The New Seekers are best remembered for wanting to buy the world a Coke in their classic hit, “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” But a year earlier, they first hit the charts with another standard, “Look What They’ve Done to My Song,” featuring the sad lyric, “It’s the only thing that I can do half right, and it’s turning out all wrong.”
That must be the lamentation of Tracy Stone-Manning, who ran the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) under President Biden. I know because she is complaining so loudly about her successors in the current Administration. They are steadily unraveling the mess she left behind, and she is not happy. In an online editorial, she bitterly complains that the agency is in dire straits because of staffing changes, but by the second paragraph it becomes clear what she is really angry about – policy changes.
She zeroes in on BLM rangelands, which she says are in peril because of policies that have moved BLM away from “core conservation functions” needed to protect them for future generations. Her editorial is titled, “What I Learned Running the BLM”, and in case you don’t have time to go find it, here is a quick summary. She didn’t learn much – about the agency’s mission or the laws that govern its policies.
She was the Director who implemented a new kind of public land lease, not for any of the legally authorized purposes, but for no purpose. Former grazing leases, for instance, would be issued to environmental groups that planned no grazing. She called it “conservation leasing,” and it immediately embroiled the agency in costly, lengthy, and ultimately failed litigation. When proposed, the plan attracted 215,000 official comments from groups, businesses, local and state governments, and others across the West, almost all objecting to it.
The issue is that the Federal Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA), which governs BLM lands, authorizes specific uses, and the agency is directed to issue leases for those purposes. They are specified: grazing, mining, timber, production of oil, gas, coal or other minerals, pipelines, transmission lines, ditches, canals and water systems, roads and trails. FLPMA contains the word “lease” 49 times, not one of which contemplate leasing public land for no use.
The Obama Administration had tried it in 2016, but federal courts ruled such leases illegal. But in 2023, Stone-Manning published regulations letting that camel’s nose under the tent. She had already issued six Montana grazing leases to a group called American Prairie Reserve, which planned to replace all the cattle with bison and create the “Buffalo Commons” that environmental groups had advocated since Jimmy Carter’s time. The goal is to rid the nation of livestock and return the Great Plains to someone’s utopian vision of the pre-Buffalo Bill era. The fact that the region is now home to 13 states, 512 counties, 2470 towns, and 15 million people is of no consequence to such activists.
The group’s grandiose plan was to buy vast sections of private land and combine it with BLM leases to create hundreds of thousands of acres of wilderness, free of all livestock, but they had a legal problem. They needed a way around FLPMA and the other major law governing such leases, the Taylor Grazing Act. So, they decided to reclassify the buffalo herds as “domestic livestock,” contrary to everything they had been saying about “wildlife” for years, and ignoring the fact that they had no intention of raising the buffalo for sale – which is the legal definition of “domestic livestock.”
Stone-Manning and her bosses readily embraced the plan because it was their agenda, too (she is now president of the Wilderness Society). But it was clearly contrary to the law and was never going to survive legal challenges. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum remanded the appeal (filed by Montana) back to the state BLM office to take another look at the legality without political pressure from Washington appointees. Thus, the career official there is now cancelling the six non-grazing leases and ending the Buffalo Common scheme in that state.
American Prairie Reserve is livid, of course, claiming the new ruling is “undoing 20 years of precedent,” a laughable falsehood. FLPMA is 50 years old, the Taylor Grazing Act is 92, and Manning’s illegal policy lasted barely three. She was all about “core conservation functions” that were never in the law. So, her successors must undo the damage and manage public lands as Congress directed. That’s what they’ve done to her song.
With buffaloes classified as domestic livestock maybe we could enlist a couple for the bull riding events in rodeos. More seriously, the one complaint I have about conservative politicians and public policy wonks is that we DO need to be mindful of our environment and alongside “drill baby drill” we need a common sense slogan to be good stewards of our environment. Conservatives are quick to criticize the “green new deal” policies which had nothing to do with saving the environment but everything to do with control but way too slow to speak truth about our responsibility to be good stewards. Thanks Greg for sending these articles. They bring perspective when the media sound bites and prejudices fail to bring truth into public policy and politics.
Excellent article! Need the real purposes of these groups exposed: 1) Ignore BLM mandates; 2) Rid all allowed uses of BLM lands; 3) $$$$ to environmental causes.
Waiting for a book containing all articles to date……..
Keep writing …then Volume II.
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