* Those of us who care about environmental issues are happy about President Obama recent decisions. Washington Post:
President Obama signed a sweeping land conservation package into law Monday, protecting more than 2 million acres as wilderness and creating a national system to conserve land held by the Bureau of Land Management.
The measure, a collection of 170 bills that represents the most significant wilderness effort in at least 15 years, would provide the highest level of federal protection to areas such as Oregon's Mount Hood and part of Virginia's Jefferson National Forest, along with sites in California, Colorado, Idaho, Michigan, New Mexico, Utah and West Virginia. It also authorizes the first coordinated federal research program to investigate ocean acidification and allows additional funding to protect ecologically valuable coastal areas and estuaries....
....The law also establishes the 26-million-acre National Landscape Conservation System, which aims to protect the most environmentally and historically significant lands controlled by the BLM. The new system, which encompasses 850 sites, including the Canyons of the Ancients National Monument in southwest Colorado, Agua Fria National Monument in Arizona and Nevada's Black Rock Desert National Conservation Area, requires the agency to make conservation a priority when managing these areas.....
Isn't it amazing how the Obama differs from Bush on the environment and protecting our natural resources? We should all offer a collective 'thank you' to the President for his positive leadership on these environmental issues.
