For 20 minutes, Wyoming lawyer William Perry Pendley railed against environmental extremists and boasted about the legal battles his right-wing nonprofit had waged on behalf of Western property owners. The tirade came at a September 2014 conference of the conservative American Dream Coalition in Denver.

Environmentalists primarily use three laws, including the Endangered Species Act of 1973, as tools to drive people off the land and into cities where they can be controlled, he said. At the time, Pendley was president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a Colorado-based nonprofit law firm that focuses on protecting property rights and advocates for selling off millions of federal acres in the West.

Weve gone from protecting the warm and fuzzies to protecting the cold and slimies, he said. It was supposed to apply only to federal land. Today, it applies to private property coast to coast, border to border which leads us here in the West to say what? Shoot, shovel and shut up if you encounter one of those critters on your property.

He continued: That, by the way, is not legal advice.

Shoot, shovel and shut up also known as the 3-S treatment is a strategy extreme property rights advocates have embraced for getting rid of unwanted, imperiled species on private land. Pendley has also written that the law underlying federal species protection is used to kill or prevent anybody from making a living on federal land .

Late last month, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt tapped Pendley to serve as acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, an agency of the Interior Department that oversees 245 million acres of public land , or more than one-third of the federal estate. This week, the Trump administration finalized rules that significantly weaken the Endangered Species Act. Among other things, the changes will make it easier for government agencies to remove species from the protected list and limit their ability to account for the impacts of future climate change. The rollback comes on the heels of a United Nations report that found up to 1 million species around the globe are at risk of extinction due to human activities.