New BLM Appointee Believes Founding Fathers Wanted All Public Lands to Be Sold off

By Julia Conley
Control over nearly 250 million acres of public lands was placed Monday in the hands of a former Reagan administration official who has argued that all federal lands should be sold to fossil fuel and other corporate interests in accordance with the goals of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Interior Secretary David Bernhardt appointed attorney William Perry Pendley as acting head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), sending fears throughout conservation groups that many of the country's minerals and resources will soon be handed over to oil and gas companies.
Pendley wrote in 2016 that "the Founding Fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold," and as recently as this month he lauded fossil fuel extraction as an "energy, economic, and environmental miracle."
"This appointment shows Trump and Bernhardt are only interested in selling off public lands to the highest bidder," said Chris Saeger, executive director of the Western Values Project, in a statement. "Pendley is an outspoken advocate for the transfer of public lands to the state. Anything they've ever said about not selling off public lands has just been a political smokescreen to distract from their real intentions: handing over public lands to their special interest allies."
Pendley's appointment comes on the heels of the Interior Department's decision to spread the BLM's Washington, DC-based headquarters across a number of western states, a move which critics say is aimed at giving the agency less control over federal decision-making about federal lands.
The news of Pendley "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," Phil Hanceford, conservation director for The Wilderness Society, told the Associated Press.
During his tenure in the Interior Department during the Reagan administration, the Western Values Project noted in a statement, Pendley frequently called for a repeal of the Antiquities Act, which preserves archeological sites, historic structures, and cultural landscapes across the country.
Under the Trump administration, Pendley has been critical of the Interior Department's shrinking of Bears Ears and Grand Escalante National Monuments — because he feels the president has not been aggressive enough in offering the public lands for what he views as their sole purposes: "ranching, mile, oil and gas, or energy activities," according to a 2016 interview.
"We now have someone in charge of the BLM who would prefer to sell those places off rather than doing the job of caring for them on behalf of all Americans," said Kayje Booker, policy and advocacy director for Montana Wilderness Association, in a statement.
Upon learning of Pendley's appointment, the environmental law group Earthjustice called on the incoming BLM chief to recuse himself from any decision-making regarding one area in Montana, regarding which the group said he has a conflict of interest.
Pendley's former legal client, Solenex, lost its oil and gas lease for the Badger-Two Medicine area in Montana in 2016 when BLM canceled the agreement.
The lease for the area, near Glacier National Park and the Blackfeet Nation reservation, was reinstated by a district judge last year and Earthjustice is currently fighting that decision in an appeals court.
Pendley has "moved from one side of the case to the other, and he's obviously in a position to influence BLM's decision making regarding this important case and that's totally inappropriate," Preso said. "There's a huge conflict of interest there."
"It's hard to imagine anyone in this position more dangerous than William Perry Pendley," said Booker.
Americans will die because of this. https://t.co/SrIeOy06Pu #ActOnClimate #KeepItInTheGround #PublicLands #ClimateCrisis
— Enviro Voter Project (@Enviro_Voter) July 18, 2019
Reposted with permission from our media associate Common Dreams.
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
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