Steve Bloch (’97) started his career thrilled at the chance to work outside most of the time. He studied botany and political science in college and worked several seasons as a field technician for the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, doing biological surveys in Oregon, Washington and Louisiana.
“I grew frustrated when the work our teams were doing (and our supervisors were overseeing) was largely ignored by management,” Bloch recalls. “Over time, it became clear to me that I would have limited impact on the future of public lands as a biologist and instead felt that natural resources and public land law would be the way to go.”
He was accepted at several law schools across the west, but one stood out for him.
“I was immediately sold on the S.J. Quinney College of Law after just a few days in Utah. The chance to study natural resources law at a highly regarded law school so close to the mountains and red rock made this an easy choice,” he says. “The College of Law felt very intimate: There was a small number of students, and we had close contact with the faculty and administrators.”
During his 1L year in 1995, he says being part of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and the Environment was particularly exciting.
“The Stegner Center was just getting started with the first symposium that spring. The classes I was able to take over my three years, including public land law, mining law, administrative law, and the environmental clinic, gave me a solid foundation as I started my career,” Bloch recalls. “I got to know Professor Keiter, Professor Adler, and Professor Lockhart, adjunct professors like Clay Parr, and alumni like Steve Alder quite well and built the kinds of relationships with them that stood the test of time. Since I graduated in 1997 and have navigated the conservation community and broader legal field, it’s clear that the Stegner Center’s reputation has only gotten stronger over the past 25-plus years.”
Today, Bloch serves as legal director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA), an independent nonprofit that strives to preserve Utah’s remaining desert wild lands.
“Utah is on the cutting edge of so many legal issues in the public lands field,” he says. “From regulating off-road vehicles on BLM-managed lands, to the state of Utah’s two dozen Quiet Title Act lawsuits over more than 12,000 claimed R.S. 2477 rights of way, to defending the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, we have it all.”
Bloch is proud to have the support of tens of thousands of Utahns and people across the United States for SUWA’s efforts.
“We’re making a difference in protecting some of the West’s most important public lands: America’s Red Rock Wilderness,” he says. “Over the course of my 25 years at SUWA, we’ve succeeded in protecting more than 800,000 acres as congressionally designated wilderness and are toeing the line to keep another 8 million acres of Bureau of Land Management lands ‘wilderness ready.'”
Even after nearly three decades at SUWA, Bloch says it’s still his dream job.
“I felt incredibly fortunate to be offered a staff attorney position in 1998 and feel lucky (just about) every day to still be doing this work now as SUWA’s legal director,” he says.