Pearcin’ the public lands

Like clockwork, a couple months go by and here I am again to talk about public lands. This time I am here to talk about Stevan Pearce, President Trump’s pick to run the Bureau of Land Management, and I am here to make an argument as to why I consider it a horrendous pick.

Pearce is a former state legislator and congressman from the state of New Mexico, an oil-and-gas executive, and a former chairman of the New Mexico Republican Party.

Nothing too scary to see there except the oil-and-gas executive part, but he is not the type of guy that you want to have overseeing 245 million acres of America’s public lands, plus another 700 million acres of subsurface mineral estate across the U.S.

First off, I will start this with a completely subjective statement: Mike Lee supports Pearce as head of the Bureau of Land Management and anyone who that coward Mike Lee supports is someone who shouldn’t be trusted (in general, but for the sake of this column I will mention it only in terms of the public lands debate).

If you can remember the past few times I wrote about public lands, Mike Lee was front and center in wanting to push for the sale of large swathes of our public lands and that is something that no good Idahoan – heck, no good American – should support. If you would like a refresher on why, you should read my past articles.

However, this piece is about Pearce.

Livestock groups and the energy-extraction industry endorse Pearce for his support of “opening up valuable federal lands for safe and responsible oil and gas development.”

This statement should rattle anyone who knows just about anything about conservation and the outdoors. Oil and gas development is generally not considered safe for the land as it causes significant and long-term environmental degradation, which consists of, but is not limited to, soil erosion, vegetation loss and contamination from spills. Furthermore, infrastructure, like roads, pipelines and well pads, alters landscapes, harms the biodiversity of the area and disrupts natural migratory patterns.

It may seem that I am being a tree-hugger here, and you can call me that, but I also really like the idea of healthy lands that myself and my family utilize most of the year in any state that we are in. I like streams and rivers and lakes to remain free of contaminants. I like not interrupting migratory patterns of wildlife to keep them around and keep healthy populations that I can continue to fish and hunt responsibly.

The Bureau of Land Management has a multiple-use and sustained yield mission that they have been tasked with by congress in the past which orders BLM a mandate of managing public lands for many uses such as energy development, livestock grazing, recreation and timber harvesting while ensuring natural, cultural, and historic resources are maintained for present and future use.

As you can tell, this statement is very vague and does not include much in the way of concrete information. However, many outdoor news rags such as Outdoor Life have tried to contact Pearce’s office to ask how he might administer such a mission if he is put into the position he has been nominated for, and he has been unavailable to discuss it until he shares them with the Senate committee. I hope we get some good answers for this blatantly obvious ask, but with how our political field has been strife with rich lies, money grubbing and easily disproven lies, I don’t think we are going to get much of anything.

And if this administration has proved anything, it is that they don’t really care all that much about telling the truth (put your torches down and stop knocking on my door; just use your brain and do a little research about 90% of the claims made. You know I’m right).

But it is a common practice that nominees don’t make themselves available to the media ahead of a confirmation hearing, so I can understand. But when it comes to public lands, the number one best part about most of our country is our access to them (sorry Texas for your lack of thereof), I wouldn’t have minded a few words to be shared.

However, we can talk about nicknames (another thing that the current administration loves). Sell-Off Steve. Yep, that is Stevan Pearce in a nutshell. My fear, and the fear of many good Americans, should be that with Pearce having greater access to everything from the top post of the BLM, such things as Senator Mike Lee’s horrendous addition to the One Big Beautiful Bill where he wanted to sell off major portions of the U.S.’s public lands to offset tax cuts to wealthy Americans and balance the budget could be accelerated. Pearce has expressed his support for the divestment of federal land that was Lee’s crown jewel and he is chairman of the very Senate committee that will consider Pearce’s nomination. Even the blind can see the potential in this.

Along with his very public support of selling off public lands, he has an enormous conflict of interest with the oil and gas industry as he has spent a large portion of his life and political career advocating for oil and gas drilling in New Mexico, such as his attempts at bringing in drilling to the Otero Mesa which the Court of Appeals of the Tenth Circuit ruled against the BLM leasing it out for oil and gas extraction in 2009. Pearce is too in bed with the oil-and-gas industry to be in the position to have more power towards what he can do with it. In my opinion, of course.

But with how cozy he is with that, and the current administration leading our country, I can only see the negative effects towards public land management.

In general, the Trump administration rejects conservation. Last August, the Department of the Interior started sowing the seeds of a rollback of the Conservation and Landscape Health Rule that requires BLM managers to consider conservation and landscape health as an equal when compared with oil and gas development, commercial livestock, and recreation. However, without this rule, BLM parcels are sacrificial, serving extractive industries without considering the long-term effects of the landscapes that don’t have the same federal protections as national parks, monuments, or wilderness areas. It seems that with the current administration and many in the industry, BLM land is designed only to produce a product and that is not right.

Fun fact is that in Trump’s first administration, the chosen nominee, the Pants-On-Head William Perry Pendley, a celebrated anti-public land advocate, couldn’t even get a Senate hearing based on his abundant conflicts of interest. So far, in his second administration, the initial nominee Kathleen Sgamma, an energy executive, withdrew her nomination after it was revealed that she had criticized the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. She went against the status quo of the current administration and was forced to resign. They really haven’t put up a nominee who is worthy of the position, and one had to withdraw their nomination because of a conflict on the framing of a major event in the recent history of our country. Folks, it just doesn’t look good.

All in all, I could write about Pearce for longer than most people could focus on looking at their screens, so I will leave you with some final thoughts.

Public lands and conservation have been something viewed almost negatively and more as a business opportunity by the political party in our country with conservation in their name. With the speed and amount of spinning in his grave that Teddy Roosevelt has done in the past few decades, I am surprised that his corpse hasn’t dug its way to the planet core yet.

If you are one who wants to make America great again, in a serious way, or just keep Idaho great, watch who you are voting for.

Tight lines out there, friends.

Update: Pearce has had his hearing and it was a disappointment. There were no questions about the Trump administration’s drive to increase oil and gas drilling and mining activity on federal lands, or its recent moves to revoke Biden-era conservation policies which usually can be attributed only to “It was a Biden thing, take it away hehehe,” Pearce and his wife have already divested interest from several oil and gas leases that they held a financial stake in in New Mexico (not weird at all), and Pearce said in his ethics agreement that they would divest financial ties to more than 1,000 oil and gas leases in the state of Oklahoma if he is confirmed as BLM director.

Pearce skirted questions about the Interior’s effort to roll back a Biden-era regulation involving methane waste from drilling operations of federal lands. He told Colorado senator John Hickenlooper that he doesn’t know much about the Trump administration’s move to revoke the rule. Hickenlooper asked, “Would you support high standards in terms of methane waste prevention? Would you support that kind of public operation on public lands?” Pearce didn’t answer the question, rather he talked about efforts to capture large amounts of methane waste to power data centers. “Well, of course, but I am talking about rolling back existing regulations,” Hickenlooper replied. Pearce went around the question again, stating “I am not familiar with the reasons the administration is suggesting (to revoke the rule) … I don’t know that I could comment on that right now.”

I did not like that answer. Pearce continued his hearing doing his best Speaker Mike Johnson imitation, mainly answering questions with answers such as “I don’t know the rationale” or “I don’t know the law regarding it” or “I’m unfamiliar with the order.”

I don’t know about you folks, but when I think of someone who is to lead the Bureau of Land Management, I sort of want someone who knows basic laws regarding the position and someone who can answer a straight question. But, c’est la vie, I guess. This is the type of political leaders that some people want in our country. We will have to see how it works out.

He ain’t in yet, so call our state representatives and tell them to shut it down. They are a couple of dingdongs when it comes to public lands, but Idaho has collectively changed their vote with the flooding of their phones multiple times in the past year, so keep at it!