Cows, coal and climate change

TRACY STONE-MANNING, the Biden administration’s director of the Bureau of Land Management, got her start in conservation at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Bitterroot rivers in Montana. As the executive director of the Missoula-based restoration nonprofit Clark Fork Coalition in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Stone-Manning pushed for the removal of a Superfund site dam. Later, as a field director for U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., through 2012, she worked to build support for legislation balancing recreation and forestry. She’s held a variety of leadership positions since then: director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, chief of staff for former Montana Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, and, most recently, senior advisor for conservation policy at the National Wildlife Federation.

Now, as the director of the BLM, Stone-Manning is tasked with overseeing one out of every 10 acres of land in the U.S. She leads an agency that hasn’t