Steve Pearce? Really? God help us.

Steve Pearce likes when life is simple, when a problem has a clear solution. He sees the world as black and white and tries to force issues into that box even when they don’t fit. His conservative worldview is not up for debate.

To the extent that he has displayed nuance as a public servant, it was the contested nature of the Southern New Mexico congressional district the Republican represented for many years that forced him to do that.

Now that Pearce is President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, he’s likely to hold immense power without the guardrail that representing a diverse constituency created.

Given Pearce’s likely alignment with Project 2025’s agenda for the BLM and its parent agency, the U.S. Interior Department, that’s concerning. Project 2025 aims to pull more energy from our land at any cost, saying, “The U.S. depends on reliable and cheap energy resources to ensure the economic well-being of its citizens, the vitality of its economy, and its geopolitical standing in an uncertain and dangerous world.”

Former U.S. President Joe Biden’s attempt to balance energy production with combatting climate change is not something Project 2025’s authors or Pearce support. Project 2025 accuses Biden of “hoarding supplies of energy and keeping them from Americans.”

Another chance to prove he’s right

Perhaps equally concerning for New Mexicans, Project 2025 advocates shrinking existing national monuments and repealing the Antiquities Act of 1906, which enables presidential monument designations.

Earlier this year, the Trump Administration was considering shrinking six monuments across the West — including our own Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, which protects wild spaces around Las Cruces.

It’s the second time ours has appeared on a list of monuments Trump has considered shrinking or eliminating. That likely means someone has been lobbying to kill our precious monument.

For years, Pearce led the opposition to expanded land protection around Las Cruces. When former President Barack Obama designated nearly 500,000 acres of land as a national monument in 2014, he handed Pearce what was perhaps his most humiliating defeat as a congressman. The wide coalition that supported Obama’s action demonstrated that Pearce was out of touch, even with many conservatives.

Pearce tried to eliminate wilderness-like protections for land in the Robledo and Sierra de las Uvas mountains in 2011. A year later he told us exactly how many acres of land around Las Cruces he believed deserved protection: 58,500, which was essentially only the Organ Mountains themselves.

Thirteen years later, a wilderness bill that Trump signed into law during his first term doubly protects half the acres across Doña Ana and Luna counties that Obama designated as a monument.

Pearce hates losing. He’s stubborn, and I fear he may view taking charge of the BLM as another chance to prove he’s right.

Our local economy at risk

Pearce can’t touch the wilderness areas without an act of Congress. But the other half of the monument — which is a substantial driver of our local economy — is at greater risk.

Pearce has always insisted he’s not an extremist. “I believe that we need to strike the right balance between conservation and economic growth,” he said in 2011.

But a year later, he admitted that only the Organ Mountains deserved conservation.

The other protected areas around Las Cruces are beautiful wild spaces full of of cultural artifacts and other treasures. They’re frequented by mule deer and javelina, oryx and quail, bobcats and mountain lions.

And their protection has created a thriving outdoor economy. A 2023 economic impact report found that the monument has had a substantial impact, more than $234 million from 2014 to 2023. The monument supported 305 local jobs in 2022.

‘The worst kind of insider’

Pearce, meanwhile, is a millionaire who made his money in the oil and gas industry. He’s long opposed public lands. He complained in a 2012 speech about the “big ideas of big forests and big national parks” championed by former President Teddy Roosevelt.

Contrast that with what conservative Patrick M. Brenner wrote recently in an op-ed published in the Washington Post and The Santa Fe New Mexican. The GOP’s history of “being the party that can actually run things” was exemplified in the West, Brenner wrote, by “sound GOP stewardship of public lands that blended enterprise with environmental respect, a tradition exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation ethic and Ronald Reagan’s pragmatic federalism.”

That won’t happen if Pearce runs the BLM, wrote Brenner, who is the president and chief executive of the Southwest Public Policy Institute.

Pearce, while in charge of the state Republican Party after leaving Congress, is remembered for “bitterness, infighting and ineptitude” that made the GOP irrelevant in our state and convinced Brenner to leave the party, he wrote.

“The Bureau of Land Management requires a leader who understands the economic and ecological stakes of the job and who can build trust among the diverse communities of the American West,” Brenner wrote. “But in Stevan Pearce, President Trump has turned to the worst kind of insider.”

On the warpath

The BLM’s mission is “to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.” Spend time on our public lands — especially desert areas that have been overgrazed for generations — and it’s easy to see they aren’t healthy. The diversity of plant and animal life is suffering because we’re way out of balance in the direction of productivity.

And yet, the Trump Administration is on the warpath against health and diversity on our public lands.

Pearce is a perfect choice to lead the BLM from that perspective. He has long been a right-wing zealot on issues including immigration and health care, but his worst sins came in the debate over public lands.

Now the former congressman from Southern New Mexico is set to take charge of 245 million acres of land that we own, and working for an administration that wants to sell or pillage nearly every acre.

God help us.