WildEarth Guardians
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WildEarth Guardians is a non-profit environmental organization, with offices in Santa Fe NM, Denver CO, and Tucson AZ. Founded as Forest Guardians in 1989, the original mission of the grassroots effort was to fight a logging project on northern New Mexico’s Elk Mountain. As the evidence of environmental threats continued, the efforts of the Guardians expanded. The organization began to take on public lands livestock grazing industry. Seeing the devastation that cattle wreak on the southwest’s precious waterways, the organization launched a campaign to out-compete public lands ranchers for leases. In 1996, when a decade-long drought began in New Mexico and more than 10,000 Rio Grande silvery minnows died because the Rio Grande went completely dry for 60 miles, the organization took on river issues and began a campaign to advocate for water policy reform. Though focused on endangered species issues from the beginning because of the inextricable link between the endangered Mexican spotted owl and its threatened forest home, the Guardians launched an official endangered species program in 2001 to address the growing biodiversity crisis. In 2007, the Guardians formed a Climate and Energy program because the American West had become ground zero for new fossil fuel extraction and oil, and gas development on public lands significantly threatens wildlife and wild places. In 2008, Forest Guardians merged with a carnivore protection non-profit, Sinapu, from Boulder, CO and became WildEarth Guardians. Though they have significantly expanded their scope over the years, the core mission to confront the threats facing the beauty and diversity of the American West has not changed. [1]
WildEarth Guardians has an in-house legal team that works closely with the program directors to reform policy and uphold environmental laws. In addition, the program directors use public awareness campaigns and political pressure to protect wildlife, wild places, and wild rivers. The current Executive Director of WildEarth Guardians is John Horning of Santa Fe.
Mission statement
"WildEarth Guardians works to protect and restore wildlife, wild places and wild rivers in the American West."[2]
Programs
Climate and Energy
The goal of the Climate and Energy program [3] is reform that prioritizes energy efficiency and conservation, phases out fossil fuels, and embraces environmentally appropriate clean power sources. WildEarth Guardians activities are focused toward meeting the goal of returning to 350 parts per million. They are committed to a 10% reduction in greenhouse gases every year through incentives, policy reforms favoring distributed electricity generation, an emphasis on conservation and efficiency, a move to sustainable communities, and promoting responsible renewable energy development. Using litigation, science, public outreach and organizing, the media, and lobbying, they are making progress. Together, these campaigns represent WildEarth Guardians’ unique “cover all bases” approach to tackling the climate crisis here in the American West.
Wildlife
WildEarth Guardians works to protect the vast spectrum of native species because they have an inherent right to exist. The American West hosts a dazzling array of native wildlife and plants, from the mighty black bear and grey wolf, to tiny caddisflies, springsnails, and irises. The diversity of life in the region is a product of varied topography and a multitude of ecological niches that these native species call home. WildEarth Guardians, like most people, value wildlife, wild lands, and naturally functioning systems. They work to preserve that tapestry, rather than let it unravel. A cornerstone of WildEarth Guardian's Wildlife Program is advocacy for endangered animals and plants. The best way to pull them back from the brink is to obtain their formal listing under the Endangered Species Act [4]. Listing species under this law is a top priority because this law is so effective at preventing extinction but the majority of imperiled species in the United States are not yet listed under it. WildEarth Guardians also work to protect and restore native carnivores in their native home. Their mountain lion project [5] has resulted in the states of Colorado, Montana, and New Mexico adopting hunter education programs designed to protect breeding females and their dependent kittens. The centerpiece of their work to confront wildlife persecution is their campaign to End the Federal War on Wildlife [6]. They aim to abolish the euphemistically named “Wildlife Services,” a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that annually kills millions of animals each year, using a macabre toolkit of weapons. They work to reform backwards policies and practices, whether perpetrated by the federal Wildlife Services or those allowed by state wildlife agencies beholden to special interests. At the local level, WildEarth Guardians promote living with wildlife rather than intolerance against the wildlife species that live in our midst.
Wild Places
There are more than 300 million acres of public lands in the 17 western states and the goal of WildEarth Guardian's Wild Places Program is to prevent their capture and destruction by private, extractive interests. WildEarth Guardian's vision[7] is vast, protected, wild landscapes interconnected by corridors that are free from the unmitigated impacts of human activity and teeming with the diversity of life. They employ an array of strategies to implement this vision, including public education, legislative reform, restoration, federal and state litigation and economic incentives. They believe the public lands face serious threats from development of oil and gas, logging, domestic livestock grazing, and off-highway vehicle use among other activities and misguided policies. While advocating to end these activities that threaten to destroy our public lands, WildEarth Guardians also work to ensure that these lands remain biologically intact and ecologically functional by actively restoring previously damaged lands, waters and ecosystems. These projects heal landscapes damaged by unsustainable resource extraction, while providing new economic opportunities to forest-based communities.[8]
Wild Rivers
Streams and rivers in the American West are one of the most endangered ecosystems in North America. Despite their central role in the economic, cultural and spiritual well-being of our communities, rivers in the American West continue to be threatened by a legacy of dam and levee building, water diversions by agricultural and municipal interests, ground water pumping, livestock grazing, urban development and other uses. WildEarth Guardians prioritizes the protection of rivers, large and small, because they are essential to life as we know it. They envision free-flowing rivers with sufficient flows of high enough water quality to sustain native fish and wildlife and healthy native stream side vegetation. WildEarth Guardians employ a diverse set of strategies to implement their vision, including federal and state litigation, lobbying, restoration, and economic incentives. The priority of their policy reform efforts is focused on the West’s iconic Great River - the Rio Grande - and her tributaries. WildEarth Guardians has been working since 1996 to protect the Rio Grande [9] and has succeeded in changing numerous policies and practices. Also since 1996, when they became the first conservation organization in the West to acquire a lease of state school trust lands for the purpose of conservation, they’ve acquired many leases and started new restoration projects with cities, counties, and private landowners. The native vegetation they plant jump-starts the restoration process, restoring healthy stream banks, purifying and cooling waters and providing important habitat for fish and wildlife.[10]