Saturday, September 30, is National Public Lands Day, an annual campaign that encourages people to volunteer their time clearing weeds, maintaining trails, or doing other helpful chores at parks or other nature preserves.

The idea is to foster an ethic of stewardship for the lands that we Americans own in common.

It's a good reminder. Those who seem to need the reminder most are political operatives within the administration who see public lands as clearance sale bargain tables for special interests.

In the past few weeks, federal judges have delivered sharply worded reminders that administrative agencies must make the law, not political agendas, their guideposts in overseeing lands that they manage on behalf of the American citizens who own them.

On August 22, Judge Charles Breyer blocked logging projects within Giant Sequoia National Monument in California, home to spectacular groves of the largest living things on Earth. The judge found the Forest Service's management plan for the monument "decidedly incomprehensible."

On September 20, Judge Elizabeth LaPorte threw out the administration's repeal of a 2001 rule barring new roads and commercial logging on nearly 50 million roadless acres in America's national forests, which produce some of the cleanest water in the country.

On September 25, Judge James Singleton blocked oil leasing on nearly 400,000 acres surrounding Teshekpuk Lake in northern Alaska, a prime breeding and rearing habitat for tens of thousands of ducks, geese, and other waterfowl that visit the vast wetland from six continents. While few people outside Alaska may have heard of Teskekpuk Lake, the area has such high value for wildlife that even James Watt, the pro-drilling Interior secretary of yore, supported its protection during his 1981-1983 tenure.

In all three cases, the courts slapped the administration for failing to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the look-before-you-leap law that requires federal agencies to study and report on the likely impacts of decisions before they are made.

NEPA has taken a beating lately from ideologues who claim that it's a tool for obstructionists to stop logging and other projects on public lands. Conservationists who file lawsuits to ensure that land management agencies comply with NEPA are tagged as "radical" or "extremists."

Too often, calls for "streamlining" NEPA are code words used by commercial interests seeking unfettered access to the public's natural resources for private gain.

At its core, however, NEPA is based on conservative principles - public servants must act prudently, understand a decision's potential consequences, and set aside arrogant presumptions that they don't need the public's advice about managing the public's lands.

That's what good stewardship of public lands requires. Once bad decisions are made, undoing them and cleaning up their consequences can be next to impossible.

The American people deserve better from their public servants. They expect them to give the best possible care to wild forests that produce clean water and to distant wetlands that shelter extraordinary numbers of waterfowl for us to enjoy closer to home.

People who want their grandchildren to see sequoia trees that were alive at the time of Christ should not have to tolerate "decidedly incomprehensible" management plans from the foresters who oversee those sequoia groves on our behalf.

Above all, we expect our public servants to obey the law. That's where good stewardship begins, and it's something that those on the losing side of the recent court decisions should think about on National Public Lands Day this Saturday.