The Most Important Legislation of 2010?

Amidst all the holiday cheering and the name-calling over tax legislation, you may have missed the passage of a piece of legislation that is likely to affect our sport as much as anything else in the next decade. On December 23, the U.S. Interior Department said that that the BLM could no longer exclude wilderness as a criterion it applies in managing federal lands. This reverses a 2003 policy change that resulted in a dramatic increase in commercial exploitation of public lands. Leslie Kaufman wrote about it in The New York Times:
“Environmentalists welcomed the decision but questioned why it had taken nearly two years for the Obama administration to reverse the policy. They also expressed worry that the new policy could prove weaker than the wilderness designation formulas in place before President George W. Bush took office in 2001.”