Tracy Stone- Manning

We add our voice to those who believe an enemy of livestock grazing with ties to ecoterrorists shouldn’t lead the Bureau of Land Management.

Tracy Stone-Manning has been nominated by President Joe Biden.

The agency has a huge footprint in the West. It manages 247 million acres of federal public land, including 155 million acres used for livestock grazing. BLM oversees 18,000 separate grazing permits.

Stone-Manning has standard bona fides that set the hearts of environmental activists aflutter. She spent nearly four years with the National Wildlife Federation, serving as an associate vice president and a senior policy adviser. She served as director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. She led the Clark Fork Coalition, a conservation group dedicated to preserving the Clark Fork River Basin.

She is no fan of livestock grazing on public lands.

In 1992 she wrote in her master’s thesis at the University of Montana, “Into the heart of the beast: A case for environmental advertising,” that livestock grazing on public land “is destroying the West.”

In a series of mock magazine advertisements, she made the case against a variety of things that she contends hurt the environment, including livestock grazing.

“It is overgrazed. Most likely, the grasses won’t grow back, because the topsoil took flight,” she wrote. “Worse still, the government encourages this destruction. It charges ranchers under $2 a month to graze each cow and its calf on public land — your land.”

Pretty standard piffle for environmental activists. But, it appears she may have taken a more active role in radical environmentalism.

In 1989 she typed and mailed a letter for a former roommate, John P. Blount, anonymously warning the U.S. Forest Service that 500 pounds of spikes had been driven into trees in a swath of Idaho’s Clearwater National Forest set for harvest.

Blount later served 17 months in prison in connection to the spiking incident.

There is no evidence that Stone-Manning participated directly in driving the spikes. She maintains that she was never under criminal investigation. She was offered, and accepted, immunity from prosecution in 1993 in exchange for her testimony.

She clearly had knowledge of the incident, and was not immediately forthcoming despite the danger the spikes posed to loggers cutting the trees. Anything for the cause.

According the Montana Standard, Stone-Manning addressed the incident in a state legislative hearing when she was nominated to lead the Montana Department of Environmental Quality.

“I’m sure everyone in this room regrets things they’ve done in their early 20s, but we all accumulate lessons,” Stone-Manning said at the time.

A youthful indiscretion? Hardly.

We agree with Bob Abbey, BLM’s director during President Barack Obama’s first term, who said her participation in the plot disqualifies her for the position.

“BLM needs a really strong leader,” Abbey told the Daily Montanan. “To put someone in that position that has this type of resume will just bring needless controversy that is not good for the agency or for the public lands.”