Opponent of Nation’s Public Lands is Picked to Oversee Them

WASHINGTON (AP) — 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, without immediate comment.

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.

Pendley's "ascending to the top of BLM just as it is being reorganized strongly suggests the administration is positioning itself to liquidate our shared public lands," said Phil Hanceford, conservation director for The Wilderness Society conservation advocacy group.

The Interior Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the accusation, but earlier it denied that the headquarters' breakup was meant to weaken the agency.