A new report by conservationists shows that Wyoming, including the Wyoming Range and the Upper Green River Valley, would bear almost half of the new oil and gas wells proposed throughout the country.

In a telephone conference Wednesday, Wilderness Society president Bill Meadows said the Bureau of Land Management plans 118,000 new wells across the country, more than 50,000 in Wyoming alone. Currently, about 63,000 functioning oil and gas wells exist across the country.

The report outlined 17 places in the U.S. that the conservation group considers “too wild to drill” including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Carrizo Plains National Monument in California, the Rocky Mountain Front in Montana, Grand Mesa Slopes in Colorado, and Utah's Red Rock Wilderness.

In addition to the Wyoming Range and the Upper Green River Valley, Wyoming's Beartooth Front and the Red Desert also made the list.

The report, Meadows said, is a message mostly to the Bush administration that these 17 “exemplary wild places” need to be managed for their environmental attributes.

“We are not opposed to oil and gas drilling on public lands,” said Meadows. “We are simply saying not every acre, every place.”

Meadows said the Bureau of Land Management has already failed to protect environmental concerns at a number of sites, including 3,000 wells in the Upper Green River Valley.

Peter Aengst, from The Wilderness Society's Northern Rockies office, elaborated, saying that the mule deer population in the Upper Green has declined by  46 percent. Some scientists said that drought, in addition to energy development, is responsible for the drop. Another study suggests that all 1,200 sage grouse near the Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline will totally disappear in 19 years because of oil and gas wells.

Further, the BLM has neglected to follow through with air quality monitoring, and some studies show spikes in nitrate concentrations and the beginnings of lake acidification.

Nada Culver, from the The Wilderness Society Four Corners office, worked on the report and said that the 118,000 wells outlined in the report were “by no means comprehensive.”

“We certainly had the feeling that drilling was being approved on a very large scale on a very rapid pace,” she said. “It’s really difficult to try to assess the number of wells being approved for drilling. The federal agencies are not tracking future development in a thorough manner either.”

Meadows said the effort to protect these lands is, to some extent, working. In Wyoming and across the country, different branches of state and federal government, including the court systems, have worked to slow down or stop energy development in these locations.

“To have Sen. Craig Thomas speak out on behalf of the Wyoming Range is a very important statement,” he said.

Sloan Shoemaker, a spokesman for the Wilderness Workshop, called the Bush administration’s energy policy “out of control.” “The BLM says, ‘Trust us. We can drill and protect the environment,’” he said. “We say baloney.”