By SHERRY ROBINSON
All She Wrote
© 2025 New Mexico News Services

During the Vietnam War former congressman Steve Pearce flew C-130 transport planes when the enemy was trying hard to shoot them down. As the president’s newly appointed director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, Pearce may feel like he’s still in the cockpit.

He’s got a great deal of relevant experience for the job – “at least he’s not a Fox News host,” grouses one BLM retiree I know – but the environmental community is already warming its legal engines. The BLM oversees about half of all federal land in New Mexico and some 245 million acres of public lands nationally.

Pearce steps back into the spotlight just as the Trump administration has begun to repeal the BLM’s Public Lands Rule and Navajo activists protested the BLM’s possible revocation of the 10-mile buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

Let’s begin with relevant experience.

He served seven terms in Congress representing the Second District. Pearce has consistently pushed to open more land to oil exploration, but he’s also said the nation should promote all kinds of energy including renewable.

In 2008, during his primary campaign for Senate against moderate Heather Wilson, he admitted, “I’m pretty conservative… but I’m not limited.” As the Great Recession deepened, he supported the spaceport then spearheaded by Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat. He won the primary but lost the race to Tom Udall.

In 2011 he was unanimously elected to chair the House Western Caucus, and he served twice on the House Committee on Natural Resources. After the Western Caucus in 2017 asked President-elect Trump to appoint more westerners to key positions, Pearce wrote that too many Obama appointees ignored local input. Their regulations, he said, “disenfranchised and harmed westerners.”

Pearce has always been a staunch conservative, and he’s been loyal to President Trump, but in 2017 Pearce and the Freedom Caucus, which he helped found in 2015, torpedoed the Republicans’ replacement bill for Obamacare. And he’s opposed Trump’s border wall. In 2018 he said: “The wall isn’t the magic answer. … You’re going to spend billions of dollars and find that it didn’t really secure the border.”

Environmentalists note that he has no use for climate science, wolf reintroduction, or wilderness study areas, but he’s all for selling public lands.

Topping their list of offenses is his longstanding campaign against the Organ Mountains- Desert Peaks National Monument.

In a 2014 op ed, Pearce said he had worked with local officials, ranchers and conservationists on a solution to protect the Organ Mountains. He introduced a bill that had the blessings of soil and water conservation districts, law enforcement, chambers of commerce, and Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican. The monument would have been 60,000 acres.

But that year President Obama approved a 500,000-acre monument, “the largest land grab nationwide of his presidency” Pearce wrote. “This is not how representative government works.”

Or maybe it is. Pearce doesn’t accept that blue, blue Las Cruces, the state’s second largest city, likes its big monument and has risen to its defense with every mention of downsizing. And yet, there’s a lot of room between 60,000 and 500,000 acres. Clearly, neither side tried too hardto compromise.

Pearce also angered Democrats and environmentalists for being the only member of the state’s congressional delegation to vote repeatedly against the Land and Water Conservation Fund. He explained in 2018, when he ran unsuccessfully for governor, that he supported the original intent of the bill, which called for at least 60 percent of funding to support recreation and conservation, but over time, a majority of funding went to land acquisition.

However, a spokesperson for the House Committee on Natural Resources said funding that year was evenly divided between recreational planning, acquiring land and water, and developing outdoor recreational facilities. The Albuquerque Journal editorialized that Pearce had a long record of working to undermine the fund.

At 78, Pearce is capping a long, eventful career. He has a better sense than most people of what western lands can deliver. As a New Mexican he must have some appreciation for Chaco Canyon and, we hope, respect for the people who consider it a sacred place.

Democrats and environmentalists are expecting the worst. Pearce has at times attacked anyone with different views, but in a 2018 interview he talked about angry political rhetoric. “It’s time for us to take a look in the mirror and throttle down,” he said.

We hope this is the Steve Pearce who steps up to lead the agency and manage the land for everyone.