This year Christmas came a little early for all Americans who treasure our public lands, when Interior Secretary Ken Salazar delivered a new policy for protecting wilderness-quality areas managed by the Bureau of Land Management. The Secretarial Order effectively puts an end to the second class status of wilderness on our public lands that was ushered in by the Bush administration’s “no more wilderness” policy.

People throughout Idaho rallied to add 517,000 acres of our state’s rugged Owyhee Canyonlands to the National Wilderness Preservation System in 2010, breaking a generation-long drought of wilderness designation in Idaho. During the previous 30 years, not a single acre of wilderness had been designated in Idaho -- despite the fact that the state has more candidate wildlands than any state outside Alaska.