I didn’t know squat about environmental issues when an oil tanker captain crashed the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, Alaska 20 years ago. I was in college at the University of Georgia at the time and the seminal moments of my life then were determined by the quality of the dates I got and by the points I scored in our daily intramural basketball games.

On March 3, The Wilderness Society filed a protest with the Bureau of Land Management, which was planning to auction off a lease that would allow oil and natural gas drilling on the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia. The BLM is the leasing agent for all federal lands, including national forests, and a “protest” is a document that allows the public to challenge those leases before they are auctioned off.

More than 100,000 acres of Utah wilderness received protection from oil and gas drilling on Feb. 4 when Secretary of Interior Ken Salazar announced the agency would cancel 77 controversial land leases issued under the Bush Administration.

The action is among the first taken by the Obama administration to protect America’s wild lands.

Some of Utah’s most beloved wild lands will be offered up to the oil and gas industry in December, courtesy of an administration that appears bent on ignoring the wishes of the public.

On Election Day, the Utah office of the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM — a division of the Bush administration’s Department of Interior — announced that a Dec. 19 lease sale of state lands would include oil and gas leases near the beloved Arches and Canyonlands national parks, along with eastern Utah's Dinosaur National Monument.

Spend any time in Colorado this election season and you’re sure to see at least one erroneous advertisement warning consumers about the “$321 million tax hike,” should they vote for Amendment 58, which would end state tax credits to a wealthy oil and natural gas industry and invest the money in education and renewable energy.