Phil Taylor, E&E reporterNeil Kornze didn't have to look far to find public lands growing up in Elko County, Nev. -- they backed up to his subdivision.
As a high school student, Kornze would travel across his home state by plane, looking down on expanses of sagebrush, salt flats and juniper-dotted mountains.
"Public lands were everywhere in Elko," Kornze said. "It's almost like asking someone to describe the air."
Now that he's director of the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees nearly 250 million acres in the West and more than two-thirds of the Silver State, those lands are under Kornze's care.
It's been a rapid rise for the 36-year-old, who in April was confirmed as BLM's youngest director. Kornze previously worked three years at BLM and several years for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).
As director, Kornze has made tough calls over where to allow oil and gas development, grazing, and off-highway vehicles, and which lands to set aside for recreation, wildlife and solitude. He must balance the needs of rural towns dependent on grazing and resource extraction with the demands of some 300 million other Americans, each owning a tiny stake in BLM lands.
From the outset, he's faced one big test after another. Within days of his confirmation, Kornze's BLM faced an angry, armed mob as it tried to round up Cliven Bundy's cows in a Nevada desert. Weeks later, a Utah county commissioner brazenly flouted the agency's closure of a sensitive river canyon. Wyoming recently sued BLM over its management of wild horses.
"He was literally thrown into the fire," said Whit Fosburgh, CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, a sportsmen's conservation group.
But Kornze's no stranger to land conflicts given his upbringing in Elko County, a stronghold of the 1970s and '80s Sagebrush Rebellion, in which Nevada ranchers rose up against BLM's domain.
His Western roots run deep, with family in Idaho, Utah, Colorado and Nevada.
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