Is the Bureau of Land Management’s new Conservation and Landscape Health Rule a nefarious effort by the administration to lock up more federal land and keep it out of the hands of resource developers?

Or is it just another election-year effort to curry favor with environmentalists?

Either way, the rule appears to wander far afield of the BLM’s main job as the federal government’s landlord. President Harry Truman created the BLM in 1946 by merging the Grazing Service with the General Land Office.

Then, in 1976, Congress wrote the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which defines the BLM’s mission as maintaining multiple uses on the vast tracts of land the federal government owns.

This means uses such as “energy development, livestock grazing, mining, timber harvesting, and outdoor recreation, while conserving natural, historical and cultural resources, including wilderness areas and national monuments, wild horse and wildlife habitat, artifacts, and dinosaur fossils,” according to the BLM’s online history.

That is a full agenda for the agency, which oversees 245 million acres of federal land. That’s 61.3% of the land area of Alaska and 46.4% of the 11 Western states.

That’s why anything the BLM does has a profound impact on the West. When nearly half the land in the region is under the control of a single federal agency, farmers, ranchers and others are deeply interested in every move.

That’s also why westerners are lining up to sue the BLM over its new Conservation and Landscape Health Rule. A coalition of agricultural and other groups has assembled a lawsuit that is essentially a 55-page catalog of all the violations of federal law the rule represents.

Those violations can be boiled down to this: The two new categories of leases are aimed at locking up vast tracts of federal land. Instead of Congress determining when and where to set aside land for conservation purposes, the new leases would allow BLM managers to circumvent the legislative branch and unilaterally designate land for conservation.

That would bar any other uses of the land.

It should be noted that the BLM has been asleep at the switch in managing federal land. The wildfires that roar across the western landscape can be attributed in large part to the BLM’s lack of management. To add “non-uses” such as conservation to the agency’s portfolio will only worsen wildfire problems, not improve them.

Rather than cozying up to environmental organizations during an election year, BLM should be developing plans to head off wildfires with more aggressive fire breaks across the West.

The current administration has often voiced its worries about climate change and how wildfires will continue to get larger, yet the new conservation rule is aimed at the non-use and non-management of large federal tracts.

The result will be even more and bigger fires, leaving taxpayers on the hook to pay for fighting them.

Federal courts will ultimately decide the fate of this ill-considered rule. Our hope is those judges will wad up the rule and toss it into the nearest garbage bin.

It is a waste of paper.