Environmental groups created an uproar when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) posted a photo on their website Wednesday showing a giant coal seam instead of serene mountain hikes.
Sierra Magazine, a Sierra Club publication, posted a blog about the image Wednesday, slamming the Trump administration for its apparent focus on coal production rather than conservation.
This giant coal seam is all the American beauty you need now, according to @BLMNational https://t.co/2kLr7eNjFB pic.twitter.com/NUGlhZhflh
— Sierra Magazine (@Sierra_Magazine) April 6, 2017
Sierra Magazine wrote that BLM’s “mission is ‘to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations,’ but the Trump administration has made it clear that it intends to focus on the ‘productivity’ part.”
The image of the coal seam, a 2014 Wikimedia Commons photo of Peabody Energy’s North Antelope Rochelle open cut mining operation in Wyoming, replaced a landscape with hikers. It was only up for two days as part of the BLM’s new web content strategy.
A spokeswoman for BLM said the agency will change the featured image every Friday, and sure enough, the current photo shows a fisherman enjoying the outdoors.
“As part of the BLM’s transition to a new website design, we will be regularly rotating the banner with photos that reflect the many uses our public lands have to offer,” Megan Crandall, a spokeswoman for BLM, told CNN.
Depicting coal as one of the uses of public land was a PR move aimed at signaling the administration’s new direction, according to Greenpeace.
“Putting a giant pile of coal on the BLM page won’t bring back coal jobs … or make our necessary transition to a clean energy economy any quicker,” Travis Nichols, a spokesman for Greenpeace told Mashable. “Empty promises and PR won’t change the fact that the world has moved on from dirty polluting coal power.”
.@BLMNational Putting a giant wall of coal on the BLM site won’t bring back coal, the future is safer without it! https://t.co/W5n0pmDcnx pic.twitter.com/vy21jYSufh
— Greenpeace USA (@greenpeaceusa) April 6, 2017
BLM downplayed the outrage, saying coal is just one of the many uses of federal government land. “We manage America’s lands for many, many uses, and coal is one of them,” Crandall said.
The photos BLM posts each week will include “everything from coal to canoes, from fly fishing to timber,” Crandall said.
She added there are plans for future scenes to show “recreation,” such as hiking, “responsible oil and gas development on public lands” and “forest management.”
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