Sure, Judge Sotomayor is grabbing all the press attention lately, but around these parts, one of the most important nominations President Obama will make is who will lead the Forest Service.

Obama had mysteriously picked an unknown career bureaucrat to oversee the agency in the Agriculture Department, and this week the White House announced that he had mysteriously withdrawn his name.

That throws the field open again, and it will no doubt set the chatterers speculating again.

The backdrop is a troubled national forest system. The pine beetles are attacking, and leaving a wasteland of dead timber behind them. The fire danger on the forest is on the rise. Lands that have been left free of roads have been opened up to development in the name of natural gas drilling and pipelines.

Among Bush's coterie of industry thugs, few were more despised by environmentalists than Mark Rey, his Agriculture undersecretary for natural resources and the environment, the position that oversees the Forest.

Rey was pilloried by environmentalists for favoring the timber and energy industries over the land. A former timber lobbyist, he was targeted with lawsuit after lawsuit. A federal judge even threatened him with jail time. The judge said Rey was dragging his feet in complying with a court order that demanded completing an environmental study.

Rey is out, but who is in?

Obama nominated a relative unknown, Homer Lee Wilkes, to the position. Wilkes is a career employee of the Natural Resources Conservation Service. That agency is overseen by the same undersecretary, but it tends to live in the shadows of the Forest Service.

The state conservationist for Mississippi, Wilkes would have been the first black to serve in that position. But for many, the choice was mystifying. Wilkes wasn't a Forest Service guy. He wasn't even a forestry guy. And for Westerners who feel a special kinship with their national forests, he wasn't even from the West.

“I think it reflects the rather low priority that the Obama White House places on public lands,” Andy Stahl, executive director of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, said last month. Stahl was one of the more outspoken among environmentalists. Their reactions ranged from dismay to cautious acceptance.

But even Mississippi environmentalists didn't seem to know who this guy was.

“He's gone from one administration to another and sort of been under the radar screen,” said Mississippi activist Larry Jarrett, who sits on a number of environmental organization boards.

Then Wilkes withdrew his name, as mysteriously as it had been entered. It came with the usual “family reasons” explanation.

“It was great for me, but when it comes to the end of the day, I had to do what's best for my family,” Wilkes said.

Who knows if that's true, or if the Obama vetters found something they didn't like, or if the daunting confirmation process took the glimmer off of serving in the White House.

What we're left with is another environmental position in the Obama White House yet to be filled. The clock is ticking.

Many environmentalists had hoped to see the post filled by Chris Wood, Trout Unlimited's chief operating officer, who was a senior Forest Service policy advisor under President Bill Clinton. Wood, though, is a registered lobbyist, and the Obama administration has imposed limits on appointing lobbyists.

Some had floated the name of Daniel Kemmis, a respected Montana seer and consensus-builder, the former mayor of Missoula and a former state senator. It's unclear how seriously his name was ever considered, though.

It's a critical position, though, and a critical time for the forest.

In the meantime, the agency will likely run on autopilot. Jay Jensen has already taken the position of deputy undersecretary for natural resources and environment. He has the forest credentials, and the Western credentials, Wilkes lacked. For the past four years, he served as executive director of the e Council of Western State Foresters/Western Forestry Leadership Coalition, based in Lakewood, Colo. He previously served as the government affairs director for the coalition, a federal-state government partnership, and as the senior forestry advisor for the Western Governors Association.

Many of Obama's top picks have had solid green credentials, including a slate of higher-ups in Interior, Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. It would be nice to see similar credentials in the person overseeing the Forest Service.

Summer's here. That's hiking season and fire season, and a good time to focus on an agency that holds so much of the Western landscape in its hands.