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A man who advocates selling off US public land for mining has been appointed by the Trump administration to oversee some 250 million acres of government-owned wilderness.

Interior Secretary David Bernhardt signed the order making William Pendley the acting head of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

The office manages a huge swathe of mostly wild federal land and the natural resources it contains, in the western US.

Mr Pendley welcomed Trump administration plans to open more federal land to mining, fossil fuel development and other private use, in tweets earlier this year.

He has called the oil and gas extraction technique known as fracking ”an energy, economic, AND environmental miracle!”

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He argued in 2016 that the “founding fathers intended all lands owned by the federal government to be sold”.