Dan Patterson

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Citizens, you’re rich. You own more land than all of Texas, Alaska, New Jersey and Maryland combined. America's public lands heritage blesses us with clean water and air, food, wildlife, recreation, energy and minerals. You’re rich, but you’re being robbed.

Until recently I was proud to work at the U.S. Interior Department-Bureau of Land Management, which controls 247 million of those acres, a huge area about 1.8 times the size of France. This land is your land.

BLM is meant to plan for "multiple uses" — conservation as a coequal balanced with development. Since 2017, however, the Trump administration has industrialized a system to push only one use: consumption. Their political agenda of boom-and-bust oil drilling, mining and privatization by modern-day robber barons regards public lands as disposable packaging for whatever filthy lucre there is to be grabbed, as they bulldoze the public and environment.

Nevada, where I worked as an environmental protection specialist for BLM, has the heaviest workload for mining on public lands. Half of the minerals staff positions here stand vacant. Everyone knows BLM is chronically understaffed and underfunded, yet now the agency won’t even ask Congress for more support. This is not an oversight, but an intentional bloodletting. The few remaining experts are shut out by the administration rushing hundreds of mining permits, knowing that BLM scientists cannot monitor such a load. As new permits pile up, federal inspections fall behind and mines sprawl past legal boundaries, risking miners’ safety and the environment and violating the law. Hundreds of old mining projects scar public lands, dusty and weedy as BLM managers make it easy for speculative foreign corporations to indefinitely extend their reclamation deadlines.

Opinion:When oil and gas companies get a foothold, Nevadans lose, says conservation advocate

The 10 million acres in my district have no dedicated BLM law enforcement based there, so enforcement is nearly impossible. Public lands suffer as the agency’s few rangers are ordered to the Mexican border or to big events like Burning Man.

Legal violations in my district are legion. BLM bosses approve bulldozing of new mining roads through essential bighorn sheep habitat, disregarding their Resource Management Plans. A new gold mine on public lands near Goldfield has been approved by the administration to leave behind toxic pit lakes, because BLM decided not to require any backfill of the pits after lobbying by a firm connected to Trump’s Interior Secretary David Bernhardt. These rushed mines can kill wildlife and pollute clean water.

In this administration, BLM now freely and illegally ignores desert tortoise, sage grouse, Tiehm’s buckwheat and other imperiled wildlife, burying the impacts of rapid-fire development, Endangered Species Act be damned! Politically whipped BLM bosses order experts who raise legal, ethical or scientific questions, "don’t argue, get it done now, or you’re out!"

Oil and gas lease sales that even oil lobbyists call "illegitimate" are demanded by the administration quarterly. BLM pulls scientists from their projects to rush slapdash sales. Few to none are left to do the science or consult with tribes, sportsmen and the public.

Oil and gas leases lock up public lands for at least a decade. Since 2017, BLM has dumbly pushed sales of special, fragile places like the Ruby Mountains and Monitor Valley, without proper scientific analyses. This government-promoted oil rush in oil-poor Nevada has subverted U.S. laws, muted public comment and disregarded dangers to our land, water and climate from fracking.

More:Fossil fuel speculators back with request to lease in Nevada's Ruby Mountains

Morale is low inside BLM as public lands and the agency’s real mission are imperiled by Trump’s BLM director, William Perry Pendley, a longtime anti-conservation "sagebrush rebel" and huckster for privatization. The administration has dragged BLM’s headquarters to oil town Grand Junction, Colorado, pushing out key agency expertise. BLM managers cozy up to oil speculators and foreign mining conglomerate "customers," while scowling at citizens as "enemies" of the Trump agenda. Whistleblowers are harshly punished. Employees who consider unionizing to protect the civil service suffer retaliation in violation of labor laws.

The courageous few BLM scientists still standing for your lands and the law are facing harsh retaliations and career ruin by the Trump administration. Civil servants need your support. Interior and BLM need big clean-ups, hopefully starting next year under a new administration that respects citizens, workers and public lands.

President Teddy Roosevelt warned “We should not forget that it will be just as important to our descendants to be prosperous in their time as it is to us to be prosperous in our time.” T.R. was right. Future generations cannot prosper without a clean environment, stable climate and healthy public landscapes.

Dan Patterson has worked for BLM in Nevada as an environmental protection specialist since 2015. He is an ecologist. The views here are his own, not his agency’s. Follow him on Twitter at @DanPattersonUSA.

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