Do Western senators really care about keeping public lands in public hands? Steve Pearce, President Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Bureau of Land Management, is a litmus test of their commitment.
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.
Canyon of the Ancients, BLM land, near Cortez Colorado, Dave Marston photo
This column was published in the following newspapers:
| 12/02/2025 | Salt Lake Tribune | Salt Lake City | UT |
| 12/02/2025 | Montrose Daily Press | Montrose | CO |
| 12/02/2025 | Denver Post | Denver | CO |
| 12/02/2025 | Wyoming Tribune Eagle | Cheyenne | WY |
| 12/03/2025 | Park Record | Park City | UT |
| 12/03/2025 | The Mountain Mail | Pagosa Springs | CO |
| 12/05/2025 | Methow Valley News | Twisp | WA |
| 12/05/2025 | Taos News | Taos | NM |
| 12/18/2025 | Jackson Hole News & Guide | Jackson Hole | WY |
| 12/11/2025 | Columbia County Spotlight | Scappose | OR |
| 12/12/2025 | Valley Times News | Portland | OR |
| 12/12/2025 | The Newberg Graphic | Newberg | OR |
| 12/12/2025 | Beaverton Valley Times | Beaverton | OR |
The ‘mainstream’ press has neglected this entire bucket of issues, but Aaron Weiss has gone a long way toward capturing its increasingly urgent essence.
Indigenous tribes seek to preserve sacred places on lands that were theirs for 700 generations, and to live their yearly ceremonial practices in the solitude they deserve, until we appeared 8 or 10 generations ago. Tribes inhale sharply, and wait, poised to act. Ancient, fragile archeological monuments and inscriptions are hidden, shaded under cliffs, or undiscovered to date, remaining for ceremony.
Mining’s hideous legacies that remain as testimonies to callous indifference corporate profiteers hold to the health and welfare of human populations down-aquifer, up-airshed, and to anyone foolish enough not to bring a geiger counter.
Wildlife among stumps where forests once stood; hikers seeking solitude, confronted by roaring 4-wheelers on newly scraped off-road recreational dust bowls; placid lakes reflect moon’s image only in grandfather’s memories. Bison, caribou and muskox seek in vain for alternative routes to seasonal forage below glaciated peaks, permafrost melting. Fish in warming trickles swim in circles in muddy discharge from culverts and diversion dams that block the way to the spawning brooks of their evolutionary ancestors. Haul trucks hammer roadbed on hundred-foot-wide road, transporting copper ore 211 miles across 3,000 rivers and rivulets, over and over, until the Place is dead. That’s what Trump wants: Oblivion. Only rubble. East Wing gold only for exclusive mobs, they too oblivious to poisons that await them by design in their medieval citadels.
These and a thousand other scenarios are the inevitable consequences of privatization of Public Lands across the country, from Florida to Alaska, from California to the Great Lakes states and on to New England.
Engineers learn early on to suppress ecological compassion, in favor of the will and wages of far away mega-corporations, who seek in turn only the extractive commodities of the day, heaping wastes in acidifying piles, discarding the 99 percent they do not want, confident that public oversight cannot access scientific monitoring data adequate to prove claims of meaningful inadequacies, much less outright violations, with sufficient agility to hold them accountable. Worker communities live echoes of slavery, subjugated by AI in Toxi-Lago, succumbing to cancers and neurological ills years, decades and, likely, for centuries after corporations are gone, after government oversight agencies have been iteratively defunded, dissolved, reinstated, voted in, then out, forgotten by our culture of contamination, through cycle after cycle of neglect.
Milankovitch cycles pass. Glaciers and deserts come and go, parching pathetic humans into the extinctions they have earned. Democracy? There, several gray shale bands down in red sandstone strata from 20,000 years ago, are scattered fragments of plastic components that failed to help us sound alarms so we could hear. PFAS-saturated drinking water treatment plants, drill rig skeletons and carbon fuels slag, freeway concrete and gravel fill, herbicides and pesticides for food cultivation to fend off out-of-balance insect populations we were too lazy to understand, much less seek in harmony; nuclear neighborhood power generation components — all these and much, much more are revealed, weathering out from cliffsides never to be forgiven, pain never to be approached by such an ignorant creature, this most invasive of invasive species ever to walk this Earth, or at the last, to crawl, to wallow, to cry out, to moan.
Now, Live Recovers.
Thanks, Aaron Weiss!
Ivan Weber, Principal/Owner (retired for community advocacy)
Weber Sustainability Consulting
953 E. 1st Avenue
Salt Lake City, UT 84103
801-651-8841
ivan@webersustain.com