Throughout his political career, Pearce has worked to privatize and undermine our public lands. As a New Mexico congressman, he co-sponsored several bills to dispose of national public lands. This alone ought to disqualify him from running the agency charged with stewarding 245 million acres for current and future generations.

In a 2012 letter to House leadership, Pearce argued that the federal government owns “vast” land holdings, “most of (which) we do not even need,” and called for a massive sell-off to pay down the national debt. Pearce’s vision for our public lands is not conservation or even balanced management—it’s liquidation.

President Trump has been down this road before: During his first term, he nominated anti-public-lands zealot William Perry Pendley to run the BLM. Pendley never even received a hearing, and the White House dropped the nomination after his record was revealed. Pendley went on to write the public lands chapter of the now-notorious Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump administration.

Pendley spent his career as a lawyer arguing that the federal government should not own public lands. Steve Pearce has gone even further. From inside Congress, Pearce spent 14 years undermining public lands, seeking to gut wildlife protections and sell off huge amounts of public land.

Pearce’s nomination comes as our public lands are being attacked from all sides. Over the last 10 months, President Trump has elevated officials such as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, both of whom view our public lands as nothing more than assets to monetize through drilling, mining and logging.

These officials are currently working to execute Trump’s vision of selling out public assets for private profit. Pearce would accelerate this effort, liquidating lands to the highest bidder—including corporations and luxury developers.

Even by recent standards, Pearce’s public lands record is radical. It is also unpopular. This spring, Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee tried to include a public land sale provision in the sprawling budget bill, framing it as a housing solution. The measure would have mandated the sale of 2-3 million acres of BLM and Forest Service lands.

But Lee’s amendment triggered immediate backlash from hunters, outdoor recreation groups and Western lawmakers. Within days, he abandoned the effort. If the Senate rejected Lee’s market-rate sell-off as radical, it should be easy now to reject a nominee whose goal is to get rid of even more public land.

That brings us to the Senate Stewardship Caucus, co-chaired by a Republican, Tim Sheehy of Montana, and a Democrat, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico. It launched last month to “advance bipartisan efforts to conserve the nation’s lands and waters” with science-based policy. The caucus has been applauded by hunting, outdoor recreation, and conservation organizations as a promising start for defending public access and wildlife.

Pearce’s nomination is the caucus’s first real test. If its members cannot draw a bright line at a nominee who has worked tirelessly to sell off public lands and weaken laws that protect them, then its vision of “stewardship” is nothing but empty branding.

The stakes are immense. BLM’s multiple-use mandate requires balancing energy, grazing, recreation and conservation under long-term land use plans grounded in science and public input. That mission collapses if the agency’s leader believes we must “reverse this trend of public ownership” of the very lands he is charged with managing.

Westerners understand what happens when responsible stewardship is abandoned. Rural communities lose the long-term economic engine that healthy public lands provide. Hunters, anglers and campers lose access they have relied on for generations.

Steve Pearce’s nomination is a referendum on whether Congress believes our shared lands still belong to all Americans. The Stewardship Caucus and every senator who claims to care about the West’s outdoor heritage should reject Pearce’s nomination. America’s public lands are a unique legacy we pass down to future generations, not a portfolio to liquidate.

Aaron Weiss is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities and co-host of The Landscape podcast.

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Staffing and budget cuts at the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and U.S. Forest Service aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. They are empty ranger stations during peak season, trail crews that never arrive and wildfire teams stretched so thin they can’t keep up.

During the four years when I led the BLM, from 2021 to 2025, I saw what it takes to care for hundreds of millions of acres of public lands. It takes committed, dedicated people—wildfire crews, wildlife biologists, planners, law enforcement rangers—and it takes funding. Today, both are being stripped away at historic rates.

We can already see the consequences. As I write, flames tear through the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, burning down the historic lodge and scarring over 100,000 acres. The fire has raged for weeks since a lightning strike started it on July 4, and it may continue for weeks more.

Fire is part of the West’s natural cycle, but climate change and decades of suppression have made today’s fires hotter and more destructive. It just doesn’t make sense that the Trump administration is gutting the agencies responsible for managing fire risk when we need these experienced and dedicated people most.

More than 1,600 wildfire-qualified staff have been driven out of the Forest Service in recent months, and as many as one in four firefighting jobs remain vacant. To make it worse, firefighters are being pulled from the fire lines to tend to logistics for some forests, even in one of the most dangerous wildfire seasons in memory. 

The administration has even proposed removing firefighting from the Forest Service entirely, a dangerous move that separates the rangers who know the land best from those dousing the flames.

People of all backgrounds celebrated when we collectively stopped Congress from selling off our public lands earlier this summer. But now, a clear and dangerous pattern is emerging: Shrink these agencies until they break, then claim that selling off or industrializing our public lands is the only fix.

This should alarm anyone who values the freedom these lands provide. Public lands are a great equalizer—places where all Americans have the same right to hike, hunt, fish or camp. And to unplug and touch nature. If we lose the people who manage these lands, our access will shrink under wildfire closures, roads will be gated and campgrounds will close. We’ll lose our freedom to wander.

It’s also a direct threat to conservation. Our public lands deliver clean water, clean air and wildlife habitat. Cutting conservation programs and abandoning fire-smart management will leave forests overgrown and ready to burn—with wildfires too big and too hot. 

Worse still, future generations are going to inherit the choices made today. When the administration guts our parks and public lands to pay for tax cuts for billionaires, they saddle the future with parks and trails that are closed, crumbling roads and buildings, forests prone to even worse fire, smoky skies and “No Trespassing” signs. The cherished traditions we pass down—teaching a child to fish or hunt, camping under a night sky, chasing butterflies—will no longer be available to all.

Westerners know what’s at stake. Poll after poll shows that people across the political spectrum want to keep our public lands public, healthy and accessible. That consensus is powerful, but only if we use it now. Either we protect the agencies that protect our public lands, or we watch the slow-motion sell-off unfold.

We must demand full staffing and funding for the agencies that manage our lands, and we must all stand together—hunters and hikers, ranchers and rafters, anglers and climbers—in defense of the places that belong to us all, and to future generations.

Tracy Stone-Manning is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is president of The Wilderness Society and a former director of the BLM. Like millions of Americans, she is spending her summer vacation on public lands.

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We were young professionals and bought a cute one-bedroom crackerbox in a small Montana town for less than $50,000. Today on Zillow, that house lists for more than $300,000. There’s no way salaries have kept up with that kind of inflation. Clearly, rising costs are hitting the working class hard. The escalating prices of fuel, food and shelter squeeze families like a vise.

But that doesn’t excuse people who would use the national housing crisis to advance their agenda to strip Americans of their public land heritage. While there are some rare opportunities for public land sales to help ease the tight housing market here and there, wholesale liquidating of public land is a false promise.

People should know that the folks who ideologically oppose public land are exploiting the housing crisis to push their unpopular agenda.

Recently, some pundits have suggested that a fix for America’s housing problem is to sell off the public estate, thereby increasing the supply of available land. After all, the federal government managed hundreds of millions of acres.

In a few widely scattered places, it makes sense to allow careful urban development on limited public lands. Clark County, Nevada, has done just that on the outskirts of Las Vegas. But that scenario has been collaboratively developed over the years through legislation pushed through by the late Nevada Democratic Senator Harry Reid.

A crop of mostly Republican politicians in the West resent the public estate simply because they dislike the idea of federal land ownership. They use both the courts and Congress in their attempts to reduce the public estate. In their vision, Western states should be more like Missouri or Kansas, with almost no public land.

These folks insist they aren’t targeting national parks or even national forests. They know that’s political suicide. Instead, they focus on Bureau of Land Management property as a precedent, which most people have never heard of. And what are these lands like?

First, the vast majority of BLM land is remote and rugged. Think of the tundra of Alaska, the basin-and-range desert of Nevada, and the Missouri River Breaks of northern Montana. These are history’s leftovers, and not where most people want to—or even can—live. 

Second, these areas tend to be arid. Developments require water, and Western water rights already tend to be oversubscribed. Local climate alone means that human habitation in these places can’t be very dense.

These lands also are often prone to wildfire. Loading these “wildland-urban interfaces” with more homes could lead to future disaster. Managing fire risk in the interface grows more difficult and costly as they are developed. When the fires do come, damages can climb into the billions, rather than the millions. The tragic 2025 fires of Los Angeles would have been even more catastrophic had the adjacent Angeles National Forest been full of homes.

One more value is worth pointing out. Even if these public lands don’t have houses on them, public lands are being used.

Undeveloped canyons help control floods. Open lands provide habitat for wildlife—not just rare species—but also the deer and elk we like to hunt and the birds we like to watch. Public lands are valuable for recreation that’s good for our souls and are the goose that lays the golden egg for many rural economies.

The bottom line is that this debate has virtually nothing to do with the price of homes, which are high for a complex mix of reasons ranging from local growth policies, wealth disparity, and high interest rates.

There’s a shortfall of millions of homes nationwide, but most of the demand simply isn’t where the public lands are. The BLM already has a process to liquidate lands when it needs to or when it makes sense. There is no screaming need for reform of that process, even if there is a screaming need for affordable housing.

To a local eye with any perspective, it’s clear that the argument to sell public lands for housing is a Trojan horse to take public lands out of public hands.

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, Writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is senior program director for Resource Media in Kalispell, Montana.

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More on feral hogs directly. But first some background on another feral ungulate. Few issues in the West are more incendiary than management of “wild horses.” Advocates proclaim them “natives” that should be “wild and free.”

Opponents submit that these proliferating aliens are harming land and wildlife belonging to all Americans.

The federal management goal for these horses on public lands is 27,000. Yet the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency charged with tending them, estimates the current population at 64,604. The Journal of Wildlife Management reports 300,000 on all lands — public, private and tribal. Federal law precludes effective feral-horse management. Unmanaged populations increase by 20 percent annually.

No less prolific are feral hogs. They’re “wild and free,” too. Having grown up with horses and hogs, I can attest that hogs are more intelligent than horses. And while feral hogs are destructive of native ecosystems, they’re no more so than feral horses. So why are there no feral-hog support groups protesting their culling on public lands?

Happily for native wildlife, there has yet to be a Wild Hog Annie. “Wild Horse Annie” was the Nevada woman whose campaign to save “wild horses” inspired animal lovers across America to write impassioned letters to senators and congressmen, demanding that feral equines be protected forever.

The result was the Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act of 1971, which mandated the BLM to manage these animals so as “to achieve and maintain a thriving natural ecological balance.” That task is impossible. No invasive species can thrive or even exist in “natural ecological balance.”

So we spend $160 million a year rounding up feral horses and placing them on perpetual welfare, with almost 50,000 permanently held in corrals or pastures. That’s more than half the $300 million we spend on all 1,618 endangered and threatened species native to the United States.

Horses and burros are the only ungulates in North America with solid hooves and meshing upper and lower teeth. Most native vegetation can’t deal with that. Yet in some areas BLM range management goals call for 15 or 20 horses when its own science tells it that 100 is the threshold for genetic viability. Why aren’t these marginal herds zeroed out?

“Feral horses are worse than cows,” declares retired BLM biologist Erick Campbell. “When the grass between shrubs is gone, a cow is out of luck, but a horse will stomp that plant to death to get that last blade. When cows run out of forage the cowboys move them, but horses are out there all year. BLM exacerbates the problem by hauling water to them.”

And this from Dave Pulliam, former Nevada Department of Wildlife habitat chief: “Horses will stand over a spring and run off other animals. In desert country, seeps and springs are the most important habitats for a whole myriad of species — sagebrush obligate birds, mule deer, bighorns, pronghorns, everything. And horses absolutely beat springs into mud holes. But our wildlife constituents don’t get as vociferous as the horse lovers.”

“Vociferous” is an apt adjective. Feral-horse groups confound the media, bully the environmental community, terrify Congress, beat up BLM and spew junk science. They are also well-funded and adept at manipulating people who have dreamed of owning horses since childhood. And they chant three mantras:

Cows do more damage than feral horses. That’s like saying we should ignore Covid because more people die from heart disease. The only thing wrong with cattle grazing is that it’s not always done right. When it is done right it can benefit native ecosystems by duplicating the range-renewal role of bison. That’s why the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and The Nature Conservancy lease land to ranchers.

Feral horses are historical treasures because they descended from animals brought from Spain by the conquistadores. They’re not. They’re mostly mongrels — a morass of domestic breeds that have recently escaped or been discarded.

Feral horses are native because a somewhat similar species was found in North America before it went extinct 10,000 years ago. That’s like calling elephants native because the continent once sustained wooly mammoths.

With feral horses, facts should outweigh sentiment. Yet wise management is an uphill and losing battle. It’s time for science and common sense to prevail.

Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit that seeks to spur lively conversation about the West. He writes exclusively about fish and wildlife for national publications.

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Instead, I hear that these animals are living symbols of the American West. From Portland urbanites to Idaho ranchers, and also from the many Indigenous peoples whose forebears called the horse their brother, no one can imagine this region without herds of mustangs and burros running free.

From the federal government it’s a different story. Hewing to a strong pro-livestock bias, the Bureau of Land Management has for decades spun a false narrative about an “overpopulation” of equines that, the agency claims, are in danger of starving and destroying their habitat. The agency would have us dismiss what photographers, tourists and advocates document every day: thriving, robust families of horses living peacefully on vast stretches of federal lands.

The reality is that wild horse populations are negligible compared to the vast numbers of cattle and sheep, to which the BLM allocates up to 80% of forage on designated wild horse Herd Management Areas. The agency complains that 80,000 wild equines is too many, yet omits mention of the 1.5 million cattle and sheep it allows to graze on public lands at the taxpayer-subsidized rate of just $1.35 per animal unit month.

Two prominent, mainstream environmental organizations — Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and Western Watersheds Project — exposed the BLM’s own grazing data that reveals commercial livestock, not wild horses, responsible for overgrazing.  These organizations were joined by the Sierra Club last November in calling on the BLM to stop scapegoating wild equids for rangeland damage that is attributable to vast herds of beef cattle and flocks of sheep.

Then there’s the tired debate about whether wild equines are native to the West. The ancestors of today’s wild herds evolved on the North American landscape over millions of years, paleontologists say. It is true that wild horses were wiped out from their home turf at the end of the last Ice Age — likely by human hunters — but some Indigenous tribes insist the horse never completely died out.

Whether they are a native species that never left this region or are native species reintroduced to their birthplace, wild equines evolved on this landscape. Because cows evolved in the cooler temperate pastures and forests of Europe, they struggle to survive in our harsh, arid ecosystems, while wild horses and burros prosper.

Driving around the West you’ll pass thousands of skinny cows while families of vigorous, healthy horses thrive on public rangelands. And while cattle congregate and trample sensitive riparian areas, wild horses will travel up to 20 miles a day in search for forage. With their simple digestive systems, they help spread native grasses far and wide.

Burros even serve as ecosystem engineers, digging wells in parched desert areas that provide a water source for other wild species. Horses and burros are prey animals that also serve as a food source for native carnivores, which, if spared from extermination to benefit livestock, help regulate wild horse populations.

The horse co-evolved in North America with the lion, the wolf and the grizzly. It’s instructive that while nobody laments the loss of a wild foal to a lion or a wolf, federal officials react fast when a steer or a sheep gets picked off by one of them. 

The federal government has a built-in bias against wild horses no matter the critical ecological role they play in promoting rangeland health. The BLM’s wild horse program is largely staffed by self-styled cowboys with a “round ‘em up” mentality for the equines and a “graze-at-your-will” attitude toward livestock.

Where necessary, wild equines can be managed humanely on the landscape with proven fertility control or an emergency gather. But these are the exceptional circumstances. 

It’s time to reject the BLM’s false narrative that wild horses harm public lands and embrace an approach that truly protects them. Wild horses and burros belong right where they are.

Scott Beckstead is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. The writer lives in Oregon where he teaches classes in animal law and wildlife law. He also serves as director of campaigns for Animal Wellness Action and the Center for a Humane Economy. 

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That was probably five years ago, and since then e-bike use has exploded. In 2020, e-bike sales in the United States for just the month of June totaled roughly $90 million, up 190 percent from the previous June.

It’s hard to remember, but regular mountain bikes didn’t become commercially available until the 1980s, and when the early adopters hit trails previously used only by hikers and horseback riders, conflicts happened fast.

People claimed the bikes increased erosion. They worried about collisions and scaring horses. They theorized that mountain bikes would frighten wildlife. Today, those same arguments are being used against electric mountain bikes.

Once again, the controversy seems to stem from the fear of change, perhaps some arrogance and maybe a little jealousy. After all, since I suffered to get to the top of the climb on my own power, shouldn’t you?

In 2017, the International Mountain Bike Association, which had said that e-bikes should be considered motorized vehicles, softened its stance. Instead, it proposed that local land managers and user groups should determine — on a case-by-case basis — whether to allow e-bikes on naturally surfaced trails. Many members canceled their memberships. Some comments were harsh.

One wrote, “If you’re too old to still ride the trails you love, do as many beforehand, reminisce about the good old days and encourage the young. Don’t throw them and our public land under the bus.” That kind of attitude does not bode well for land managers to find an easy compromise.

So, what are the impacts of electric mountain bikes. Do they harm trails, or cause more accidents?

In 2015, the International Mountain Bike Association studied the environmental impacts of mountain bikes, both electric and self-propelled, and found no appreciable differences between the two in terms of soil displacement on trails. Overall, bike impacts were similar to the impacts of hikers.

Horses, motorcycles and off-road vehicles do much more damage to trails.

As for problems caused by speed, traffic studies show that accidents and their severity escalate as differences in speed increase. But do electrified bikes go that much faster than traditional bikes?

To find out, Tahoe National Forest measured the top speeds reached by intermediate and advanced riders using both kinds of bikes. Differences on the downhills were small. On uphills, traditional bikers averaged 5-8 mph, while electric mountain bikes traveled 8-13 mph. This was a difference, but not enough of a difference to cause more accidents, especially if bikers alert others to their presence and ride in control.

Rachel Fussell, program manager of the nonprofit PeopleForBikes, says that more than a battery boost, speed on trails reflects rider skill as well as trail design. She believes that all users observing proper trail etiquette would avert most potential conflicts.

Celeste Young has been a biker all her life and now coaches mountain biking. Her fleet of bicycles has recently grown to include an electric mountain bike.

“The most negative thing I’ve heard is, ‘Oh, you’re cheating,’” she says. “But it’s just another way to be out there. You get an extra boost going up these really hard trails, so it makes a challenging trail fun, rather than demoralizing.”

It’s a puzzling notion that someone accused her of cheating. It would be one thing if you secretly put a motor in your bike during a race, but when it’s an amateur rider going out for fun and exercise, how is having an electronic boost cheating?

The whole thing reminds me — a skier — of the controversy that erupted after snowboards appeared at ski resorts. They were new and fast, and their rhythm on the slope was different than the rhythm of people on skis.

We didn’t like them, and I doubt they liked us. But we’ve worked it out. Now, public land managers face the knotty problem of how much access to allow e-bikes, and where, or whether to segregate them to their own trails. Welcome to the crowded West.

Molly Absolon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring discussion about Western issues. She lives in Victor, Idaho, and has worked as a wilderness educator, waiter, farmer and freelance journalist to support her outdoor recreation habit.

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