Back to the Land

Last Sunday, U.S. Bureau of Land Management Director Tracy Stone-Manning took a walk along Rattlesnake Creek, near her Missoula, Montana home.

Twenty-four hours later, she turned in her keys and passwords and became a private citizen again. The little stream 200 yards from her house and 2,000 miles from her former office in Washington, D.C. offered an easy example of why Stone-Manning has spent a career fighting for public lands both in and out of government.

“Imagine the difference between walking along that creek and how your body feels and how your brain is working; to stopping to read an email or take a phone call,” said Stone-Manning, 59. “If you were connected to a machine reading a scan of your brain, they would be very different scans. You feel better when you take a walk that doesn’t involve … stopping to text and respond to the thing you’re tethered to.”

Making that point, in matters local and global, has threaded through Stone-Manning’s career. She led Missoula’s Five Valleys Land Trust and Clark Fork Coalition before working as advisor to Senator Jon Tester and then-Governor Steve Bullock as his Department of Environmental Quality director and later chief of staff.

President Joe Biden chose her to lead BLM, an agency responsible for more than 250 million public acres with one third the personnel and one-quarter the budget that the U.S. Forest Service has to manage 193 million acres. BLM’s lands are also all west of the Mississippi River, resulting in, as she put it, “members of Congress who don’t know what the BLM is, or don’t care because it doesn’t affect their constituents.”

To counter that, Stone-Manning did what she’s done in her previous postings: give more people reason to come together about shared values bigger than politics.

“Look at Governor Bullock’s reelection in 2016,” she said. “He ran on three things, and one of them was public lands. Look at Senator [Steve] Daines’ insistence when he was in his last reelection cycle to get the Great American Outdoors Act passed, because his constituents wanted it. That’s where permanent and full funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund passed. It passed the Senate 92-8.”

Karen Knudsen succeeded Stone-Manning at the Clark Fork Coalition, as the organization was trying to get a Republican governor, Judy Martz, and president,George W. Bush, to back a Democratic-leaning county’s wish to rip out a century-old hydroelectric dam on the Clark Fork River.

“The arc of her career is shaped by a few fundamental values,” Knudsen said of Stone-Manning. “Find a hopeful vision of what’s the biggest win possible, and work back from there. With the Milltown Dam, she asked ‘What does the river most urgently need from us?’ Tracy always challenged us to think that way. The river needs that dam gone. Great, let’s figure out how to go do that. Those ideals of optimism and collaboration were always sacrosanct to her.”

Stone-Manning led BLM for four years, getting confirmed in October 2021. That’s significant, as her Trump administration predecessor, William Perry Pendley, was never confirmed. His lack of permanent status was one of the key reasons cited by a federal judge who invalidated two Natural Resource Conservation Plans affecting Montana which Pendley had approved. 

The plans, covering the Lewistown and Missoula BLM districts, called for increased resource development at the expense of recreation and conservation goals. The plans were rewritten during Stone-Manning’s term, based on work from local advisory committees which had to be restored after the previous Trump administration let them lapse.

“Every single member of Congress has big portions of nature in their districts that people care about,” she said. Whether Forest Service lands, national parks and monuments, or even city green spaces, “they might be sitting in Washington, D.C., but they know what those lands mean to their constituents.”

Stone-Manning said that if one of the throughlines of her experience was that Americans deeply valued their public lands, the second was that the laws governing those lands “don’t fully serve our time anymore.”

BLM’s guiding law, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, was passed in 1976 and signed by President Gerald Ford. President Richard Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, signed the Clean Air Act that year too, and followed with the Clean Water Act in 1972. He added the Endangered Species Act in 1973. The Wilderness Act came in 1964, under President Lyndon Johnson. 

“All those bedrock laws happened in the mid-‘60s and ‘70s, before we understood climate change and had a much smaller population,” Stone-Manning said. “But we still have to follow them.”

The United States had just over 200 million people in 1970, compared to almost 350 million today. Four of every five Americans live in urban areas. They’re dependent on clean air and water, which are greatly affected by the pace of environmental change. They’ve just lived through the hottest year on record, as well as the hottest decade since record-keeping began in the late 1800s.

“The L.A fires are instructional,” Stone-Manning said, referring to the wildfires that have killed at least 25 people and destroyed more than 12,000 homes. “Nobody’s talking about ‘you didn’t cut enough trees down to stop these fires.’ This has nothing to do with forest management. The ignition source is houses. It is nature demanding that we look. When the flames are burning there’s a lot of finger-pointing. But when the flames go out, are we going to take this as a lesson that climate change is real and on us?”

That challenge confronts fundamental changes in the way Americans think about things. Stone-Manning said one of the things she finds most daunting about her next job as president of The Wilderness Society is rallying public attention. 

When she was working at the Five Valleys Land Trust in the 1990s, she recalled launching public campaigns by building a flyer on Adobe Page Maker software, and then looking through the phone book for the addresses of people she thought were likely supporters, and then mailing the solicitation.

“We don’t do any of that anymore,” she said. “There’s a whole generation of people who get their information in ways I don’t. I need to hire those people and say ‘please help.’”

Rattlesnake Creek tumbles out of the Rattlesnake Wilderness—possibly the only federal wilderness area with a city bus stop at its main trailhead. Congress created it in 1980 after a long public campaign for its protection. As BLM director, Stone-Manning oversaw an innovative restoration project in the Gold Creek drainage one watershed north of the Rattlesnake, where loggers were hired to restore ecological balance to a basin nearly wrecked by unsustainable past logging. 

One of the accomplishments Stone-Manning highlighted in her BLM term was the Public Lands Rule, which requires the bureau to consider conservation values along with science, data and Indigenous knowledge as a counterweight to extractive resource values in land-use decisions. So mining, logging and grazing must contend with recreation, ecosystem services and ecological health when deciding what to do with public lands.

That rule might not last long if incoming President Donald Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda sees it as an impediment to making money. But past presidents have found that the value of America’s public lands can’t always be measured in dollars. 

“The reason we have public lands today is because the public demanded it,” Stone-Manning said. “I remember during one of the big pushes for public land sell-offs in 2015, I walked down from the [Montana] governor’s office to the rotunda, to this thunderous sound—it was literally the biggest rally the capitol had ever seen—about keeping public lands in public hands. There were people from all over the state, all political stripes, across gender, across age. It was something to behold. Everybody in that rotunda—packed in—had this thing in common: They cared about public lands.

“So the ability to answer the question: Are we up to the task to figure out how best to manage those public lands into the deeper challenges of the 21st century, depends on the public. If the public demands it, it will happen.”