(By Jeffrey St. Clair)
Biden's pick to head the BLM is a longtime Montana natural "resource"
politico named Tracey Stone-Manning. I've followed Manning's meteoric
career with considerable interest for the last 30 years, during which
time our paths have crisscrossed on several occasions. At each stage on
her arc of power there have been subtle shifts in her persona, only the
flamboyant red curls have remained the same. Manning’s politics are
run-of-the mill awful, made worse by her totally undeserved reputation
as an environmentalist. But it’s a grift she’s played from her earliest
days in Missoula. As a student as the University of Montana, she hung
out with environmental radicals and married the journalist Richard
Manning, who was canned from the Missoulian after his groundbreaking
reporting on the environmental crimes of Plum Creek Timber. As director
of the Clark Fork Coalition, Manning earned a reputation as a deal
cutter, an environmentalist who could work with industry, even some of
the vilest industries, like the mining companies. This capacity for
compromise earned her a position as the top environmental aide for
Senator Jon Tester, where she scripted a rider to a Defense
Authorization bill delisting wolves in Montana and Idaho after
environmental groups had sued and won a case overturning the Fish and
Wildlife Service's own plan to remove wolves from the Endangered Species
list.
She was the architect of Tester's awful mandated public lands logging
bill, which would have greatly expanded clearcutting on the
Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forests, parts of the Lolo and Kootenai
National Forests, while also releasing numerous Wilderness Study Area
for logging, motorized travel and development. From there, Manning was
named the Director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality
where she approved a permit for a controversial copper mine in the Smith
River watershed. Environmentalists promptly sued her and won.
Stone-Manning (who by this time had become known as Stone-Mining)
approved an "absurd" Clark Fork River pollution permit for the new
owners of the old Smurfit-Stone pulp mill just west of Missoula that
would've allowed them to dump toxic effluent into the Clark Fork River
at the same levels that old Smurfit-Stone did. Stone-Manning was sued
(successfully) by her old group the Clark Fork Coalition and local
tribes. Next Manning was named chief of staff for Montana's then
Governor Steve Bullock, where she worked in secret with the timber
industry to sell out environmental groups by opening five million acres
of Montana forest lands, including inventoried roadless lands and lynx
and grizzly bear habitat, for fast track logging without any
environmental review.
But what provided the fuel for Manning's extraordinary ascent? Missoula
in the early 90s was the epicenter of the radical environmental movement
in the US with a very rambunctious Earth First! contingent that had
engaged in some dramatic and effective direct action protests across the
Rockies, which soon drew the attention of the FBI and other police
agencies. Manning herself was reportedly under scrutiny. Then activists
were investigated, some were busted, the group shattered under the
pressure. But Manning's career, almost alone among her former
compatriots, began its remarkable rise through the very agencies she'd
once berated and protested as an activist. Many EF!ers over the years
have sold out, gone corporate and started cutting deals with timber and
mining companies. It's an old story. But none of them have ended up
running government agencies, never mind the BLM. So some longtime
Missoula activists still wonder whether Stone-Manning cut some deal with
the feds, all those years ago, or more sinisterly was a conduit for
information from the beginning, when she was acting as spokesperson for
Missoula EF! She did admit during a public hearing that she had passed
at least one letter from environmental radicals to the FBI.
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