It’s a natural fit for an administration as chaotic and corrupt as President Donald Trump’s that William Perry Pendley, who loathes America’s public lands, was picked last September, and reappointed in January, to manage them. The Bureau of Land Management, which Pendley now directs, oversees more acreage of the public domain than any other federal agency.
At stake are 250 million acres of grassland, steppe, desert, and forest that BLM oversees, along with the agency’s 700 million subsurface acres, rich with oil and gas and hard-rock minerals. Pendley’s entire career has been about liberating the extractive industry from environmental laws, enabling companies to pillage the lands he is now entrusted to protect.
To understand Pendley’s worldview, you have to understand the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the right-wing nonprofit law firm in Colorado he honchoed for 30 years as president and chief legal counsel. The MSLF was founded in 1977 with money from Joseph Coors, the hard-right Colorado beer magnate, to counter what was perceived in the 1970s as the rising influence of public-interest environmental law firms.
Article submitted by, Great Gazoo.