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I don’t blame any of us for being distracted by the news; every day is head-spinning and exhausting. One minute, we gasp at the sight of bulldozers destroying the East Wing [ [link removed] ], then we are disgusted by a lavish state dinner to honor a brutal journalist-murdering Middle East dictator [ [link removed] ]. Then we justifiably clutch our collective pearls at the prospect of Congress releasing files that detail more than a decade of powerful men celebrating the rape of vulnerable girls [ [link removed] ], and we rightfully assess the increasing likelihood that one of the offenders is the President. Just when we think it cannot get worse, we stare open-mouthed at a public statement from that same President in which he demands the execution of [ [link removed] ] six sitting members of Congress for daring to urge honor from our armed forces.
Any one of these would be grounds for all-hands-on-deck impeachment-level focus in a normal world. But we do not live in a normal world; we live in a world where all of this and more happens at the same time that this administration and its Republican enablers ALSO celebrate a historically horrible cavalcade of unmitigated disaster for America’s public lands.
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I know this stuff can get buried by the headlines, but it’s important, so here is a bullet-pointed summary of this week’s public lands news.
News broke that former NM Congressman Steve Pearce has been nominated to oversee more than 245 million acres of your public land. In what can only be likened to the insanity of an avowed arsonist being hired to run the nation’s largest fire station, it’s almost impossible to conceive of a worse person to head the Bureau of Land Management than this jackwagon.
There is a pile of shocking articles about Pearce’s zealotry, and several are footnoted below, but the best quote comes from Outdoor Life, where my friend and head of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, Jesse Deubel, a longtime conservation champion who is very familiar with Pearce, lays it out plainly;
He’s as anti-public lands as you can find, which is really concerning, obviously, considering the role he’s about to be in.
And, of course, key leaders in the Republican Party rushed to praise Pearce’s selection. Despite reams of evidence that Pearce loudly opposes the very idea of public lands, Steve Daines the Senator from Montana, happily offered this full-throated endorsement of Trump’s selection to E&E news:
“I knew Steve in the House days, and Steve is a great pick. And I particularly like the fact that it’s a Westerner. I think it’s helpful when we have leaders in those important positions that come from the West, when they understand uniquely the challenges we face as it relates to federal land, state land, private land. And Steve Pearce has lived it and breathed it.”
On Wednesday, the Trump Administration announced it would dramatically weaken the Endangered Species Act, one of our bedrock environmental laws passed in 1973 that protects imperiled plant and animal species. The ESA is why we still have bald eagles and grizzly bears, and may be the reason we save iconic species like the sage grouse.
The Republican attack on the ESA comes at a perilous time in our history, given this administration’s breakneck push to industrialize our last wild places. It’s clear they aim to move fast enough to literally make species extinct before advocates have the time to protect them, and they need to weaken this law to make it happen. The targeted components of the ESA are being attacked now because they slow this rapid development, and wealthy corporations know it. This paragraph from an NPR story captures the essence of who is behind the move.
The administration’s announcement answers longstanding calls for revisions to the Endangered Species Act from Republicans in Congress and industries including oil and gas, mining and agriculture.
Of course, Republicans like Ryan Zinke, who raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars lobbying for ConocoPhillips after being fired from Trump’s first cabinet for corruption (not an easy task), absolutely love this new rollback announcement.
On Thursday, the Trump Administration announced it would open more than a billion acres of public U.S. waters to offshore drilling, despite longstanding, widespread, and vehement opposition over concerns about spills and ecological damage to beaches and marine wildlife. This is not something done for “energy independence”; instead, it’s a move in keeping with demands from oil companies who want to export even more petroleum to foreign countries, a practice championed by then Interior Secretary Zinke and labeled “harebrained” by governors in affected states.
This new push to dramatically and aggressively open even more waters, much off the coast of California and in the vast offshore area formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico, to industrialization met with sharp criticism from Democrats. Jared Huffman, the top Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, offered his scathing assessment to Politico.
“It’s about the dumbest thing you could do with your money, short of buying a Donald Trump meme coin.”
On Friday, I learned that the Trump administration will lease more than 2,100 acres of the last wild, pristine Wyoming sage steppe for oil and gas industrialization. It’s a place that is very important to me and my family, especially my son Lander, who is named for the town just north of this proposed lease site. This parcel is adjacent to the largest sage grouse lek in the world, a place where the majestic bird gathers in the spring to dance and boom. These sites, once common across the West, are almost gone, and an article in the Laramie, WY Boomerang explains why it’s special.
Wildlife biologists know the tract, labeled Parcel 0712 in the lease sale, as among the most biologically rich reaches of the sagebrush-steppe biome remaining anywhere on Earth. Just two miles from the boundary of Parcel 0712 is the sprawling Divide Lek, which retired Wyoming sage grouse coordinator Tom Christiansen frequents in the spring. He’s there to count male birds strutting to court mates, and there are a ton of them. “It’s the largest lek on the planet, at least that I’m aware of,” Christiansen said. “The highest (count) was over 300. I don’t remember the exact number, but this last year (the count) was over 200.” Parcel 0712’s proximity to the largest-known congregation of sage grouse, a struggling species, isn’t the only superlative descriptor of its wildlife value. This parcel amid the sagebrush sea also completely overlaps the main thread of the longest mule deer migration corridor known to Wyoming and the world.
As I absorb all these gut-wrenching updates, I think of two things. The first is the memory of my son Lander, running through the Wyoming sage with our birddog Teddy (yes, named after the former President), chasing wild majestic sage grouse without an oil Derrick in sight.
The second is a statement from that father of our public lands, Teddy Roosevelt himself, who issued a clear admonition to fight the sort of evil that would threaten a place like this.
“Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children forever. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.”
T.R. - 1913
And lastly, I think of how it’s high time we take Teddy’s advice.

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