by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
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.
