Throughout the summer we’ve invited you to participate in shaping President Obama’s America’s Great Outdoors Initiative. Nearly a quarter million of you have engaged — either by attending one of the more than 25 “listening and learning” sessions the Administration held across the country or by sending in your thoughts and ideas to the America’s Great Outdoors website.

I recently arrived home after a week in the Land of Enchantment, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Several of my Wilderness Society colleagues gathered for a week long symposium, organized by the Bureau of Land Management, to discuss science within the National Landscape Conservation System.

National Monuments and the Antiquities Act have been in the news quite a bit lately because of a manufactured controversy that misrepresents a leaked memo to suggest incorrectly that the Obama Administration has imminent plans to use the Antiquities Act to create a slew new National Monuments.

After years of suffering through a presidential administration that starved federal conservation programs of adequate funding, such programs are finally getting the needed boost they deserve.

In October, Congress gave a significant funding increase to the Interior Department, which is responsible for most U.S. land conservation and management. The $4.6 billion funding increase will go towards a series of important projects and initiatives long pushed for by The Wilderness Society and the rest of the conservation community.

In the Four Corners region, among the rugged mountains, mesas and deep canyons of the high desert there are pockets of desert wilderness where the soil is the only thing standing between travelers and a wealth of ancient Pueblo artifacts.

In these lands, the ancient Pueblo people once settled villages with hundreds of family farms. Today, the area is rich with evidence of their small communities, but it’s also a hotbed for those looking to profit from illegally selling this priceless cultural heritage.