Biden Land Management Nominee: We Need to Stop 'Breeding Our Weapons' to Save Grizzly Bears
President Joe Biden’s nominee to head the Bureau of Land Management, Tracy Stone-Manning, once penned an essay that called for population control to protect the endangered grizzly population.
As Stone-Manning’s nomination heads for a likely final Senate vote next week, Fox News reported that she once wrote an essay for High Country News in which she declared that we human beings keep “breeding weapons” used against the precious grizzlies, that is, breeding human babies.
The 1991 diatribe argued that land should be set aside for the bears following the “pyrrhic” conquest of the West, and that humankind has “annexed too much space” in a battle in which our “greatest weapon” has been our population.
“In fact, we keep marching on,” she wrote. “Now we are turning the weapon of overpopulation onto ourselves.”
“What would the demise of the grizzlies predict about our lives?”
Stone-Manning asserted that the U.S. population had “doubled” since 1940 and that the hillsides in her native Montana look like “warzones.”
“The damage is evident and the demise of the griz imminent, yet we continue our war cries while breeding our weapons,” she wrote.
“We can bicker and moan at each other in our battle about what is going to help the bear now, but ultimately we need to look at maps less, crunch numbers less, and begin to wage war on overpopulation.”
The BLM nominee also once created mock advertisements for her graduate thesis in which she characterized babies as an “environmental hazard” and that Americans should only have two children.
As a California native, I’m very familiar with this kind of language — from people who live in old VW buses in the redwood forest and make their own vegan cheese, or communist agitators who plan protests in the basements of co-op grocery stores.
To hear it from the nominee to head a federal agency is extremely concerning at best. However, Stone-Manning’s previous writings really only spell the quiet part of environmentalism out loud. It is a movement that is decidedly anti-human at its core.
This is hardly the first indication that Stone-Manning is a radical environmentalist. The bulk of the partisan criticism she has received during the course of her confirmation process was for her involvement in a 1989 tree-spiking eco-terrorist plot.
Tree-spiking is a dangerous practice that terrorists employ to try to prevent certain areas from being logged. Spikes are buried in the tree so that when a saw hits them, the equipment shatters and sends shards of metal flying — a tactic that often severely injures loggers.
While Stone-Manning would admit in 1991 that she penned a cruel letter that made loggers aware that trees had been spiked so they would not get hurt, her actions still posed a serious risk to life and limb.
Stone-Manning’s idea may sound nutty, but considering the kind of talking points we’re currently hearing about a green economy and overpopulation, she was really just ahead of her time.
All these ideas, which paint humanity as the aggressor and nature as our innocent victim, completely skew the role mankind plays in the preservation of our precious resources and the earth’s creatures.
In reality, human beings have been tasked with managing our land well, by the God of the universe in fact, who gave us this role when he created us. We are set apart from the animals not only by being created in the image of the one who created them but also because we’ve been given dominion over creation and divine instruction to practice good stewardship.
It’s easy enough to see not only our separation from the animals but our sincerity in tackling this role by the existence of entities like, well, the Bureau of Land Management.
What’s fundamentally flawed with Stone-Manning’s reasoning (if you can call it that) is that she assumes the grizzlies have some sort of supremacy over human life and that as they go around hunting, fishing, hibernating and occasionally violently killing human beings, we are the ones who are invading their territory.
Grizzlies are no doubt amazing creatures, and they play an important role in the ecosystem, too. Yet their demise is no reason to paint humanity as a scourge on the earth, as it is only humanity that even cares about the future of grizzly populations.
What’s rather sick is that while grizzlies are animals, human beings are being treated like animals as Margaret Sanger’s plan to make sure that people — particularly people of color — don’t “breed” too much. It is our young who are being slaughtered in the womb and our women who are being dehumanized and pumped full of chemicals or inserted with special man-made devices to prevent them from “breeding.”
Human babies aren’t “weapons”; they’re images of the divine being that created the grizzlies, the earth they inhabit and the whole rest of creation, and human babies who have a divine duty to conserve our resources, not to sacrifice their own value in the eyes of the creator to protect it.
The animals have no knowledge of this morally grievous debate, nor do they care about our survival. Again, they’re not made in God’s image; we are.
We can never expect to be good stewards of creation if we continue to demonize the glory of God’s creation — mankind.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
