There is reason to celebrate the Bureau of Land Management's decision to trim more than half the public lands it first planned to include in last Friday's controversial sale of oil and gas leases. At the same time, we wonder why the agency considered auctioning leases adjacent to national parks, next to fragile archaeological sites, in areas without completed environmental assessments and under private homes in the first place.

Only one week from the sale date, more than 84,000 acres were withdrawn due to objections from the National Park Service that environmental data on the area near Fillmore was incomplete.

The agency certainly should have expected the storm of protests it received from the Park Service, environmental groups and preservationists, not to mention the people living near Moab who would have had drilling rigs as next-door neighbors.

A cynic might say that the BLM threw those parcels into its original 360,000-acre sale just so it could appear to be responsive to protests and willing to compromise when it deleted them. After all, the 164,000 acres remaining on the auction block still include parcels in Desolation Canyon, a popular rafting site on the Green River; Nine Mile Canyon, home to the greatest collection of ancient Native American wall art; the White River area; and other wilderness-quality parcels in national forests.

In fact, the National Park Service protested lease sales of 94 parcels included in the original sale; 70 of them remain on the list. Robert Redford and a group of environmental organizations are challenging the lease sale in federal court.

It is evident that the BLM is rushing to fulfill a Bush administration promise to industry to make most of the public land in Utah available for oil and gas exploration and drilling before President-elect Barack Obama moves into the White House. Now that some of the most controversial parcels have been removed from this lease sale, Obama should make sure these and other Utah treasures aren't offered up in the future.

Those who love Utah's scenic beauty, abundant wildlife and clean water can be glad for these concessions, but still concerned about wilderness-quality parcels that remain on the list. The end of the Bush administration will be good for Utah's thriving tourism and recreation industry that could be marred by this last-ditch wholesale leasing of public lands for oil and gas drilling.