A year ago, residents of Yucca Valley, California, along with Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and US Forest Service officials, filled the town’s community center for a public meeting about the Sand to Snow national monument. Designated early in 2016 by Barack Obama – and now under review for resizing by the Trump administration – the monument spans from the desert near Yucca Valley to the San Bernardino mountains about an hour east of Los Angeles.

Residents wanted to know what would change once their backyard BLM land was converted into a national monument. Would the monument prohibit public access? Would it mean an end to hunting? What would it do for protecting area wildlife? Even those who had opposed Obama’s creation of Sand to Snow and the nearby Mojave Trails national monument came to the meeting, asking how they could have their voices heard in planning processes.

Attendees asked questions, gave their opinions, filled out comment cards and drew on maps of the monument, giving the agencies first-hand information about usage, geography and important sites. Instead of traditional planning, in which the BLM worked from their own priorities and information, Sand to Snow and Mojave Trails management involved the public from the beginning.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mojave Trails national monument. Photograph: Bob Wick, BLM

“The BLM hadn’t decided anything yet,” said Mojave Desert Land Trust conservation director Frazier Haney. “They were starting from scratch. It was ground level. They were saying, ‘Hey, come and tell us whatever you know about this.’”

This was known as the resource management planning rule, or “planning 2.0” – a change to BLM planning processes that was designed to increase public participation in early stages of planning, to reaffirm the collection and use of scientific data in the planning process, and give the agency opportunities to execute “landscape-level planning” rather than be constrained by political boundaries.

Planning 2.0 was put in motion in 2011 with an agency review, and finalized with public surveys and open comment periods from 2014-16. When it went into effect in December 2016, the process became one of the final ways in which Obama cemented his legacy in federal lands management. It was “an upgrade to bring in simple, modern concepts”, said Phil Hanceford, director of the Wilderness Society’s BLM Action Center, who added that before the ruling the BLM’s planning processes had barely changed since 1983.

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However, Sand to Snow and Mojave Trails were the closest the BLM ever got to implementing planning 2.0 principles.

On 27 March, Trump signed a joint resolution to eliminate planning 2.0. Led by Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, both Republicans from states rich with public land, the House and Senate voted to nullify it on 7 February and 7 March, respectively.

Since then, the administration has only continued to erode the BLM’s responsible management mandate. Trump’s 26 April executive order On the Review of Designations Under the Antiquities Act calls for the review and possible decreasing in size of 28 predominately BLM-managed national monuments.

At first, going after planning 2.0 appears to be just one of the new administration’s many rollbacks of federal regulations and defunding of agencies. But what is strange about this cut is that in certain important ways, BLM 2.0 was exactly the kind of federal land management that earlier generations of western Republicans longed for. For decades, the BLM’s benign neglect and skeleton of a bureaucracy made it the darling of rural westerners. So why have the region’s Republicans now turned on the BLM?

In a region deeply suspicious of bureaucracy, and where “local control” has long been a rallying cry, planning 2.0 was designed for efficiency and to promote local participation over top-down administration in planning.

This debate is just one iteration of a longstanding fight about public lands. The debate goes back as far as the agency’s founding loyalty to grazing, which has provided the fodder tor those who have ridiculed the BLM as a “captured agency” and the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining”, and also helps explain why many people associate the BLM with ranchers and incidents such as the 2014 Cliven Bundy standoff.

Yet the BLM’s 247.3m acres include much more than rangelands. After the 1976 Federal Lands Policy and Management Act (FLPMA, pronounced “flip-ma”), the BLM adopted the US Forest Service’s dual mandate of multiple use and sustained yield. The agency was asked to identify and manage wilderness areas for increased protection. Today, those constitute about 10% of BLM land.

But the BLM coming into a newfound role as environmental manager does not alone explain why Republicans would turn away from the agency. At the same time as the BLM’s identity was being transformed, westerners were also being called upon to negotiate the region’s relationship to growth, environmentalism and the rest of the country.

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As the high price of oil in the 1970s promised a western energy boom, governors hesitated in promoting western extraction as a solution and temporarily aligned with environmentalist goals. They didn’t want to become the nation’s boiler room, slag heap or energy colony. “Local control” became their refrain against eastern corporate officials, bureaucrats and environmentalists alike.

While many of the anti-growth policies put in place during the era appeared environmental in motivation, they were also reacting to perceived threats of control by outsiders. Historian Richard White adds that many rural westerners perceived environmentalism as praising local control when it suited their interests, and overriding it when it didn’t. This made environmentalism, White says, “a debate over the rights of local communities in the west”.

The federal government, and the bureaucracy of the BLM in particular, became one of the west’s enemies.

Still, why the end of the “local control” rallying cry?

First, the relationship of politicians to oil and gas industries has intensified: western Republicans such as Wyoming’s Cheney are “captured” themselves, by oil and gas interests. The strongest lobby in favor of the nullification of planning 2.0 was oil and gas. “The argument we saw from them and from some counties was that more public involvement in public lands gives them less control,” said the Wilderness Society’s Hanceford.

The other reason for the end of the “local control” mantra is that the “locals” have also changed. Not only have BLM visitors increased nearly fourfold since 1996 – from 18 million to 62 million, but the number of Americans living in the rural west has boomed.

For a long time, westerners have pointed fingers at the exorbitantly wealthy outsiders who buy trophy ranches and put up McMansions on hilltops. But geographer J Dwight Hines writes that the post-industrial middle class is the largest and most influential subset of newcomers, who “present the most profound challenge to preexisting ways of life”.

Hines classifies these newcomers as “permanent tourists”, because most come seeking quality of life and often become politically involved in enacting land use policies that enable them to have regular and constant access to recreation. Like tourists, they come to consume an aesthetically, politically, and economically gentrified landscape, and they further reproduce the same.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Burning Man. Photograph: Bob Wick, BLM

Whereas the “local control” efforts of past decades relied on a shared opposition by westerners to control by outsiders, the problem today appears to be that the “locals” are outsiders. Growth in the desert communities around to Mojave Trails and Sand to Snow, for instance, follows this trend. Residents include retirees and “desert rats” who have left Los Angeles for the lifestyle, health benefits or aesthetic appeal of the desert.

A possible positive outlook is that “nothing will stop the BLM from applying the planning 2.0 principles”, Hanceford says. “They still have the authority to provide greater transparency.” This means that some BLM offices will continue to follow planning 2.0 principles and solicit local participation, while others won’t. Three BLM offices – north-western California, Missoula and eastern Colorado – are moving forward with landscape-scale plans like those recommended under planning 2.0. However, in the first week of May, the Trump administration suspended the district and resource citizen advisory committees until September, a step further in locking the public out of BLM planning processes.

But one likely effect of this elective compliance with BLM 2.0 is to exacerbate the divide between the “old” and “new” wests – and between lands designated as grazing or extractive lands and those with more environmental protections. While it might be tempting for the conservation-minded new west to welcome the end of the old west, a more useful way to see things might be to respect the push-and-pull between the two constituencies, and for the new west to interrogate its own impacts and blind spots, such as exurban sprawl, rural gentrification, and the effects of recreational tourism. (For instance, who expected that superbloom tourism would be linked to deaths of the endangered desert tortoise?)

Old west or new west, Hanceford says, “Congress made a big mistake here. Planning 2.0 was not a controversial ruling. They could have fixed its problems though the administration, and they chose to use a sledgehammer.”

Caroline Tracey is a PhD student in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studies land governance and transformation in the intermountain West. Julia Sizek is an Associate Scholar with the Native American Land Conservancy in southeastern California and a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley