Ryan Callaghan isn’t looking for a fight but says he’ll step up to stop public land sales and other policies emanating from the Trump administration if he needs to, alongside a politically diverse army of hunters and fishermen.
That’s the plan when the Montana-born Callaghan takes over on Jan. 1 as president and CEO of Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, one of the nation’s largest public lands and outdoors advocacy groups.
“Push comes to shove. We’re going to fight, but our job is to bring the values of the rank and file, grassroots, public land user to D.C.,” he said in a recent interview.
Callaghan’s rise to leadership comes at a time when the influential outdoors group is opposing several Trump administration public land policies. It’s staked out positions against the Interior Department’s proposal to revoke the Bureau of Land Management’s Public Lands Rule, a Biden administration policy that put conservation on equal footing with extractive industries like mining or drilling. BHA also opposes the Trump administration’s rollback of the 2001 Roadless Rule, which prohibited road construction and timber harvesting on more than 58 million acres of national forest land.
