Conservative lawyer in favor of selling public lands picked to oversee BLM

A conservative lawyer and writer who argues for selling off the nation’s public lands is now in charge of a nearly quarter-billion acres in federally held rangeland and other wilderness. Interior Secretary David Bernhardt on Monday signed an order making Wyoming native William Perry Pendley acting head of the Bureau of Land Management. The bureau manages nearly 250 million acres of largely wild public lands and their minerals and other resources in vast holdings across the U.S. West. Pendley, a former midlevel Interior appointee in the Reagan administration, for decades has championed ranchers and others in standoffs with the federal government over grazing and other uses of public lands. He has written books accusing federal authorities and environmental advocates of “tyranny” and “waging war on the West.” He argued in a 2016 National Review article that the “Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold.” In tweets this summer, Pendley has welcomed Trump administration moves to open more federal land to mining and oil and gas development and other private business use, and he has called the oil and gas extraction technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, “an energy, economic, AND environmental miracle!” The Interior Department appointed Pendley as the policy director at BLM, which manages one out of every 10 acres in the United States and 30% of the nation’s minerals, in mid-July. It confirmed his appointment as acting head on Monday night. A conservation group called Pendley an “ideological zealot” and pointed to the federal agency’s announcement earlier this month that it planned to move the BLM’s headquarters from Washington and disperse the headquarters staff among Western states. But Utah cattle rancher and county commissioner Leland Pollock said the Pendley appointment is the latest indication that the Trump administration is returning BLM to its original mission of ensuring that public lands are open to multiple uses. That includes mining, ranching, cattle grazing, ATV riding, hunting mountain biking and hiking, he said. He said the administration has made clear to him and others who had pushed for state control of federal lands that it has no intention of going that route. The 55-year-old is a commissioner in Garfield County in southern Utah, which has 93 percent federally owned lands...MORE

Pendley's books, some of which are mentioned in the critical news report above, are:

War on the West: Government Tyranny on America's Great Frontier
 
It Takes A Hero: The Grass Roots Battle Against Environmental Oppression
 
Warriors for the West: Fighting Bureaucrats, Radical Groups, And Liberal Judges on America's Frontier

and more recently: Sagebrush Rebel: Reagan's Battle with Environmental Extremists and Why It Matters Today 

I was part of that battle with  Pendley and look forward to him bringing reason and balance back to the BLM. If he can manage as well as he writes, we should be witnessing positive changes in the way BLM goes about it's business. Most importantly, they should be held within the confines of the statutes they administer.