[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 171 (Thursday, September 30, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6827-S6828]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                   Nomination of Tracy Stone-Manning

  Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, the Senate is currently taking up a 
nominee to the Bureau of Land Management: Tracy Stone-Manning. There is 
a lot that I can say about Tracy Stone-Manning, but there are some key 
features that come out if you are going to deal with the Bureau of Land 
Management.
  You walk into a leadership role where you have thousands of people 
working under you and around you, and you have care for the forests, 
and you have care for a lot of things that are running our environment.

[[Page S6828]]

  This particular leader was involved, when she was in college, in a 
group that was gathering to be able to spike trees. She has admitted 
that she is the one who actually wrote the letter to be able to 
actually lay out what they had done, where they drove a spike into some 
trees, intentionally designed to be able to threaten loggers who would 
come through that area; that if they actually put a chain saw to that, 
there is a decent chance it would break the chain and it would come at 
the logger or that if they put that log in a sawmill, it would split 
the bandsaw and throw debris across all the workers who are there. To 
be clear, tree spiking is an act of ecoterrorism.
  Now, this individual will be voted on by this body to lead the Bureau 
of Land Management. I wish I could say that was the only issue that was 
there, but as you read through her writings--she wrote multiple 
different things about dealing with environmental issues, but one of 
the things that were most painful to me to be able to read was a 
section that she wrote where she had a picture of a child, and in the 
picture of the child, it said: ``This is the greatest environmental 
threat that we face''--children. In her philosophy, the world has too 
many kids, and the way that we can protect the environment is to have 
fewer children in the world. I happen to think children are a blessing, 
not an environmental threat.
  But this body is about to vote on putting Tracy Stone-Manning to lead 
the Bureau of Land Management.