This year is shaping up to be a banner year for environmental policy. The Obama administration is making decisions based on sound science and reason, peeling away actions and policies created in the past administration that significantly weakened environmental protections. The administration is establishing a new hope for our forests and wildlife.

There is a place in south-central Wyoming’s Red Desert region that is so wild and pristine the state designated the area as "Very Rare or Uncommon" back in 2007. While locals recognized the major significance of this spectacular wilderness and spiritual place, Adobe Town was facing a serious threat from a proposal by the Bureau of Land Management to open the area up to oil and gas development.

Nearly a year after the Bush administration put some of Utah’s most pristine lands on the auction block for oil and gas leasing, the Department of the Interior has handed down a report with recommendations aimed to overhaul the Bureau of Land Management's oil and gas leasing programs.

Millions of acres of lands and waters containing many of the nation’s most incredible natural and cultural treasures got a long-overdue boost last week when the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued new guidance that made the protection of natural and cultural resources a top priority.

A remarkable news item surfaced this past week that Gale Norton, President George W. Bush’s first Secretary of the Interior from 2001-2006, is under a federal criminal probe due to her potentially inappropriate, unethical, and illegal relationship with Royal Dutch Shell over the federal lands that a Shell subsidiary was awarded for oil shale development when Norton was Secretary.