Idaho has for several years been very proactive in taking steps to protect sagebrush habitat for the sake of hundreds of species including the keystone of them all, the ostentatious greater sage-grouse. Now, a federal judge in that state has voided nearly one million acres of oil and gas leases on federal lands across 11 western states.

Chief Magistrate Ronald E. Bush noted that the period for public comment was too short during the lease application process, and it didn't allow for adequate protestation time; describing it as "arbitrary and capricious".

"Faster and easier lease sales, at the expense of public participation, is not enough," wrote the judge, who reinstated a 30-day public forum-style comment period followed by an administrative protest period on all recent leases on public land.

In January 2018, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued a memorandum of instructions to streamline the leasing process by making common-sense adjustments to steer it away from over-regulation while maintaining standards of public health, environmental review, and public input.

"The court wasn't fooled by the agency's efforts to disguise its intention to provide greater influence to extractive energies-and the sage-grouse and 350 other sagebrush-dependent species will benefit from today's win," said Talasi Brooks, an attorney with Western Watersheds Project, one of the environmental groups which have supported the Idaho reversal.

Under the recent rollback of protections for 9 million acres of western sagebrush habitat, departments like the Bureau of Land Management, Environmental Protection Agency, and the Interior have moved to allow states to take greater autonomy in energy and mineral production within their borders.

According to The Washington Post, this has involved making decisions that partly and sometimes entirely outflank citizen input in the case of the EPA, while the BLM has opened much shorter public comment periods and also established different methods of accepting public feedback, with some regional offices accepting only fax or in person protests rather than by email.

The treeless meadows of sagebrush habitat characterize the American West, and the greater sage-grouse-which dances, struts, and fans its tail in an extraordinary mating ritual every spring-has become the poster child of this ecosystem. The bird's population, once numbering 15 million, has been reduced to just 500,000 through habitat loss, drilling, and disease.

Private-public partnerships in states like Idaho have intervened by slowing and even halting the decline of the charismatic bird, so much that the Near-Threatened species never had to be listed as Endangered under the law.

(WATCH the BBC's amusing video-a dance party of the mating grouse…)

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