A former Republican congressman from New Mexico has been nominated by President Donald Trump to head the Bureau of Land Management, a move that quickly was condemned by the Sierra Club.
Steve Pearce back in 2017 signed on to a letter to then-President Trump applauding his review of monument designations by Presidents Clinton and Obama and requested that Trump shrink or remove completely “a majority of the monuments under review.” The letter also called national monuments “affronts to our very mode of governance.”
“We New Mexicans have had a front row seat to Steve Pearce’s pro-polluter career and rejected it, yet Donald Trump thinks he’s the right choice to oversee the millions of acres of public lands in New Mexico and across the West," Dan Ritzman, director of conservation at Sierra Club, said Wednesday. "Pearce is a climate-change denier, an ally of the oil and gas industry, and an opponent of the landscapes and waters that generations of Americans have explored and treasured. Time and time again, Donald Trump has shown he thinks the primary beneficiaries of our shared natural heritage should be billionaires and corporate polluters, and not the American people.”
Also criticizing the selection of Pearce was the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
"A longtime player in unsuccessful efforts to prioritize resource extraction and privatize or sell off public lands, Steve Pearce is uniquely unqualified to hold the position of Director of the Bureau of Land Management,” said Scott Braden, executive director of the Alliance. “At a moment when our nation’s public lands face ever-increasing threats from climate change, drought, and wildfire, he is not the right person for the job. As the Trump Administration continues its deeply unpopular efforts to undermine public lands protections, SUWA will continue our work, undeterred, to protect Utah’s redrock country for current and future generations.”
The Wilderness Society also released a statement criticizing the choice.
“Just a few months ago, a bipartisan outcry confirmed once again that Americans love public lands and deeply value the freedom they provide to hunt, fish and recreate, forcing the Senate to abandon an effort to sell off our public lands," said Lydia Weiss, senior director of government relations at the Society. "And yet, the Trump administration now wants the Senate to vote for someone to lead the nation’s largest public land agency who supports selling off our public lands. The public deserves better. Future generations deserve better. The Senate needs to stand with the overwhelming majority of Americans who value public lands and reject Steve Pearce’s nomination.”
Pearce served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2001-2009, and again from 2011-2019. He was the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in New Mexico in 2008 and for governor in 2018. He lost both races.
During his term in Congress the Republican amended the National Landscape Conservation System Act to lock in existing grazing rights on NLCS lands and hindered the Bureau of Land Management’s ability to protect soil, water, and wildlife resources, according to Republicans for Environmental Protection.
BLM manages approximately 245 million acres of public surface land and an additional 700 million acres of subsurface mineral rights.
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