The Wyoming Legislature was very much captured by the spirit of this sequel to the Sagebrush Rebellion. From the mid-1990s and even into the new millennium, bills were introduced or passed to allow polluting companies to confidentially “self-audit” their own environmental violations; to saddle local governments with legal liabilities for land-use planning decisions that restricted property use; to demand logging on national forests well beyond the state’s jurisdiction; and to establish a state slush fund to sue the United States over environmental protection efforts. Now and then a “Stop the War on the West” bumper sticker on a brand new Lincoln Continental would cruise past you on the highway to Cheyenne. One legislator from Torrington decked out his seat on the House floor with a wolf pelt as lawmakers passed a $1,000 bounty on the federally protected species.

    From the vantage point of that era, it seemed clear that if Wyoming’s environment ever attained the protections it deserves, it would come from heated and controversial national actions that slipped past the vanguard of traditional industry and anti-federal political positioning that our Legislature had become.

    Yet in 2008, the Wyoming Legislature has positioned itself to historically expand its support for wildlife management, habitat preservation and improvement, and endangered-species research. Lawmakers are poised to pass the most meaningful improvement in decades in local control over the impact of new subdivisions. And the state is taking a strong interest in a future economy in which injecting and storing carbon dioxide to keep it out of the atmosphere may become an economic rival to the extraction of fossil fuels that accelerate global climate change.

    How on earth did we get to this point, when melting polar ice caps and sportsman outrage over oil and gas development have pushed the War on the West out of the headlines in this world-scale energy extraction state? And how much more do we have to do — and how much time to do it in — to build a true conservation legacy for future Wyoming generations?

    Those are some of the questions I hope we can try to answer together in this column. But already some clues are clearly visible.

    Before we move on, though, I want to make something clear. I began my career as a journalist for the Casper Star-Tribune, investing seven years covering environmental and political issues. But in 2001, seeking an opportunity to more strongly advocate for our wildlife and landscapes, I became a lobbyist.

    I am proud of our work at Wyoming Conservation Voters and the Wyoming Conservation Voters Education Fund to empower citizens to bring about more forward-looking, sustainability-driven public policy on the environment, wildlife and growth. We’ll be doing more than ever this year, and we’d love to hear from you.

    But this column won’t be about promoting my organization. The opinions expressed here will be mine alone and represent my reflections on Wyoming’s environment, its defenders, and the decision-makers whose sense of stewardship we all depend upon to safeguard this rare jewel, our state.

    Wyoming political leaders have changed direction on the environment slowly enough in the last 14 years that the overall shift in their tone and actions largely escaped media and public attention. But the dominant issues have undeniably shifted.

    The anecdotes you pick up traveling around the state have started to change. War on the West refrains have faded from the letters page (only three such letters to the paper-of-record used the phrase since 2004, and one of them questioned its accuracy). Protests over national forest food-storage rules in bear country have been replaced by grave-toned worries about the seemingly viral propagation of ranchettes climbing the foothills and fronting favorite fisheries. The sheer power of the oil and gas boom has grasped us by the lapels and forced us to pay attention to wildlife populations, to habitat, to open space, to air quality, to the quality of our community life and to the specter of another bust. And the rising national tide of opinion about our country’srole in damaging our atmosphere is finally cresting even on Wyoming’s shore. There was a climate change awareness event in Rawlins last year. And one in Ucross. And even one on Gannett Peak’s vanishing Dinwoody Glacier.

    Wyoming in 2005 became the first state to create an interest-generating savings account expressly to pay for wildlife habitat recovery and preservation, and looks ready to add to the Wildlife Trust Fund for a fourth year in a row, if public support remains as powerful as it has beenso far.

    None of this is to say that Wyoming has overcome all of its environmental challenges. There are still many miles to go. Coalbed methane development is expanding to every corner of Wyoming with gas-bearing coal seams, threatening to change entire landscapes. New coal-fired power plants are being planned or built to generate more electricity for the West, nibbling away at Wyoming’s air quality as long aspromising new clean-coal technologies remain on the shelf. Legislators continue to resist efforts to protect Wyoming fisheries by keeping more water in streams. And the final round of litigation over the future of wolf management is just getting started, and is likely to inflame tempers on both sides of the issue, further polarizing conservationists and landowners at a time when cooperation is essential for Wyoming’s future.

    But the feeling in the air is that past polarization has hurt all sides in the natural-resources debates of the past several years and that more fence-mending is urgently needed. Stock growers have a land trust now. Wyoming’s GOP junior senator is moving to limit energy extraction in key wildlife habitat. And instead of focusing on funding lawsuits to block endangered species listings, the state is instead moving to invest in species research to obviate the need for listings, not block them.