Fighting Bureaucrats Out West

William Perry Pendley is an imposing figure. A big, rangy six-foot-five-or-so, decked out in Western garb, he looks just as hard-bitten as a lawyer as he must have during his many years in the Marine Corps. Pendley has to be tough these days. He spends most of his time fighting the federal government. “People back East just don’t understand the kind of struggles we have to undergo out here just to get access to our own resources,” he says, relaxing among the many artifacts of Western art in his spacious Denver office. “More than 70 percent of the land in some states is still owned by the federal government. The idea was that government ownership was supposed to guarantee multiple use and public access, but more and more it’s a matter of Washington bureaucrats shutting off access so that people back East can imagine that everything out here is still wild and free.” For nearly two decades now, Pendley has been president and chief legal officer of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which has been in the forefront of the Sagebrush Rebellion since the 1980s. Having just published his memoir—Warriors for the West, a selection of the Conservative Book Club—Pendley is more than willing to reminisce, particularly since most of the battles are still being fought. “The Carter and Clinton administrations were the most aggressive about locking up federal land but there’s a bureaucratic inertia,” says Pendley. “The President can change a few people at the top but mostly these agencies are staffed with bright, baby-faced lawyers just out of law school who are eager to carry on the radical environmental crusade.”....