BLM nominee once worked with extremists
Friends say she was a moderating force
One spring day in 1989, Tracy Stone rented a typewriter from the University of Montana library and began to retype a letter.
The typewriter was to avoid using her personal computer. The letter was an anonymous warning to the U.S. Forest Service that someone had hammered hundreds of metal spikes into an Idaho forest that was slated to be cut down for timber.
An acquaintance in her circle of young environmentalists had asked her to send it. After fixing a few spelling mistakes and removing some profanity, Stone dropped it in the mail.
It was a decision that has followed her for more than 30 years, through her rise in Montana politics to become one of the country’s prominent environmentalists and public lands experts and now President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management. The letter led to law enforcement raids on student houses and a grand jury investigation. Her testimony in the subsequent trial would help send two people to federal prison.
Now that Stone-Manning’s nomination is in the Senate, Republican opponents have seized on this incident and other issues to cast her as an environmental extremist who should be withdrawn as the nominee.
“Tracy Stone-Manning collaborated with eco-terrorists,” said Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
A former BLM director during the Obama administration, Bob Abbey, also said he opposed her confirmation because of her involvement in the tree-spiking incident and “the fact her initial silence put people at risk.”
Yet former classmates and activists, as well as two former defendants in the criminal case, describe her as a cooling voice among passionate activists, someone who did not want destructive tactics to distract from the message of environmental protection.
“Other than the mailing of the letter, Tracy knew nothing and was not involved,” Jeff Fairchild, who spent two months in federal prison for the tree spiking, said in a phone interview from Tennessee, where he works for Amazon. “She was a bridge builder. She was a moderating voice in every discussion ... She was always the one to say, ‘Hey, look, loggers have families, too.’ “
The job of BLM director is about judgment and balance. The 245 million acres out west under the agency’s control face competing demands from ranchers, hikers, hunters and miners, as well as the wildlife on those lands.
Striking that balance is a tall order, given the president’s priorities. If confirmed by the Senate, Stone-Manning will be tasked with winding down oil and gas drilling on federal acreage and helping set aside nearly a third of the nation’s land for conservation. Those efforts to tackle climate change and protect habitat face intense opposition from Republicans, who say Biden’s environmental agenda will kill jobs.
Stone-Manning, who did not reply to requests for comment for this article, would arrive at the agency after a period of tumult. BLM did not have a Senate-confirmed leader through Donald Trump’s entire term. Its acting head under Trump, William Perry Pendley, once advocated for the federal government to sell all the agency’s land holdings. Around 300 bureau employees quit or took other jobs after the Trump administration moved BLM’s headquarters to western Colorado.
In the years since sending the letter, Stone-Manning built a reputation of wrangling granola-munching green activists and ruby-red Republicans onto the same side of contentious public land issues, sometimes seeking compromise with industry to the dismay of more liberal environmentalists.
The former student activist became an avid sportswoman who hunts birds with her springer spaniels and regularly fills her freezer with elk meat, according to friends. She is the daughter of Republicans, she said at her confirmation hearing last month, including a father who was a commander in the U.S. Navy.
“I would not be here today, introducing her, if I thought she was the person that you described,” Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., told Barrasso during the hearing. “This is a good person that has a good heart, that understands the value of our public lands.”