Those concerned about the federal pillaging of the West's open spaces can thank these endangered creatures and an Interior Department review board that determined the BLM had illegally failed to consider the ferrets' fate when it sold oil and gas leases on the Utah/Colorado border. The board rightly suspended 15 leases covering 29,000 acres, some of the last of the endangered ferret's habitat.

This is not the first time the Bureau of Land Management's seemingly headlong rush to put public land on the auction block for energy development has been curbed. But it is unusual that its parent agency would do the reining in. That fact only underscores the BLM's indefensible willingness to cater to energy companies at the expense even of its own department's rules for protecting the environment.

U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball ruled in August that the BLM ignored federal environmental laws and its own findings when it sold 16 leases on land the agency itself had designated Wilderness Inventory Areas. A lawsuit was necessary to bring the BLM to heel in that case.

The BLM tries to excuse its eagerness to allow energy companies to operate heavy equipment and bulldoze roads in sensitive areas by pointing to its stated mission to allow multiple uses of federal land. But the agency's mission also is to be a steward of public lands with scenic, recreational and archaeological value; wildlife habitat, precious water and clean air.

The fire sale of more and more leases in areas deserving protection is absurd when there are already millions more acres open to development than can be drilled.

The survival of the black-footed ferret may seem insignificant compared to the commercial value of oil and gas. But when any species becomes endangered, that is a signal that an entire ecosystem is in trouble.

Maintaining those ecosystems helps keep Earth's larger biological systems in balance, a far more important goal than fattening the bottom line of the extractive energy industry.