verifiable nor of sufficient public interest to pursue.) Similarly, I excluded several classes of New York State lands such as private conservation easements and the bizarre category of "Forest Preserve land underwater". It's much easier to go back later and import more than it is to recover from a botched import. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
