Last August, the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership celebrated a remarkable victory: At the Partnership's request, the Bureau of Land Management in Utah pulled 49,000 acres slated for oil and gas leasing from an upcoming auction.

"Every single parcel we protested was removed," says Joel Webster, who wrote the group's formal protest.

Webster and his colleagues at the Partnership, which represents 25 sportsmen's organizations, had high hopes that the victory marked a turning point for conservationists trying to keep the BLM from auctioning environmentally sensitive public lands to the oil and gas industry. But in February of this year, their optimism was deflated when the very same Utah BLM, in a very similar lease sale, pulled only 10 percent of the 74,000 acres the Partnership had targeted. Having submitted a 15-page report full of scientific citations and the BLM's own data detailing how gas drilling would harm critical habitat for mule deer, sage grouse and other wildlife, the group was left scratching its head.

"There's a complete inconsistency in how BLM offices are handling protests over wildlife in lease sales," Webster says.

The Partnership's experience exemplifies the ups and downs of the protest game over the past seven years. It's been a gritty, sale-by-sale struggle against an agency that, pushed by a bullish industry and supported by the Bush administration, has auctioned off rights to the fossil fuels underneath millions of acres in the West.

A High Country News analysis reveals that conservationists are making some headway. In Utah, for example, protesters have convinced the BLM to jettison 308 of 1,521 controversial parcels since 2001. But major victories are rare, and which challenges succeed appears to depend on which BLM office is in charge - and who is filing the protest.

The BLM's policy for putting federal parcels up for bid to energy companies dates back to the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. For many decades, the program generated little controversy, only flaring up when oil and gas prices spiked or the BLM sought to lease lands valued by conservationists. This happened in the late 1970s, when the federal government put portions of national forests around Yellowstone National Park on the auction block.

Today's leasing push, though, is unlike any other in BLM history. Driven by record high prices for natural gas and oil, and faced with diminishing reserves in long-producing basins, drilling companies and other speculators began pressing the BLM in the 1990s for bigger, and more lucrative, lease sales. For the most part, they got what they asked for. During the Clinton administration, however, conservationists were largely silent on the matter, even though the option of protesting leases had existed since 1987. (Congress established the protest process in response to Reagan-era Interior Secretary James Watt's attempt to lease lands in federally designated wilderness areas.)

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