Opinion | The Great Western Public Land Robbery

The Trump strategy is to destroy from within. He has a secretary of state who doesn’t believe in diplomacy, an attorney general who scoffs at lawbreakers in the executive branch and now a man who opposes public lands to run the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees an area nearly 50 percent larger than the state of Texas.

Pendley spent decades suing the government for trying to protect fish and wildlife and clean water. “The Founding fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold,” he wrote in 2016. He’s also expressed sympathy for the deadbeat rancher Cliven Bundy, a hero of anti-public land terrorists. And he’s mocked Native American religious claims to sacred sites.

Now, he’s free to fulfill the wish list of his former industrial clients. He’s the land bureau’s acting director, just like Cuccinelli at immigration. It’s another Trump tactic to put people in temporary charge of important arms of government, hacks who could never be approved by Congress. In the short term, they do enough damage to satisfy their big-money handlers.

Pendley was given this powerful perch by way of executive order orchestrated by Interior Secretary David Bernhardt, a former oil and gas lobbyist who is now doing the work of his ex-clients on the taxpayer’s dime.

Americans, by huge margins, love their public land — a sentiment shared by Trump voters. In the West, where the bureau’s land includes prime habitat for wildlife, and a favored open range for hunters, anglers, hikers and birders, Trump’s policies could cost Republicans Senate seats in Montana, Colorado and even Texas.

But what’s good in the political backlash to bad policies still leaves us at a dangerous moment for nature. Trump has gutted two national monuments in the West, the largest environmental rollback in history. And he’s given fresh life to a colossal mine that could imperil the world’s largest wild salmon fishery, in Alaska’s Bristol Bay.

I was in Montana last week, sitting around a campfire after a day spent hiking and swimming in a public forest full of summer enchantment. My Montana family members and I were talking about how the rich pay $1,500 a day to go “glamping” in this Last Best Place. We had it free — the forest, the river, a meadow bursting with wildflowers and huckleberries — for now.

Timothy Egan (@nytegan) is a contributing Opinion writer who covers the environment, the American West and politics. He is a winner of the National Book Award and author of the forthcoming “A Pilgrimage to Eternity.”

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