The Bush administration’s most enduring mark on the American West may well be the tens of millions of acres of public lands it has handed over to the oil and gas industry -- and the belated backlash the giveaway has spawned.

As if to punctuate this legacy, the Bureau of Land Management -- which oversees mineral rights on public lands -- held its most contentious gas lease sale Dec. 19, making available some 150,000 acres of Utah’s magnificent redrock canyon country near Arches and Canyonlands national parks.

In the weeks before the sale, the BLM fielded protests from conservation groups, the National Park Service and even Robert Redford. The agency eventually pulled some parcels, but as it has since 2002, when the White House ordered the BLM to push gas drilling as its highest priority, the agency proceeded with a controversial sale.

This time, however, a monkey wrench gummed up the works. Posing as a legitimate industry bidder, 27-year-old University of Utah student Tim DeChristopher bid nearly $1.8 million for 13 lease parcels totaling 22,000 acres. He also managed to drive up other bids by about $500,000, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. The BLM, which escorted DeChristopher out of the room once it figured out what was going on, says it may redo the auction. Meanwhile, contributions to DeChristopher have poured in, and now he says he hopes to write a $45,000 check to the BLM to hang on to the leases he won. One of his lawyers, interestingly, is former BLM Director Pat Shea.

Officials stocking up on AR-15-style long guns; preliminary gun ban list revealed.

S&W sales

With bans on AR-15 and AR-15-styled rifles to the public expected under the Obama administration (see gun-ban lists below), Smith and Wesson has just announced expansion of that market, with the sale of 275 of its M&P15 rifles to the Chicago police department.

Chicago, president-elect Obama’s home town, has virtual bans on handguns and strict repressive limits on long guns, but police are excluded and criminals blithely ignore the provisions.

The M&P15 strongly resembles the AR-15, a high quality, semi automatic long gun used by the U.S. military and the public for decades. What the Chicago police expect to do with 275 of the guns, vilified as assault weapons by the lamestream media, was undisclosed. Assault, it has been noted, is a type of behavior, not a type of hardware.

Welcome to 2009 — and to the era of First Amendment 3.0. First Amendment 1.0 was the time of origination, when the Founders debated, discussed and eventually created in 1791 a statement — the first 45 words in the Bill of Rights — that both declared and protected freedom of religion, speech and press, and the rights of assembly and petition.

First Amendment 2.0 was the time of definition, where the nation — through the means of the independent judiciary — defined those basic freedoms and in the process came to apply those protections to state statutes as well as federal laws.

Which brings us to 3.0 — a time of transformation.

At a pace and range not seen before, we are attempting to apply the principles of the First Amendment to an increasingly diverse society even as technology is redefining — at breakneck speed — what we mean by free expression and association.

The religious-liberty pronouncements of a society once largely defined as Protestant, Catholic and Jewish are being tested by world religions, by Wiccans and by those who profess no religious beliefs.

The means and meaning of free speech and free press are expanding as rapidly through the World Wide Web via social-networking sites, individual blogs, YouTube and a host of other high-tech means.

The Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which Bill Clinton signed into law eight days before he left office, protected 58.5 million acres of national forest land from logging and energy development. It was a bold move, but it seemed doomed to a short lifespan. An administrative rule can be readily overturned, which is exactly what the Bush administration tried to do.

But nearly eight years later, the Clinton Roadless Rule remains in effect for 35.6 million acres of national forest in seven Western states. Idaho has adopted, and Colorado is about to adopt, state-specific roadless regulations. They fall far short of the Clinton rule but still provide limited protection for large swaths of land.

The contentious issue has a long history. The Forest Service first inventoried its roadless areas in the 1970s, after the 1964 Wilderness Act directed it to determine which of its lands were eligible for wilderness protection. Some of this land was preserved in a piecemeal fashion, through state-specific bills. But much stayed unprotected. The goal of the Clinton Roadless Rule was to systematically protect these remaining road-free lands without going through the arduous wilderness-designation process. More than 1.5 million people commented on the proposed rule, and over 95 percent of them were in favor.

Well here it is that time of the year once more. Normally all of us go out of our way to make lists of things we intend to do in the forthcoming year. These are called New Year’s  Resolutions.

Another name for them would be … “the best of intentions.”

All of us vow to lose weight, exercise more, be kinder to others, save more money, eat better foods and on and on. Health clubs do a booming business for about the first ninety days of the year and then the members get tired and fall back into their evil ways. The cycle then begins to repeat itself by us forgetting our resolutions and sinking back into the depths of depravity by sucking down those cola’s, eating chocolate and ‘forgetting’ our workout clothes which keeps us from going to the gym. So much for good intentions.

It’s not that we’re bad, we’re just human.

When Dave Iverson first came to the U.S. Forest Service’s regional office in Ogden, Utah, in 1980, he was drawn by a love for the outdoors and a desire to do good work on the public lands. But after spending almost three decades on planning and policy, he quit last year just shy of retirement. Overwhelmed by what he called a dysfunctional bureaucracy, he simply couldn’t take it any longer.

Iverson says the agency has become “pretty much demoralized and cowering in the shadows. There are almost no people in the higher offices of the Forest Service who will stand up to the powers that be.”

He’s not alone in thinking that agency staffers feel beset. Beginning in 1990, Gregory Brown, program director of environmental studies at Central Washington University, conducted three surveys of Forest Service employees and their attitudes about their work. These days, says Brown, workforce morale is currently at its lowest. Agency staffers cite the effect of workforce reductions that stress remaining employees, who now have to do multiple jobs. They also cite ambiguous operating procedures and the shift of money away from management programs to fighting wildfires.