00:00:00
Speaker 1: Are you overwhelmed by the firehose of public land news and social media posts and crises seemingly coming at us day after day right now? Yeah, me too. There is a lot going on right now related to our national parks and wilderness areas and forests and the like. Serious change is underway. And even for me, someone whose job it is to stay up on this stuff, It is nearly impossible to keep track of it all and what’s real and what’s not and what’s actually important. The thing is, if you hunt or fish or camp or climb or kayak or recreate or enjoy these public lands in any other way, it is more important than ever to stay up to speed on what’s happening to them. But because of that fire hose of change, it is harder to do so than ever as well. Today, I’d like to help with this particular challenge by inviting a public lands leader to help us understand, sort through, and assess some of the most attention-grabbing public land news of the last 12 months. What’s real? What’s not? What’s a serious threat, and what might actually be an opportunity? Joining me to discuss all of that and more is Tracy Stone Manning. the president of the Wilderness Society and former director of the Bureau of Land Management. Given that background and past leadership positions at the National Wildlife Federation and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, Tracy has unique insight into our public lands and managing agencies. And as a hiker, backpacker, and hunter, she has a lifetime of real lived experience recreating and enjoying these lands too. Today, Tracy provides a report card of sorts on our current public lands moment, and not a moment too soon. Thanks for being here. This is Future Wild, brought to you by Conservation First Bank. Tracy Stone Manning, thanks so much for being here.
00:02:16
Speaker 2: It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me.
00:02:19
Speaker 1: It’s with a particular challenge, too, that I’m inviting here to join me, Tracy, that I’m hoping you can help us with. And this challenge is drinking from a fire hose. I’m not sure if you could relate, but right now, many of us who have a connection to public lands, whether that’s hunting or fishing or hiking or backpacking or just loving knowing there’s a wild place out there, for those of us who care about these places, of course, the last year and a half or so has just been a roller coaster, right? There’s been so much change, so many new proposals, so much new rulemaking and legislation and headlines. It’s hard to keep track of, even for someone like me, who this is my full-time job. I can’t imagine how it must feel for the average American who just loves this stuff, but also has a lot of other things going on in their life. So I’m first curious, Tracy, how you have dealt with that. Do you feel that too? Is that a thing? Like you wake up in the morning sometimes and you can kind of feel a tightness in the chest, like, oh, what now?
00:03:32
Speaker 2: It’s a thing. And I think it’s intentional, right? They’re flooding the zone. And I think it’s intentional. Like, you know, people talk about, oh, it’s a pendulum swing. And, you know, politics, they swing back and forth. This isn’t a pendulum swing. Like, this is unprecedented. The scale and level of attacks on our public lands and nature literally have never been this big from any administration in our history, right? And so it can feel overwhelming to the average person. And I think the average person just has this sort of sense of, hey, this feels wrong, right? This doesn’t feel right. And it’s incumbent upon people whose day jobs it is, like yours, like mine, to let people know, okay, now’s the time to plug in. Now’s the time to shoot off an email and say, this doesn’t feel right. And I’m just grateful that there’s a whole community of people out there working to protect this beautiful conservation legacy we have in this country. Yeah.
00:04:40
Speaker 1: And it I think that we are seeing, and I think it’s always been this way, but maybe it’s just becoming more visible, the fact that that conservation community and that public land community is incredibly diverse. It’s not just urban environmentalists. It’s not just rural hunters. It’s not just birders in Michigan or trout fishermen in Colorado. It’s all of those people who are wildly different in many different ways, plus so many other different versions of that, right? And they’re coming from all sorts of places. They have all sorts of different backgrounds. They have different political affiliations. And all of that, I think we are seeing now, folks are saying, hey, who cares? Let’s stand together on this thing that unites us. And that’s been exciting to see.
00:05:32
Speaker 2: It’s the silver lining.
00:05:34
Speaker 1: Right?
00:05:36
Speaker 2: This great awakening to our common ground.
00:05:42
Speaker 1: Right?
00:05:42
Speaker 2: People from all walks of life saying, hey, we have this thing in common as Americans, as people who love our country, as people who love the outdoors. We’ve got this beautiful thing in common called public lands. A third of our country. I mean, it’s incredible. That we all own a third of our country in common. And we have a say in how they are managed for us today and how they should be managed for future generations. And I think that’s the part that has people so disconcerted now. The idea that we may not be handing this legacy, this beautiful legacy, down to future generations has people kind of freaked out, as it should, right? But I remain optimistic that precisely because there’s this awakening because there’s this real, this realization that we are not, um, opposed to each other. We are working in common for our common ground and it’s awesome.
00:06:44
Speaker 1: So you mentioned that this has got a lot of people freaked out and you know, I feel the same way, but I am also particularly, um, I’m not allergic to it, but concerned about the risk of falling into the social media hysteria that sometimes happens on so many different issues. Not just this, but anything, right? It’s very easy for the loudest, most catastrophic take on an issue to then reverberate across the internet and be the thing that we see. Oh no, this is a disaster, and this is a disaster, and this is a disaster. And I sometimes worry You know, am I sure? Is that for real? Is it really as bad as it sounds? Am I getting this right? So what I’m hoping you could help us with, Tracy, is a little bit of a fact check or a temperature check on some of the news we have been seeing over the last 12 months, almost like a report card. I’d love to kind of throw at you a number of the most kind of attention-grabbing public land issues of the last 12 to 16 months. and get your take on, okay, what’s the reality of what this means? And then how serious is it? And maybe it’s a, how serious of a threat is this? Or maybe, you know, there’s a couple of things like, Hey, how much of an opportunity might there be here? Or could this threat actually be an opportunity? Um, I would love to, to get your read on these things so that the rest of us can have like a, a real life, um, perspective on some of these things that for a lot of us are a, a headline, um, and a bunch of news alerts and action alerts. And then we have to try to assess it with limited background and really try to get to the bottom of, is this really important or is it not as important? Or is this a thing that where I actually could make an impact or is it something that’s going to happen no matter what? And, and really I should be focusing on this other thing where really I do have leverage. There’s so many questions like that, that I think we’re facing now on almost a weekly basis. And, and I think this is needed is some of this just clarity. So, That’s my thought for our time here together. Does that sound okay?
00:08:58
Speaker 2: It does. And can I start with an overarching idea of it? Yes. In the how freaked out should we be, I want to start with hope, right? And my hope comes from the American public and this beautiful conservation legacy we have that generation upon generation has built upon. And this feels like a blip to me. And what gives me hope is that it’s a minority of people in charge who are making poor decisions. The majority of the country still wants to ensure that we have a conservation legacy. And I mean, that is something to celebrate and take to the bank. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:09:43
Speaker 1: So true. So let’s then take that. And take a step further with a specific example of this. And I think it’s an example that we’re already seeing some of what you just mentioned there, which is the hot topic of the moment, the roadless rule rollback. We, of course, just saw the official proposed rule from the administration to roll that back in its entirety. But now they have this 30-day comment period open in which we can weigh in. So can you lay out exactly how your read is on this rollback And where does that kind of, if we were to say like an A is like, hey, this is a great idea. And an F is this is a very bad, serious idea that we need to wrestle with. Where would you rank this one once we are able to kind of get your take on it?
00:10:33
Speaker 2: We’re starting with a fail. It’s a fail. And here’s why, right? For over 25 years, this rule has been in place to protect 45 million acres of our national forests. And it’s been working. And it’s been working for people. It’s been working for elk. It’s been working for fish. I mean, one reason I really care about it as a hunter is that roadless country, as you know, is critical for wildlife, right? I’m a Montanan. Over 90% of elk summer range is in roadless areas, right? We need to keep those areas intact. You know, what’s the saying? The good Lord ain’t making any more land. And so once we develop that land, you can’t undo it. So on paper, it’s a total F. We should just keep those protections in place. Do I have faith that Americans will rise up and say this is a terrible idea and we can stop it?
00:11:37
Speaker 1: I do.
00:11:38
Speaker 2: I think we can stop it through this process. And if we can’t stop it through this process, we lay down this great administrative record, all those comments that we can take to the court. And we lay down a great record for Congress so that Congress can step in one day and say, hey, hang on. That actually should be something that we take care of as a Congress for future generations. So the louder we get now, Either we win, which would be great, or we create the groundwork for eventually really winning. Does that make sense?
00:12:17
Speaker 1: It does. And I’ve got two follow-ups. One of those being about the comments you just mentioned there. I think there’s a tendency sometimes to feel like we’re shouting into the wind on that stuff. Especially in recent months, it feels like, hey, we’ve weighed in. strongly on a number of these different things, and it doesn’t seem to be making a difference. You obviously, with your role at the BLM previously, you had this firsthand experience having to analyze those comments and then potentially use them to help make your decisions. Can you just expand a little bit on what you mentioned there as far as how those comments are used or not used currently, but then also how they can still be an important tool years down the line? How does that actually play out?
00:13:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, so great question. And I’m here to say to our listeners and viewers, it really matters to comment. You can do it in under two minutes and it really matters. And here’s why. First, the Forest Service needs to hear that this is a bad idea, right? We can’t give them the ability to say, well, nobody said anything. So, okay, let’s finalize this, right? We have to weigh in and say, this is a terrible idea. And, um, so that, that helps in the short term. Um, and that helps for people who are on the ballot right now, who might go to the administration and say, what are you doing to me? Please stop this, right? There’s that kind of avenue. Uh, then there’s just the avenue of literally creating a record, a record that we can take to court and say, your honor, the agency got it wrong for all these reasons. These people commented and said these things, and the agency didn’t address those comments in the final rule. And that’s how they got it wrong. And again, the very last sort of record building is with the broad public so that the Congress sees, hey, maybe we should just put this to bed once and for all and pass a law, not a rule, that protects these lands for future generations and for wildlife today.
00:14:32
Speaker 1: And that comment and the scale of that and then some of the particular actual comments are then used as essentially data that backs up that case. Is that right?
00:14:42
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
00:14:44
Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. So one additional follow-up on the roadless. And I wanted to share with you one of the questions I’ve had is I’ve tried to do my own assessment without, you know, just relying on the headlines from someone else, but trying to say, okay, let’s, let’s critically think about this. Um, as a hunter, I know that one thing that many wildlife species require is diverse vegetation is sunlight reaching the ground where that can then, you know, create those early successional habitats that provide the new green growth that so many wildlife depend on, um, to get that nutrition or the edges that so many different wildlife species like birds and bugs require. Um, All of that is good for many species, many types. And so there is a growing chorus across the conservation world in many parts saying, hey, we do need to try to make sure we’re managing our forests to provide some of that. There is possibly a need for active management of some degree in some places possibly. Same thing with fire, right? The case that the administration has made is that we need to better manage our forests and we need to better deal with wildfire problems. risk, and mitigation. Many folks would hear that and then take the context I just provided and say, huh, that makes some sense. Maybe there is some rationale for rolling back the roadless rule if it’s keeping that from happening. I’ve done a bunch of digging on this and trying to understand it for myself, and I know and I understand there’s exclusions. There’s ways that these things can happen within roadless areas, but I would love to hear from your perspective how you think about that and how The Wilderness Society might be thinking about that or anybody can think about how, you know, the possibility for quality wildlife habitat and the possibility for wildfire management and roadless areas can all happen at the same time.
00:16:42
Speaker 2: Yes, great question. And the roadless rule doesn’t prevent that, right? So much of our hazardous fuel work happening right now is happening in roadless areas. Let’s just have a quick little reminder. The roadless rule prevents roads from being punched in to forests. We have hundreds of thousands of miles of roads on our forest system already. We know that roads lead to people getting deeper into the forest. We know that roads and people lead to fire.
00:17:20
Speaker 1: Right?
00:17:20
Speaker 2: Fire is four times more likely, uh, uh, off the side of a road than it is in the back country. Um, there is a way, uh, to do the exact kind of work you’re talking about of making sure that forests are managed properly, um, through either getting in there and doing mechanical thinning or prescribed fire. And you’re absolutely allowed to do that in roadless lands. What you’re Because roads ultimately lead to the habitat, the cutting up the habitat that is such a problem, right? And lead to the runoff of sediment for fish. And roads, it turns out, are convenient for people and terrible for wildlife. And the great thing about the protection that’s been in place for the last 25 years is that it allows us to still get in there and do work. We just don’t punch a road in to do it. Yeah.
00:18:24
Speaker 1: And there’s, as you mentioned already, there’s no shortage of roads in other spots if that is your preferred route, right? 370,000 miles of them.
00:18:34
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:18:35
Speaker 1: So I want to shift gears, but not by too much. It’s something that’s closely related. And that would be the review that was proposed over the summer of Wilderness.org. study areas and some of the wilderness, some areas of like BLM land, for example, with wilderness characteristics. This one was a little bit tricky for some people, I think, because they were trying to understand what exactly does this mean? Why are they opening up this common period? You know, is this actually a threat? Is this just a simple, typical thing that any administration does? So could you give us your read on what that actually was? And was this typical or is this concerning?
00:19:17
Speaker 2: It’s concerning and not typical. At stake are 200 million acres of lands that are either managed as wilderness, designated as wilderness and managed as wilderness, or potentially proposed for wilderness through wilderness study areas, or just have wilderness characteristics. There’s a whole bunch of different bureaucratic ways you can name a place and manage a place. So wilderness study areas are exactly as the name sounds. The Congress has the ability to create permanent protection in the form of wilderness. Wilderness study areas are places that the Congress asks the agency to study to say, hey, should these be wilderness? You guys know better than we do. You’re the land managers. Should they be wilderness? And then the Congress decides yes or no. Problem is that’s dragged on for quite a long time. And there are many, many acres of wilderness that the agencies or wilderness study areas that the agencies have recommended to the Congress to create as wilderness. And the Congress just hasn’t gotten around to it. And what, the current administration is doing is saying, hey, should we be managing those areas as if they were wilderness? Should we open them up for development since the Congress hasn’t gotten around to it? We believe the answer to that question is no, you shouldn’t. What should happen is Congress should get around to deciding whether or not these places should be wilderness. And the reason that the agencies manage them as wilderness while they’re waiting for that decision to be made is once you develop a place, you can’t recreate that wilderness character. Like if you punched a bunch of roads into the Bob Marshall wilderness, you can’t, it’s no longer wild. And so it’s a very conservative, prudent way to manage. Let’s protect what we have. Until we decide what to do with it. And this administration is saying, nah, let’s just open it up and get in there. And that’s really kind of dangerous. And what it’s doing is kind of robbing from the future the ability for the future to make these decisions.
00:21:53
Speaker 1: And wouldn’t it preclude these lands if they lost those wilderness characteristics because of possible changes? it would then not just in a lived experience kind of way, but actually in a legal way preclude those lands from being potentially designated as wilderness someday, correct?
00:22:14
Speaker 2: Correct, because they no longer are wild. So why would they be designated as wilderness? It’s a backdoor attempt to circumvent Congress and to take away the possibility for protecting these lands for future generations.
00:22:36
Speaker 1: And is there overlap? I think there is some overlap with roadless rule and WSAs and things like that. Is that correct?
00:22:46
Speaker 2: In some places, yes. So in some roadless areas, there’s also a wilderness study area within those roadless areas. Of course, because they’re wild, right? And You know, so there are different layers of designations. But first of all, the elk don’t care what the designation is. The trout don’t care. Right. The habitat is the habitat. And how we choose to manage that habitat for future generations is what matters. And the unfortunate thing is this administration is really opening it. They want to open it all up. to potential development, right? We’re seeing it with the travel management proposal from last week as well. They just want to say it’s all open unless we close it. And it’s just, it’s a way of governing that does not look around the corner to the future. So when I was director of BLM, I would say to land managers, our job is to leave as many options on the table for future land managers as possible, right? The more options you leave on the table, the more room they’ve got to manage, the more room they’ve got to protect elk and mule deer and trout in the future. And it’s a very kind of, one could say kind of conservative approach to managing because what was it? Uh, that what was, uh, I think it was Aldo Leopold who said, uh, the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.
00:24:30
Speaker 1: Yeah. Keep all the parts, you know?
00:24:32
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so, right. It’s a beautiful line and it’s a really thoughtful way about, uh, uh, for land managers to proceed.
00:24:42
Speaker 1: You mentioned exactly where I wanted to go next, which was the travel management plan, uh, updates that were announced. And this is another one that I think, um, can be couched in a way that some people might think, oh, this is good. The administration is couching many of these proposals in terms of more access. We want to open up your public lands to you. We want more access for hunting and fishing and climbing and biking and whatever. And that sounds pretty good. Why might, and you already previewed a little bit, but could you dive in further into the travel management plan changes in particular? And again, why some of this is less beneficial than they might want us to think.
00:25:29
Speaker 2: Yeah. Look, we all share these lands in common. And there are a bunch of different uses on these lands. And what a land manager does is try to make sure that the use you’re going to do, an ATV or say, like, you have a good time when you’re out there, right? and it’s safe and you’re not going to like jam, you’re not going to come around the bend and run into a horse. Um, and, uh, and the same thing for sort of hikers and hunters that there are places where, you know, if you go, you’re going to, you’re going to feel alone out there and you’re not going to run into, um, motors as you’re trying to sneak up on an elk. And, and that makes your experience better.
00:26:17
Speaker 1: Right.
00:26:18
Speaker 2: And, And it feels sort of like a no brainer when you’re out on the landscape, but it takes really thoughtful management so that you get to have that experience. And what this rule would do is to say, so whatever you want to do out there, friends have at it. And there, you know, there are billions of people on this planet. There are hundreds of millions of people in this country. If, if, You do that kind of management and people are going to get into tussles out on the landscape. And we should just prevent that from happening.
00:26:52
Speaker 1: And the current travel management plan has been a tool for doing that, right? That’s been a means of trying to find that careful balance?
00:27:00
Speaker 2: Totally. It’s a balance. It’s about trade-offs. Some people say, I want everything. It’s like, well, you don’t get everything, right? We were all raised in households, like some of us with siblings. You don’t get it all. You’ve got to share everything. And thoughtful travel management planning is about sharing. It’s about sharing this beautiful experience that is our public lands. And it has worked. It’s hard, but it’s really worked. And I’m afraid that, I mean, not, you know, you were before saying everything sounds so terrible. The logical extension of what they are talking about is like road warrior out there. Like, who wants that?
00:27:46
Speaker 1: I don’t even think the off-roaders want that.
00:27:48
Speaker 2: No, of course not. Yeah, yeah, of course not.
00:27:52
Speaker 1: You know, the multiple-use mandate that many of our public lands have is something that I’ve always thought is one of the most wonderful things about them, right? We have so many different ways we can engage with these places. There’s so many different uses for them. there are economic opportunities, there are spiritual opportunities, there are recreational opportunities, there are wildlife values and water values and all this stuff. But I think, and you know this more than anyone, but over the course of our public lands history, I think we’ve found that everything all at once everywhere doesn’t work, right? So multiple use doesn’t mean it has to be everywhere all at once everything. It can be Some of these places are best used in this way, and some of these places are best used at this time in this different capacity. And being able to find that balance that you’re talking about, find those trade-offs, assess those, and then find some happy medium that works for the long term, that is a tricky, tricky balance. But it’s the whole thing. If you can’t do that, then none of this works.
00:28:55
Speaker 2: Yeah. I used to say, you know, multiple use, it’s not for the faint of heart, right? Because it’s hard. And you’re quite right. Multiple use doesn’t mean every use on every acre, right? It means many uses across the entire system of our public lands. So there’s space for lithium mines to help charge the future. There’s space for a truly quiet, wild experience. Get to have both, right? But that takes… thoughtful management, and it takes the engagement of the public, working with the public to say, here’s what we think we should do. What do you think? Working with tribes to say, here’s what we think we should do. What do you think? And collectively coming up with how best to manage this unbelievable heritage we have that is called public lands.
00:29:55
Speaker 1: So the travel management plan and then pair that with the, I believe, two executive orders that the president rescinded from decades ago that also had some degree of control over off-roading and some of this travel-related stuff on public lands. Those three things kind of pair together. How would you assess kind of the threat level there? How real are these changes? How soon might we see something like that? What’s that going to look like?
00:30:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s, um, uh, the threat is real, right? Because what they’re, what the administration is suggesting we do is undo years of very careful, balanced management where everybody, um, uh, agrees that, that we’re going to share this landscape and this unfettered approach that they are, that they want to take, um, is just flat out dangerous, right? They’re unwinding decades of work. And I don’t know what that’s going to look like in the end, right? People five years from now might say, whoops, that was a terrible idea. Let’s figure out how to fix it. And what I’m actually oddly kind of excited about is we will have an opportunity here, I think, in the coming years. This administration has fundamentally shifted how it looks at public land management. It is decimating our land management agencies, right? Firing a bunch of people, dozing a bunch of people. And so whoever comes in in the future is going to have to figure out how to put Humpty Dumpty back together. And I don’t think anybody would build the public land system that that was built 50, 75, 100 years ago to solve the challenges of 50, 75, and 100 years from now. So we have this incredible opportunity to build a system to manage our public lands for the future. That is the one, for me, bright spot in this tear-it-all-down approach. Well, if it’s all torn down, we get the chance to rebuild it. And that’s pretty cool. That’s really exciting. And we get the chance to rebuild it with this very shared understanding that we all love our public lands. We are learning together as a country that a lot of people love our public lands. And so I know it sounds a little weirdly optimistic in a very difficult time, but I am optimistic that this wake-up call And the work that we have to do together to rebuild can ensure that 100 years from now, that whatever meat eater is in the future is going to be having people on talking about the incredible hunt they had.
00:33:09
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, speaking of learning, you know, another thing that I think has been a strange but beneficial side effect of all this is just how the last year and a half or two years has surfaced so many public land, rules and laws and designations that have just been humming under the surface that most of the world doesn’t know about, right? The average American didn’t know anything about the roadless rule. They don’t know anything about travel management plans. They don’t know anything about what’s actually going on with how the Forest Service is structured or the wildfire capabilities, right? Most people didn’t know anything. But now all of a sudden, this is being dragged out into the public eye. And people are realizing, oh, wow, there are these important structures in place that make this possible. Oh, wow, this law that was passed or this rule that was created 25 years ago has actually made my elk hunt possible or my mountain bike trail that I love possible. I think there’s this great educating of the American people underway right now, which could pay dividends someday.
00:34:15
Speaker 2: I think that’s exactly right. I was listening to Chris Wood on your show a little while ago where he said, hey, this whole roadless rule thing, it’s just religion, right? It’s just people who hate regulation. They want to tear it down because they don’t like regulation.
00:34:29
Speaker 1: Right.
00:34:31
Speaker 2: But it turns out some regulations really matter, right? I turn on my tap and I drink the water and it’s clean because of regulation, right? I can barrel down the highway at 75 miles an hour on a two-lane highway because there’s a regulation that says I stay on the right side of the double yellow line and you do too and we don’t kill each other. Like, you know, I think people are awakening to that there was this system in place that was attempting to ensure that we get to pass this legacy on to future generations while also delivering today for the American people the resources that we need.
00:35:11
Speaker 1: Yeah. So continuing along the more positive lines, what about the America, the beautiful act? That was something that was pretty widely celebrated this summer. Um, and you know, both sides of the political spectrum seems to say, Hey, this is a good thing. Um, some people were like, this is the best thing ever. Some people were like, Hey, this is great news, but there’s a whole bunch of other bad stuff going on too. So let’s not put lipstick on a pig. Um, What’s your take on that? What will it actually lead to? Was this a band-aid? Was this a generational win? What exactly happened here?
00:35:50
Speaker 2: I think the America the Beautiful Act is really important because it does what the Congress and government is supposed to do. It is funding maintenance for our public lands. It is a little bit shameful that we have a backlog of billions of dollars of work that needs to happen in our park system and on our forests and in our refuges. That is not okay. And the America the Beautiful Act is attempting to address some of that maintenance backlog. And it’s for things like bathrooms and trailheads and parking lots. It’s for basic infrastructure. um of course we should do that as a country right of course uh so good on the congress for talking about catching up to that backlog bad on the congress for letting it happen in the first place right yeah this is this is this is like the course of doing business you if you own a house you keep it up right when something breaks you fix it um and You don’t wait for 75 years and say, oh, my God, my house is a hot mess. I better get to fixing it. You keep it fixed as you go if you can. And that’s my hope for the future of our public lands, that this great awakening to the threat that we could lose them, the threat that they could be managed incorrectly, may lead to support for the management we really should be doing on these lands all along. Yeah. Yeah.
00:37:30
Speaker 1: Yeah. It’s funny. It makes me think of, uh, when I, when I finally take care of some home improvement problem, we’ve been having the home that probably lingered for months and I finally do it and I feel really proud of myself and I kind of expecting my wife to be, you know, really happy about it. And instead she was like, well, yeah, you should have done it a long time ago. No, no need to, not going to pat you on the back, buddy. You did the thing you were supposed to be doing for weeks.
00:37:52
Speaker 2: So exactly. It’s, it’s kind of like that. Yeah.
00:37:54
Speaker 1: Yeah. That resonates. Um, I’d like to run you through a series of, of additional things like this, but for the sake of time, we’re going to kind of look at it like a rapid fire session now. So I’m going to drop one of these issues and we’ll get like your 60 second take on it, kind of compress what we’ve been doing into the highlights because there’s, there’s so much going on that I want to make sure we get at least a little bit of insight into each one before I, before we need to let you go. So this one I, I should have given you more time on this because this is very near and dear to your heart. But the rollback of the public lands rule that I know was so much a part of your tenure there at the BLM. Can you give us a quick rundown of what that was trying to do, what you were trying to achieve there, and then what the ramifications of this rollback will be?
00:38:45
Speaker 2: Yeah. All the public lands rule did in a nutshell was say we want to protect the very best of our lands. restore the lands that need restoration, put people to work on our public lands, restoring them, and make really good decisions based on the health of the landscape going forward. Conservation is one of the multiple uses, and it’s been sort of shunted off into the corner for far too long, and conservation should just be a part of how we approach managing our lands. If we manage lands for their health, future generations will benefit.
00:39:32
Speaker 1: Give, I’m going to, I’m going to give you extra time on this one. The, because I do want to get a little bit more clarity around one of the things that has been used as, as reasoning for getting rid of it, which were these opportunities for, for, conservation leasing opportunities or something along those lines. And those who say this is a bad rule would say, oh, you are taking public lands. You’re precluding these public lands from being used for other uses. You’re locking them down. You’re land grabbing this stuff for conservation or outside environmental groups are going to land grab here. Can you give me just a quick, better understanding of the reality of what you were trying to do there? and how that would do what you just mentioned, which was kind of put conservation on equal footing with the other multiple uses. Within the BLM’s Organic Act, these things were listed there, but for some reason conservation has not been getting any kind of real, tangible way of achieving those goals, while oil and gas leasing or grazing, they do have tools for that.
00:40:39
Speaker 2: Exactly. So almost every single use on our public lands– has a rule that governs that use. Here’s how we’re going to go about grazing. Here’s how we’re going to go about oil and gas drilling. This simply said, here’s how we’re going to go about ensuring we protect fish and wildlife habitat for the future, which is what our organic act says we need to do at the BLM, right? So this restoration lease was just one tool to let people do that. Look at the amazing amount of conservation and restoration that has happened on private lands. Look at the astounding work that Ducks Unlimited and Pheasants Forever and Trout Unlimited have done on private lands. This tool would give people the ability to do that work and know that over a 10-year period, because that’s how long the leases last, that work could take literally and figuratively take root. You’ve got a piece of hammered ground, you want to restore it for trout or upland birds or elk. You get in there, you do the restoration, and you know that nature has a minute to lock that restoration in without kicking off any of the other uses. Grazing still gets to happen. Recreation still gets to happen. BLM’s pretty good at doing many things in one place, right? Restoration was just one of those things. Unfortunately, it got blown out of proportion about how powerful it was. It’s not nearly as powerful a tool as the opposition was trying to make it out to be.
00:42:15
Speaker 1: Yeah. I, uh, I thought it was such a cool idea and I was so disappointed to see it, you know, never get a chance to really get off the ground the way it deserved, but, uh, but hopefully as I’ve heard you say in other places, hopefully it’s laid the groundwork for whatever comes next. Um, I’m sure it was a lot of work that, uh, that I’m certainly appreciative that you and your team, uh, took on, but, uh, thank But back to rapid fire, and now I will try to move along more quickly here. How about the Congressional Review Act being used in a couple different controversial ways to roll back resource management plans and then the mineral withdrawal on the boundary waters? They tried to use this for some monuments as well. That didn’t actually work out. But give me your take on the CRA being used to roll back some of these protections for public lands.
00:43:07
Speaker 2: We believe it’s a terrible idea and not what the Congress intended when they wrote the Congressional Review Act back in the 90s. We’re worried it’s going to cause some chaos on the landscape and that Congress at some point is going to have to step in and fix it. All right.
00:43:26
Speaker 1: Adjacent to that, I mentioned the monument reduction. They originally tried to do that with the CRA project. That didn’t happen, but then the administration just went ahead and redrew the lines for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase monuments. Could you share with me your thoughts on that and how the executive powers being able to not just create monuments, but now possibly remove them, resize them, do what’s being done most recently?
00:43:58
Speaker 2: I think the courts are going to wrestle with that question. of whether a president has the authority to undo a different president’s work. But think about it. Can you imagine undoing the Grand Canyon, which eventually went from a monument to a park? There’s only been one president in the history of our country who has used the Antiquities Act to shrink monuments, and that’s the current president. We believe it is not what the Antiquities Act is, uh, is meant to do. Um, and, and it’s, what’s very clear is that the American public does not support using, uh, executive power to shrink conservation.
00:44:47
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s, uh, it’s interesting to see Theodore Roosevelt’s name, um, in comparing yourself to him. And then at the same time, use one of his landmark tools to then undo, uh, monuments and public lands that designations that, that, that one is thick with irony for me. Uh, yeah, but moving on, uh, another fun one here that caused quite a stir would be the forest service restructure. Um, the, the many different ramifications of that after all of the things going on last year with, with, firings, forced resignations, all those changes. And now we have this massive restructuring of the Forest Service, moving the headquarters, closing down research stations, etc. I know that something similar happened prior to you taking on the job with the BLM, and you had to kind of deal with the mess of that. Can you run us through your take on this? How serious is this? This was one where some people cried bloody murder. Other people said, well, actually, maybe it’s not that bad. Where’s the truth lie in your perspective?
00:45:56
Speaker 2: Mess is the right word. It was a mess. And when I was at the BLM, I saw the years and years and years and years of experience that walked out the door as a result of that move to the West. And the BLM is still feeling that today. Let me be really clear here. There’s only one outcome. from the dismantling that they are doing through cuts and through moving the agency out of Washington, D.C. And that is land management agencies that do not work. And those land management agencies, when they do not work, when they do not deliver for the American people because they can’t, because there’s not enough of them and it’s in chaos, people will throw up their hands and say, see, The federal government can’t manage these public lands. We need to sell them off. We need to hand them over to the states. That is what this is about. It is not about governmental efficiency. It is not about org charts. It is about dismantling our public land legacy. And it’s really dangerous.
00:47:12
Speaker 1: And is it something that are we going to see near-term impacts of this or is it or is this something that’s going to take years for us to start feeling this this slow atrophy of the service and its abilities and can it be fixed you know if someone came in in a few years and said hey actually let’s go back to how it was or let’s adjust and let’s refund and let’s hire back i mean i guess you had to try to do that right how long does that take uh let’s.
00:47:40
Speaker 2: Let let me answer the uh question first of are we seeing um the ramifications of it now. Of course we are, right? There are people who are pulling up to campgrounds that are closed or they’re pulling up to campgrounds and the water doesn’t work or the bathrooms are closed. People are trying to walk down trails that aren’t being maintained. But here’s where it’s really coming home to roost. We’re in a historic fire season and over and over and over again, We are hearing people who are bravely out there trying to protect our communities say, I don’t have the resources I need. I don’t have the people that I need to do my job. And that’s terrifying and it’s not okay. The long-term question of can we fix it?
00:48:30
Speaker 1: Sure.
00:48:31
Speaker 2: And it gets back to that notion of if they tear it all down, we get to build it for the century we are walking into. not the century we came from, right? So we’ve kicked off at the Wilderness Society, we kicked off an independent initiative called Ground Shift. You can go to groundshift.us where some of the thinking is happening about, okay, if we get to rebuild it, what should it be? It’s a huge opportunity in the wreckage.
00:48:59
Speaker 1: All right, speaking of possible wreckage that might be harder to recover from, Maybe, maybe not. You’ll have to tell me. But I’d like to move north into Alaska and get your take on three separate locations there that there’s been a lot of concern around and that have been. in recent months and years progressively opened up further and further to development. That being the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which I was so fortunate to get to visit last summer. And it just changed my perspective on everything. Okay. And then just to the west of it, the NPRA, the Western Arctic over there, the National Petroleum Reserve of America, as it’s known. Both of those places are being opened up to additional oil and gas leasing and development. Of course, the NPRA has been for a while and more so. Now they’re just trying to, over the last handful of years, the leasing has been opened up on the Arctic Refuge. Let’s tackle this. Let’s tackle the Arctic first. Those two covers most of the northern border of Alaska there. Give me a little bit of insight into how you see the impacts of those two locations being opened up to more development and to what degree will real change actually happen? That’s been one thing I’ve seen debated, especially with the refuge as well. Maybe it’s open up to leasing, but nobody seems to want to buy the leases or it’s not economical to actually go in there and develop. So maybe nothing will actually happen. What’s your take and assessment on all of that?
00:50:39
Speaker 2: America’s Arctic is amazing, as you discovered last year, right? It is astounding. It is wild. It is big. The Western Arctic and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are massive. home to millions and millions and millions of birds each season that go there and in a frantic frenzy manage to breed, raise chicks, and get out before the winter comes. People have subsisted off of that landscape for thousands of years. People still today subsist off that landscape. That alone is worth protecting, that anywhere on the planet people still live off the land. And that happens in our country. I mean, that’s amazing. That alone is worth protecting. And all of that is at risk. I think your take is right, that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is not attracting the big majors, but it is still leased. We are still going to have to fight it in court. But the Western Arctic, west of there, on the National Petroleum Reserve, They’ve just opened the doors to oil and gas. There is a proposed rulemaking that basically says if oil and gas corporations ask for it, they get it. And that is not what the law says that governs that place. The law that governs that place says there is oil here that is important to the country, but there’s also this incredible habitat that we have to take care of. There is It’s very hard to do both. There is a way to do both. The way this administration is approaching it is completely lopsided. And at risk are millions of birds, caribou, and people’s way of life. It’s a real threat. And it really deserves our attention. And, you know, oil is.
00:52:54
Speaker 2: Is a resource we can get elsewhere, right? The Bakken, the Permian, like we produce incredible amounts of oil in this country. And at risk now for getting more of it is truly wild country. And some places, frankly, just shouldn’t be developed. And a huge expanse of the Western Arctic is one of those places.
00:53:17
Speaker 1: And it’s something that is almost unavailable anywhere else in the world it’s like our own version of the african serengeti and we still have it in america uh you know it’s it’s wild to consider that another thing a friend of mine brought this and made this kind of comparison to me and it it really struck home he said when you when you think about when you look at the caribou herds that we have across the arctic and across the far north these vast i mean i mean truly vast 500 000 animal herds that are moving sometimes more than a thousand miles back and forth, migrating across these incredible wild places in the United States of America. We have that. This incredible wild wonder of this world. But it might be disappearing. And it might be disappearing just like we lost a similar wildlife spectacle of bison in the millions across our Great Plains, right? And then in a series of just a handful of years, seemingly, it went from seemingly endless, infinite wildlife, and then gone. And of course, totally different set of circumstances that led to that loss. But as many people are starting to discover, caribou are in the midst of this precipitous decline. And at this moment when caribou are across the world declining by something like 65%, we are now possibly going to add on this massive set of habitat changes that could extinguish this life force, you know, that’s unparalleled. Um, it’s, it’s a hard one to wrap the head around, but, uh, but yeah, frustrating.
00:55:00
Speaker 2: Really frustrating. And, uh, and we have, you know, we have science that shows that development is, um, uh, that caribou are really, really sensitive to it. Um, uh, research from Alaska fish and game biologists who tracked them for years, the lead cow, uh, I mean, can you imagine being the lead cow for thousands and thousands and thousands of animals? Anyway, lead cows out there and from 30 miles away understands a road is there and changes course. I mean, how amazing is that? And, you know, that’s the kind of vastness that we’re talking about, but that’s also what’s at risk. And you just nailed it, Mark. Like we are at an inflection point for Alaska. like we were in the American West 100 years ago.
00:55:52
Speaker 1: Related to roads, Caribou and Alaska then would be another potential development project that could impact that herd, the Western Arctic herd, and all sorts of stuff we just mentioned there, the proposed Ambler Road.
00:56:07
Speaker 2: Yep.
00:56:07
Speaker 1: Where does that stand? How likely is that to actually, actually happen? And talk to me about the threat level there, the impact of that.
00:56:18
Speaker 2: The president used some authority he believes he has in Anoka to just say, yep, overturning everything that the previous administration did and we’re going to build that road. And so it’s being taken to court. The threat is real. And again, like for your listeners, it’s a 200-mile-long road. going across a stretch of land that has no roads on it, right? And it would bring not only development, but people and people from the South. And I had the great fortune of flying the proposed route when I was BLM director and touching down and talking to people in villages along the way, people who subsist off that landscape. And they were worried. They were worried that their way of life was about to fundamentally change forever with the road. They were worried about things like drugs coming in and alcohol coming in that can’t get in today. They were worried about crime coming in. They were worried about hunting pressure that would be perhaps too much hunting pressure. And ultimately, I think, worried about thousands and thousands of years of a way of life changing Like almost overnight, similar to what you were talking about with the bison, right? Whole way of life and whole thousands and thousands of years of a place existing, changing overnight. And for what? For a proposed mine. A mine that’s not, there’s not even a mine plan submitted yet. And people, you know, they say it won’t be an industrial road. That’s just silly talk. Of course, it will be an industrial road. Of course, it will be open to the public. The Dalton Highway was not meant to be a public road when the pressures became too great. So they opened it to the public. And people today, like I was talking to elders who talked about the Dalton Highway like it was put in two years ago, talking about the changes they saw from Caribou as a result of that highway going in. And we should put highway in air quotes. It’s dirt for a whole stretch of it. That dirt road going in fundamentally changing their hunt that they have been relying on for thousands of years. So it’s a real threat to a real wild place that requires the attention, I think, of everybody in the country because of what you just so eloquently stated. In our country, this happens. There’s a lot of copper sitting in our unused devices. There’s a lot of copper sitting under the ground that should be mined elsewhere in the country. But there are some places that ought not be, and that’s one of them.
00:59:26
Speaker 1: We’ve covered a decent amount of ground. Unfortunately, there’s so much more that could be discussed in more detail or other issues out there, other challenges or maybe opportunities. But for the sake of time, we can’t dive into every single one of them. But I’d love to give you a last chance here to highlight for me maybe what you see as the single greatest threat that we’re facing. Maybe it’s something we’ve already talked about. Maybe it’s something we haven’t yet. And then conversely, the greatest opportunity. And maybe I can anticipate where you might go with that, but I’d be very curious to hear the greatest threat of all of these or something else and the greatest opportunity and what we as just average American citizens can do given that to either make a difference on the good or the bad. How can little old me possibly impact these monumental possible changes that could impact the places that we deer hunt or trout fish or, or camp or climb or mountain bike, or simply know that is, you know, providing for us clean air and clean water and some stillness and silence on a, on a weekend. What would you say to that, Tracy?
01:00:43
Speaker 2: I’d say a couple of things. I mean, I think, I think it’s adding up everything we just talked about, right? That’s the threat. The threat is this approach to governing that this administration is doing is which is nature. We’re going to roll right over nature. We’re going to roll right over a way of life. People who don’t have an understanding of what the American conservation ethic is. How amazing is it that as a Montanan, I can go buy an elk tag and a deer tag for under, under 40 bucks total. And it’s, go out onto our public lands and fill my freezer. Like that is something that we should hand down to future generations, not hand over. And the people in power right now are very interested in handing it over to private interests and to corporate interests. And so time and time and time again, that’s what we’re seeing is the kind of underlying ethic. Like we’re going to hand it over to our corporate buddies and So, all of us collectively, you know, government of the people, by the people, for the people, we can work together to save our public lands, which is why there’s this terrific push now for getting a million people by public land stay from all walks of life, meat eater and the wilderness society. And And duct tape and beer and like all different kinds, the Outdoor Alliance, all different stripes of people who care about America’s public lands, who care about handing these lands down, not over to future generations, coming together, trying to get a million signatures by Public Lands Day, which is at the end of September. And it’s easy peasy. Go to savepubliclands.us and sign a petition, right, so that we can show strength in numbers. And we can show that this is not about red or blue, right? This is about red, white, and blue, right? This is about our country. This is about America and passing along this beautiful conservation legacy we have. So I know it’s exhausting for folks. I know that it feels like, are you kidding me? How can I possibly keep up? But people can keep up. They can keep listening to shows like this and learning how they could take three minutes out of their week to file off a comment. You don’t have to be a PhD. All your comment has to say is, please don’t do that. I care. That’s good enough. I’m a hunter. I care. I drink clean water.
01:03:35
Speaker 1: I care.
01:03:37
Speaker 2: So people can engage and should engage. And that’s how we’re going to pass this to the future. All of this stuff that we have today, it didn’t just happen. People made it happen. These wild places that we still get to go to, people made that happen. So it’s all up to us to make sure that we continue to pass that on. It gives me actually great hope. Yeah.
01:04:08
Speaker 1: I feel the exact same way, Tracy. And I’d like you to share one last thing, which would be if I were an overachiever and I wanted to do more than just say, hey, I’m a hunter and I care. If I wanted to write a A + + public comment on one of these different proposals or rule changes, what does that look like? You know better than most what comes into on these things. You know better than most on how they are assessed, how they are quantified, how they are possibly used. What does the best possible version look like if I have 10 minutes or 15 minutes to do this?
01:04:48
Speaker 2: Yep. If you have 10 or 15 minutes to do this, go to an organization you trust that has the facts. I might offer that the Wilderness Society is science-based, legally based. If you come to wilderness.org, you can learn about an issue and you’ll learn how to what to include in your comment, and we give you ways to comment. You don’t have to Google to figure out which agency you’re sending it to. And it’s really important to, if you have an individual comment, it is treated separately than just signing on to a postcard drive. Don’t get me wrong, those postcard drives are super important too, but you want to be A + +?
01:05:37
Speaker 1: Yes.
01:05:39
Speaker 2: There’s this beautiful thing called the internet and you can learn on the internet. Just go to a trusted source like Trout Unlimited, like the Wilderness Society, like whomever you support and you’ll find on those websites the information you need to make an informed comment.
01:05:57
Speaker 1: Wonderful. Well, Tracy, I greatly appreciate you taking the time to chat here today about all of this and then also just all the work you have done for public lands and are still doing And the fact that you and the Wilderness Society are willing to stand together with a bunch of hunters and anglers at Meteor or Backcountry Hunters and Anglers and bikers and climbers at the Outdoor Alliance or TCA or the Dirtbag Diaries. And as you wonderfully said, stand together and say, hey, we all care about these public lands. Maybe we’ve got slightly different ways of doing things. Maybe we talk about it differently or we you know, enjoy different activities out there, or maybe we vote for different people, but who cares? Because we all love these public lands and we would like to see them around in good shape for the future. So thank you for helping make that possible.
01:06:46
Speaker 2: Amen to that. It is our common ground. Um, I’ll leave you with this. I had the great fortune, um, last week of paddling in the boundary waters and, uh, it’s the country’s most visited wilderness area. And, uh, I’d never seen that many people in wilderness before, right? Um, It is indeed really visited, but thoughtfully so. And everybody we ran across couldn’t believe their good fortune that they got to be out there on that landscape. It was old. It was young. It was red. It was blue. It was all walks of life out there doing the same thing we were, like listening to loon calls as we fell asleep, catching northern pike and walleye. And just paddling and being in nature. And places like that were fought for and will continue to fight for. So that, you know, 100 years from now, somebody’s going to be on Meat Eater and be like, oh, my God, I was just paddling in the boundary waters and it was awesome. And it takes all of us to speak up and protect these places. So we’re grateful to be in partnership with everybody in doing that. Thanks for having me on today. Absolutely.
01:07:57
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Thank you for listening to this conversation with Tracy Stone Manning. But before we go, I want to reiterate a point that Tracy made just a few minutes ago. Whether you are a hunter or a hiker, a Republican or a Democrat, a country boy or a city girl, public lands are one thing that unite so many of us. We might use them differently or believe they should be managed in slightly different ways. But the vast majority of Americans believe that public lands should be kept in public hands, that our public lands should be managed with public input kept in mind, and that they should be safeguarded with the long-term interests of these lands and the American people prioritized rather than corporations or foreign interests. Right now, as Tracy mentioned, a wide swath of nonprofits, brands, and individuals are rallying around these three simple ideas. Hunters and hikers, climbers, kayakers, environmentalists, conservationists. you name it are all rallying around these three simple ideas the ask is simple go to savepubliclands.us and sign the petition help us showcase to our elected officials this vast and diverse set of supporters standing up for and speaking out for our public lands We are shooting for a million signatures by Public Lands Day on September 26th in the big, bold, pro-public lands statement that would make to our elected officials. So please join us at SavePublicLands.us.
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