Call it a sign of the times.
The lead image on the website of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) once featured an image of two backpackers enjoying the vast wildness America offers. Today, that image has been replaced with a massive mountain of coal.
This was the BLM homepage as of Wednesday, April 5.
This is the BLM homepage now:
BLM, an agency within the Department of the Interior, manages over 245 million acres of land, including over 5,700 miles of trails in conservation and recreational lands and 2,400 miles of land along American rivers.
Of course, swapping out a photo changes nothing about BLM’s agenda—the agency plans to feature many photos—but it does reflect the shift toward a focus on fossil fuels under the Trump administration.
As Mashable reports, the Interior Department halted all new leases for coal mining on public lands under the Obama administration. That has already changed under President Donald Trump. On March 15, for example, U.S. Department of the Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke approved a $22 million lease to the Canyon Fuel Company, LLC, which plans to extract 56 million tons of coal from public land in Utah.
The coal photo will reportedly not remain for long. A BLM spokeswoman tells the Huffington Post it will be swapped out again on Friday.
H/T Mashable