# 30x30 Conservation Initiative **Instrument:** [[Executive Order 14008]] § 216, "Conserving Our Nation's Lands and Waters" **Signed:** January 27, 2021 by [[Joe Biden]] · **Revoked:** January 20, 2025 by [[Executive Order 14154]] § 4(a)(iii) **Rebranded:** "America the Beautiful," May 6, 2021 **Status:** Federally defunct; the goal survives only in roughly nine states ## Summary A goal-setting paragraph in a climate executive order that became, within ninety days, the most successful right-wing land-politics mobilization since the [[Sagebrush Rebellion]] — and that never acquired a definition, a baseline, a metric, or a single acre of new legal authority in its four years of existence. Section 216 of EO 14008 directed the Secretary of the Interior, in consultation with Agriculture, Commerce, and the Council on Environmental Quality, to **"submit a report … recommending steps"** toward "the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030." That is the entirety of its operative force. It designated no land, withdrew nothing, created no regulatory authority, defined no term, and imposed no obligation on any state, county, or private landowner. Every substantive conservation action later attributed to "30x30" was taken under pre-existing statutory authority — the [[Antiquities Act]], the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, Farm Bill conservation programs, the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act. The gap between what Section 216 said and what it was successfully made to mean is the whole subject of this page. ## What the program actually was **The May 2021 report.** *Conserving and Restoring America the Beautiful*, delivered to the National Climate Task Force on May 6, 2021 by [[Deb Haaland]] (Interior), Tom Vilsack (Agriculture), Gina Raimondo (Commerce), and Brenda Mallory (CEQ). Its eight principles are almost defensively conciliatory — Principle 6 is titled **"Honor Private Property Rights and Support the Voluntary Stewardship Efforts of Private Landowners and Fishers"** — and it deliberately swapped "protection" for "conservation and restoration," writing that working lands are "integral to conserving functioning habitats" and that "maintaining ranching in the West … is essential." The rebrand from the numeric "30x30" to the patriotic "America the Beautiful" was widely reported as a defensive move against the land-grab attack already underway. **And it declined to define "conserved."** The report conceded there was "no single metric … that could fully measure progress" and recommended recognizing "a continuum of effective conservation measures." That refusal is the load-bearing failure of the entire program. It gave opponents an unfalsifiable maximalist reading to attack and gave supporters no scoreboard to defend. **Implementation, such as it was.** The America the Beautiful Challenge, a grant program administered by the congressionally chartered National Fish and Wildlife Foundation — $91M in 2022, $141.3M in 2023, $122.5M in 2024, roughly 40 percent of the 2023 round to tribally led projects. The **American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas**, launched in beta at conservation.gov on April 19, 2024 — **without publishing acreage or percentage totals**, which is why E&E News headlined it "database details conservation but not acres." And the [[Bureau of Land Management]]'s **Public Lands Rule** (Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, final May 9, 2024), whose restoration-and-mitigation leasing provision — letting third parties lease BLM land for conservation the way others lease it for grazing or drilling — became the most contested public-lands regulation of the era. ## The numbers, stated honestly This is where precision matters most, because nearly every public claim about 30x30 progress is misleading in one direction or the other. **Starting point.** The [[Center for American Progress]] report that created the US target — *How Much Nature Should America Keep?*, August 2019 — put conserved US land at roughly **12 percent** and ocean territory at roughly **26 percent**. USGS protected-areas data broadly corroborates 12–13 percent for land. **The land side never moved much.** Going from ~12 percent to 30 percent means roughly **400 million additional acres** — a figure [[American Stewards of Liberty]] computed independently and used to devastating effect. **No US government source ever published an authoritative land-progress percentage.** The Atlas launched without one. The 2022 annual report gave none. The administration's public claims were cumulative *action* counts — "41 million acres in three years" (April 2024), "over 45 million acres" (CEQ Chair Mallory at CBD COP16, November 2024) — mixing monuments, refuges, CRP enrollments, easements, and restoration projects, and never converted to a percentage of the country. **The marine side was already banked before Biden took office.** Peer-reviewed analysis published in 2022 found that while 26 percent of US ocean waters sit inside marine protected areas and 25.3 percent are fully or highly protected, **96 percent of total US MPA area and 99 percent of the fully protected area is in the remote central Pacific** — created by [[George W. Bush]] in 2006 and 2009 and expanded by [[Barack Obama]] in 2014 and 2016, all under the [[Antiquities Act]] — principally [[Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument]] and the [[Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument]]. Outside those Pacific monuments, **less than 2 percent** of US waters have high-level protection: Alaska 0.7 percent, California 5.7 percent, the Southeast and Gulf 2.1 percent. **So:** any claim that the United States "hit 30 percent" rests almost entirely on ocean acreage protected years before the policy existed, most of it thousands of miles from the continental United States. And any claim that 30x30 seized 400 million acres of anyone's land describes something that never happened at all. Both stories are wrong, and the vacuum where a definition should have been is why both could circulate. ## The opposition — the actual subject The campaign against 30x30 is a near-perfect case study in converting a procedural nullity into a national threat, and it is organizationally continuous with fifty years of [[Sagebrush Rebellion]] politics. **The frame arrived before the order.** "Federal land grab" attached to the 2019 CAP report and the 2019 congressional resolutions, not to EO 14008. Two features made it durable: the arithmetic implying ~400 million acres, and the absence of any definition of "conserved" that could rebut a maximalist reading. **The organizational core.** [[American Stewards of Liberty]] — a Georgetown, Texas nonprofit operating on roughly $320,000 a year, run by Margaret Byfield, daughter of Sagebrush Rebellion legal martyr Wayne Hage. ASL's product was **model county resolution language** plus a printed field guide, the *Guide to Fight the 30 x 30 Land Grab*, plus paid "coordination consulting" contracts with county governments — roughly $500,000 with Kane County, Utah and $200,000 with Chaves County, New Mexico. The county resolution is the exact tactical instrument county-supremacy activists perfected in the 1990s, redeployed intact. *On the counts: ASL advertises "over 160 county resolutions from 16 states." No independent registry exists; contemporaneous press counts were substantially lower (E&E News reported "more than 70 local governments across 12 states" in 2021). Treat the higher figure as ASL's claim, not an established number. State-legislature resolution counts are similarly unverified.* **The elected amplifiers.** - **March 16, 2021** — Congressional Western Caucus letter to Biden: 18 senators, 50-plus House members, warning the goal would "undermine private property rights, circumvent the multiple-use mandate, and lock up more land." - **April 21, 2021** — **fifteen Republican governors** sign a joint letter saying 30x30 "infringes on the sovereignty of the states and rights of the citizens." *One of the signatories was North Dakota Governor **[[Doug Burgum]]**, who as Interior Secretary would preside over the program's dismantling four years later.* - **May 7, 2021** — [[Lauren Boebert]] introduces the **30 x 30 Termination Act**, H.R. 3014, with 27 Republican cosponsors; Sens. Roger Marshall and Kevin Cramer introduce the Senate companion, S. 1673, on May 18. The bills would have nullified § 216, barred federal funds, required "no net loss" of non-federal land in counties already 15 percent federally owned, and **barred unilateral [[Antiquities Act]] designations** in such areas. Neither passed. - **June 24, 2021** — Nebraska Governor [[Pete Ricketts]] signs Executive Order 21-08, *"Stop 30x30 — Protect Our Land & Water,"* then runs a statewide tour and a national anti-30x30 conference with ASL. He is now a US senator. **The institutional layer is more divided than the grassroots.** [[Heritage Foundation]]'s critique (Katie Tubb, May 2021) is not a land-grab piece at all — it argues the report lacks implementation detail, that NEPA dysfunction undermines stewardship, and that the administration will not genuinely credit private conservation. Notably, the **Property and Environment Research Center**, the free-market-environmentalist wing, **supported** America the Beautiful's market framing and argued that conservationists should be allowed to compete for resource leases on federal land — essentially the BLM conservation-leasing concept the rest of the right destroyed. [[Mountain States Legal Foundation]] supplied the doctrinal argument against it: *"a non-use is not a use"* under the multiple-use mandate. **The conspiracy substrate.** The American Policy Center folded 30x30 into the older [[Agenda 21]] framework. ASL's own materials name three "international initiatives underlying 30x30": the 2019 *Global Deal for Nature* paper, E.O. Wilson's Half-Earth project, and a 2021 IUCN resolution — a slippery-slope argument in which 30 percent is the beachhead and 50 percent by 2050 is the objective. ## The UN claim, resolved The most repeated charge is that 30x30 was imposed on the United States by the United Nations. The record runs the other way: 1. **The international target came second.** Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted at CBD COP15 on **December 19, 2022** — twenty-three months *after* EO 14008 and nineteen months after the America the Beautiful report. 2. **The United States is not a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity.** It signed in 1993; the Senate never gave advice and consent. The US attends as a non-party observer and is not bound by Target 3. No CBD instrument imposed anything on the United States. 3. **What is real is a shared intellectual pedigree, not a chain of command.** Both the US goal and the CBD target descend from the same scientific-advocacy literature — Dinerstein et al., *"A Global Deal for Nature"* (*Science Advances*, April 2019) and Wilson's Half-Earth — which [[Center for American Progress]] translated into a US-specific policy ask in August 2019. A separate fight is routinely conflated with this one: the **Natural Asset Companies** listing proposal, which 25 Republican state attorneys general opposed and which the NYSE withdrew in January 2024. That was a securities-listing question, not a 30x30 action. Keep them apart. ## Termination The program was not repealed, litigated away, or defunded by Congress. It was **deleted**. - **January 20, 2025** — [[Executive Order 14154]] § 4(a)(iii) revokes [[Executive Order 14008]] in full. Section 216 was the goal's only legal foundation; with the parent gone, the goal ceased to exist. [[Project 2025]]'s Interior chapter, by [[William Perry Pendley]], had specifically instructed the incoming president to "vacate that order" and to strip from resource management plans any decision advancing "the 30x30 agenda." - **Late January–February 2025** — America the Beautiful Challenge grants frozen mid-project; documented shutdowns include a $1.5M grant at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie in Illinois, roughly $475,000 in unpaid invoices, and about twenty layoffs. - **February 3, 2025** — Interior Secretary [[Doug Burgum]] issues Secretary's Order 3418, directing termination of actions taken under the revoked orders. **No secretarial order names "America the Beautiful" or "30x30" anywhere.** The program was killed by revoking its parent and terminating derivative actions — which left nothing to challenge in court. - **July 3, 2025** — Executive Order 14313 establishes the **"Make America Beautiful Again" Commission**, chaired by Burgum. The name is a deliberate appropriation and inversion of the Biden brand. Its "MABA 250" strategy, launched February 11, 2026, pairs "Energy Dominance and conservation" and never mentions its predecessor. - **May 12, 2026** — The Public Lands Rule rescission is finalized (91 FR 25787), effective June 11, 2026. Conservation leasing is eliminated; ACEC rules revert to pre-2024; land health standards are repealed. BLM's stated ground is that leasing "exceeds the Bureau's statutory authority by elevating conservation as a discrete 'use.'" Of 138,161 comments received, reporting indicated roughly 97.9 percent of the ~130,000 tallied opposed rescission. - **April 17, 2025** — Proclamation 10918 opens the 50-to-200-nautical-mile bands of the [[Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument]] — roughly 310,000 square nautical miles — to US-flagged commercial fishing. **A federal court in Hawaiʻi vacated the implementing agency letter on August 8, 2025** for bypassing Magnuson-Stevens rulemaking; the proclamation's own legality is still undecided, with trial reported for December 2026. - **June 11, 2026** — Proclamation 11035 reopens the Mau and Hoʻomalu zones of [[Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument]] plus the Mariana Trench Islands Unit and Rose Atoll — roughly 477,000 square miles, the "nearly half a million" of the White House fact sheet. Combined with April 2025, agency figures sum to roughly **890,000 square miles** of Pacific monument waters designated for reopening, though no official cumulative total has been published. *This closes the loop: the Pacific monuments that constituted 96–99 percent of America's protected ocean — and therefore essentially the entire marine half of 30x30 — have been targeted in full.* - **The second lock, and the reason nothing has actually changed yet.** Papahānaumokuākea also became a **national marine sanctuary** effective March 3, 2025, under regulations finalized in the Biden administration's last days. Sanctuary rules independently prohibit commercial fishing and were issued under the National Marine Sanctuaries Act, not the [[Antiquities Act]] — so a proclamation modifying the *monument* does not repeal them. As of August 2026 no commercial fishing has resumed anywhere in the Pacific monuments. **Where it survives.** Roughly nine states maintain their own targets. California is near its 30 percent land goal and raised its ambition to 40 percent by 2050 in August 2025; Vermont pursues "50x50"; Massachusetts targets 40 percent by 2050. Local conservation ballot measures approved $16 billion in 2024 and $1.9 billion in November 2025 — the goal migrating to the level of government where voters approve it directly. ## KB significance **1. The clearest available demonstration that a definition is a defense.** Section 216 was legally inert. It was destroyed anyway, because the administration refused to say what "conserved" meant and thereby ceded the definition to its opponents. The Atlas — the one artifact that could have supplied a number — launched three years late and without acreage. There is a general lesson here about policy communicated as an aspiration rather than a metric. **2. Astroturf leverage without scale.** A two-person nonprofit with a $320,000 budget produced the frame that fifteen governors, seventy-eight members of Congress, and a hundred-plus county commissions repeated back. See [[American Stewards of Liberty]] and [[Astroturfing]]. The mechanism was not persuasion at scale but **template distribution** through an existing county-government network built in the 1990s. **3. The Sagebrush pipeline, again.** The through-line from FLPMA (1976) to the Nevada rebellion (1979) to county supremacy (1994) to Wayne Hage's daughter running the 30x30 campaign to [[William Perry Pendley]] drafting the [[Project 2025]] chapter that killed it is one continuous organizational lineage. The movement's decisive wins come through **personnel and drafting**, not elections. See [[Sagebrush Rebellion]]. **4. Executive-order policy is a rental.** Four years of program built on a single revocable paragraph, erased in one subsection on an inauguration day. The same structural lesson the [[Antiquities Act]] fight teaches from the other direction — and the reason the durable version of this policy now lives in state statutes and local bond measures rather than in Washington. --- ## See Also - [[Executive Order 14008]] — the parent order and the text of § 216 - [[Executive Order 14154]] — the one subsection that ended it - [[Antiquities Act]] — the statute that did the actual conserving, and its own current crisis - [[American Stewards of Liberty]] — the campaign's organizational core - [[Sagebrush Rebellion]] — the fifty-year lineage - [[Bureau of Land Management]] — the Public Lands Rule and its rescission - [[William Perry Pendley]] — [[Project 2025]]'s Interior chapter - [[Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument]] · [[Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument]] — where the marine "30 percent" actually lives - [[Climate Change Timeline]] — the broader climate-policy arc