The Bureau of Land Management oversees one out of every 10 acres of land in the United States. Longtime Montana resident Tracy Stone-Manning has led the agency since September 2021, slowly rebuilding it following the exodus of experienced employees during the headquarters’ brief relocation to Grand Junction, Colorado, under the first Trump administration.
Under Stone-Manning’s leadership, the BLM raised royalty rates for oil and gas companies, formalized conservation as a valid land use alongside extractive activities like drilling and grazing, and ended new federal coal sales in the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming. But the agency’s focus seems likely to shift away from renewable energy and conservation this year, given the incoming Trump administration’s determination to prioritize drilling, which has seen record production in recent years.
High Country News sat down with Stone-Manning in Missoula, Montana, in early January to ask about housing development on federal lands and industry’s role in the renewable energy boom. We also discussed the future of her attempts to promote conservation, and more.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
High Country News: What are you most proud of from your time as the BLM director?
Tracy Stone-Manning: I don’t think I can pick one, but I can say I’m proud of the fact that we’ve positioned the bureau to really take on the difficult challenges of the 21st century. We’ve got this beautiful and complex mission, and it gets harder and harder to execute that mission when more and more people want to come to our public lands, extract from our public lands, and when our public lands are going through the changes that are upon them. Preparing for those changes and those pressures was really important.
HCN: What’s something you wish you could have accomplished, but were unable to?
TSM: My biggest regret — I’m sure every director’s regret — is that we don’t have the resources to do our work. It’s just frustrating that we do a lot with a little. The public deserves more to be invested, and, really importantly, the people who work at the Bureau of Land Management deserve to have more invested in their work and the lands they manage.
HCN: Approximately 56.7 million acres of BLM land failed health standards this year — up from 54 million in 2022 — in large part due to overgrazing. What can be done to improve the chronically poor health of BLM grazing allotments?
TSM: One, investing in some of these properties — physically investing in them. The hundreds of millions of dollars that we’ve gotten through the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law is going to help us break that horrible cycle of invasives, fire, invasives. Two, through the Public Lands Rule, we are now applying land-health standards to all of our work, not just grazing. Doing a watershed condition assessment is going to enable us to focus on the watersheds that need the help. That’s the slow crawl out of the place in which we find ourselves.
HCN: The Energy Act of 2020 called for public lands to supply 25 gigawatts of clean energy by 2025. Last year, permitting surpassed this number (29 gigawatts.) How did you achieve this?
TSM: A lot of people really focused on the work, and the market also helped drive the work. There were a lot of companies knocking on our door, saying, “We’re interested in this bit of public land.” So the work became ensuring that we did it smartly. That’s why we just updated the Western solar plan from 2012 to help give us the road map to making sure that we’re doing our part to meet the clean energy future, and doing it sustainably.
HCN: Developing more public lands for renewable energy development can put Indigenous cultural, archaeological, ceremonial and food-gathering sites at risk. How do you make sure sites important to tribal nations, both on reservations and ceded lands, are protected, even if they sit within lands productive for wind or solar projects?
TSM: What we’ve done is actually focus where (development) should go, which is to say we’ve taken a bunch of acres off the table. One of the criteria screens is: Is it appropriate, or not? Are they sacred lands? Are there cultural objects? And, if so, it’s off the table to begin with. If it is on the table, we still analyze those things.
HCN: So do you think what’s in place is working, currently?
TSM: It depends who you ask, right? Every acre matters to somebody, of course. We think we put the tools in place to be fair and equitable and smart about guiding the development to where it’s appropriate.
HCN: Speaking of development, various Republican politicians, from Utah Sen. Mike Lee to Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, have proposed selling federal public lands in the name of housing. What do you think of these efforts?
TSM: Our public lands are this incredible gift and obligation from the past that we have to carry on into the future. That’s the reason that public lands can be controversial: Everybody loves them, and people have different ideas about what they should do for the country. Is (development) appropriate in some places where we have 20 acres in the middle of or on the edge of a town? Maybe, and we have a whole process for that. But are we going to develop whole swaths of our public lands? That doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me.
HCN: Utah filed a lawsuit last year arguing that 18.5 million acres of BLM lands in the state should revert to state management. What’s your response?
TSM: I can’t comment on ongoing litigation, but I can say that public lands belong in public hands, and that they are one of the country’s great equalizers. It doesn’t matter the size of your checkbook, you have equal access to them. We need to hold on to that. (Reporter’s note: The federal government said this fall that Utah’s claim is “without merit.”)
“…public lands belong in public hands, and that they are one of the country’s great equalizers.”
HCN: Let’s turn to the incoming administration under President-elect Donald Trump. What’s the future of the Public Lands Rule, which formally elevated conservation as a valid “use” alongside recreation, grazing and oil and gas development? Is it durable enough to withstand a new administration?
TSM: We have rulemakings around oil and gas, and rulemakings around grazing, and rulemakings around coal and renewable energy. We’ve never done a rulemaking around the conservation side of our mission. We live in a time where everything is politicized. But if people pull away the politics, they’ll see (the rule) will serve not only our public lands, but the people who benefit and enjoy our public lands as well.
HCN: Do you think Trump will repeal the oil and gas bonding reform you accomplished?
TSM: It’ll be interesting to see what happens. I don’t have a crystal ball, but what I do know is that the work that a future administration chooses to do has to be similar to the work that we did. It’s a rule-making process, and you have to engage the public. There’s a big, long process, and there are no magic wands that one can wave.
HCN: The BLM was relocated to Colorado under the Trump administration, and in Trump’s first term, the bureau went without a Senate-confirmed director. Are you concerned about another bureau relocation and/or another string of acting directors?
TSM: Part of the efficiency of the bureau is the fact that there are a small number of people — relative to the 10,000 total employees — who live and work in Washington, D.C., to ensure that the people who are out in the field have the tools they need to do their job. It makes sense that those jobs happen in Washington, D.C. You get called to Congress. I ran up to the secretary of the Interior’s office daily in some weeks. That face-to-face communication still really matters, so I would hope that the incoming administration sees the efficiency in that.
HCN: If you could pass along one nugget of wisdom for the next director, what would it be?
TSM: The employees are amazing. Multiple use is not for the faint of heart, so (BLM) attracts people who are problem-solvers and pragmatists.
HCN: You’re transitioning to become the president of The Wilderness Society in February. How will your work managing multiple-use lands inform your work leading wilderness conservation efforts?
TSM: What this job is informing about my next piece of work is the deep value of nature. We are in a time of drought and climate change. Fire and invasives are serious and deep threats to nature. The more we understand and look to nature, the more we understand it scientifically, and the more we give grace and space to nature, the better off we are going to be as a species. Having sat in this chair enables me to see the true and deep value of nature. When we save nature, we save ourselves.
HCN: Looking to the future of a new administration, is there anything else you’d like our readers to consider?
TSM: People ask me if I’m worried. My answer is no, not really. I don’t mean that to sound naive, but it’s based on this true belief and optimism in the American people who love our public lands. The American public has been pretty good about demanding its government to take care of these lands, and I hope and expect that they will do so into the future.
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