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William Perry Pendley, the longtime public lands opponent who is now the acting head of the Bureau of Land Management, told a skeptical crowd of environmental journalists on Thursday that his past actions and words are now "irrelevant," that he has yet to be briefed on climate science despite having been on the job since July, and that wild horses, not climate change, are the biggest threat public lands face today.
Pendley was the marquee name on the opening panel at the Society of Environmental Journalists conference in Fort Collins, Colorado. Pendley insisted that forcing most of his agency's DC-based staff out of Washington will make BLM more responsive to the public, despite warnings from former BLM state leaders that Pendley and Interior Secretary David Bernhardt are on a mission to simply gut the agency.
Another member of the SEJ panel, Boise State University professor John Freemuth, sat down with CWP's Go West, Young Podcast afterwards to talk about Pendley and the proposed BLM move.
"These are national lands, and there will be decisions where BLM needs to interact with other agencies and various specialists and go up and down the hall to have conversations," Freemuth said. "If they're in Grand Junction and there's that kind of question, they're not going to be in the conversation."
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Nope. Not going to clarify. Those are my personal opinions.”
