As we prepare to inaugurate a president who has repeatedly called climate change a "hoax," appointed as Environmental Protection Agency administrator an Oklahoma attorney general who is suing that agency, named the CEO of ExxonMobil as secretary of state, vowed to renege on America's commitments to the Paris Climate Agreement, favors increased coal mining, fracking and oil drilling, and undoubtedly would favor turning treasured national parks into luxury golf resorts, let's not dwell on the dark days that loom but rather celebrate the conservation renaissance that swept over this country during the latter half of the Obama Administration.

Though he began his presidency with at best a lackluster record of environmental protection, Barack Obama evidently experienced an ecological epiphany and wound up preserving from despoliation more than 265 million acres, the most of any president.

Last June, when in honor of the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service he established the 87,500-acre Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument in Maine, Obama commented, "The parks belong to all of us. This planet belongs to all of us … We have to have the foresight and faith in the future to do what it takes to protect our parks and to protect this planet for generations to come."

The Maine designation was one of several actions our 44th president took in the past couple years that should make all of us who feel passionate about the outdoors applaud. Among them:

• Establishing the Atlantic Ocean's first marine reserve, the 4,913-square-mile Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument off the coast of New England.

• Expanding the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to nearly a half-billion square miles.

• Creating the largest protected place on the planet by quadrupling the size of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument to 582,578 square miles of land and sea in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

• Designating more than 2 million acres as wilderness, creating thousands of miles of recreational and historic trails, and protecting more than 1,000 miles of rivers by signing the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act.

• Using the Antiquities act 23 times, more than any other president, to create national monuments.

• Ordering a moratorium on new coal mining leases on public lands.

• Reaching an agreement with automakers that will require cars to double fuel economy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2025, thereby saving consumers more than $1.7 trillion at the pump and cutting national oil consumption by 12 billion barrels.

• Adopting a clean power plan that will cut carbon pollution from power plants by 32 percent over the next 15 years.

• Launching a Great Outdoors Initiative designed to increase access to parks and green spaces across the country. In our state this program led to improvements along the Connecticut and Naugatuck rivers.

• Blocking construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline that would have carried 600,000 barrels a day of crude oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

Historians often credit Teddy Roosevelt as having had the best environmental record of any president because he set aside some 230 million acres as protected land and created the National Wildlife Refuge System.

But Roosevelt also has been excoriated by many conservationists because of his ardor for hunting, so in my view Obama should be at the top of the list of best environmental presidents..

Jimmy Carter also had a strong environmental record, but surprisingly the president who had an even more significant impact is the same one who resigned in disgrace because of the Watergate scandal.

Richard Nixon not only created the Environmental Protection Agency, he also signed the Clean Air, Coastal Zone Management, Ocean Dumping, Marine Mammal Protection, Endangered Species and Safe Drinking Water acts.

So leaders who acted less than honorably in some areas still can redeem themselves when it comes to protecting the environment. Let's hold onto that hope for the next four or eight years.

It now falls on us who cherish the outdoors to redouble our commitment to protecting and preserving the environment .

We can achieve this by supporting such organizations as land trusts, nature centers and wildlife conservation agencies, and also by simply getting out on the trail and on the water more frequently.

As Henry David Thoreau observed, “We need the tonic of wildness... We can never have enough of nature.”