WildEarth Guardians

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WildEarth Guardians envisions a world where wildlife and wild places are respected and valued and our world is sustainable for all beings. We believe in nature’s right to exist and thrive and we fight to protect what remains, restore what has been damaged, and build human communities that celebrate diversity and live in greater harmony with the natural world.

Since our founding, Guardians has centered our work on defending the rights of nature by protecting the vulnerable and voiceless and confronting the powerful people and unjust systems that stand in the way. We believe social and environmental justice are deeply intertwined, and that we can and should do more to create a more just, equitable, diverse, and inclusive organization and world.

WildEarth Guardians has four main programs:

Wildlife

Our wildlife program focuses on staving off the biodiversity crisis by protecting imperiled species, creating an ethic of coexistence between human interests and native carnivores across the West, and reforming systems of wildlife governance to be more science-based, democratic, and ethical. In Colorado, Guardians' main focus in the wildlife program is ensuring wolves brought back to the state can survive and thrive here. We led advocacy efforts around the creation of Colorado’s wolf recovery plan - ensuring that there was no trophy hunting of wolves in the plan and helping to include coexistence measures.

Now we are fighting for the future of wolf restoration in the state. Colorado’s first wolf family since reintroduction–the Copper Creek Pack–was taken into captivity after livestock owners failed to implement timely and effective coexistence measures. The adult male of the pack sadly died. It is unknown when or where the remaining pack members will be released. And now Livestock interests have put forward a misguided petition to halt future wolf reintroductions altogether. Our work to create a Colorado willing to coexist with wolves is more important now than ever. 

Wild Places

Guardians promotes healing and restoring public lands across the West while connecting large, protected landscapes for native wildlife—from grizzly bears to bighorn sheep. In Colorado, we are fighting to protect national forests from the impact of motorized vehicles and pushing to remove unmaintained roads that provide unnecessary access fragmenting critical wildlife habitat and degrading streams and rivers throughout the state. We're also challenging domestic sheep grazing allotment approvals to stop disease transmission to vulnerable, local bighorn populations.

Wild Rivers

Living rivers are vital to the diversity of life on Earth. Guardians, we fight to ensure that rivers across the West have a right to their own water. Our primary effort in the Centennial State is protecting the headwaters of the Colorado River. We are fighting new dams and diversion projects that would drain water from this already over-allocated river system, devastate irreplaceable wetlands that took centuries to develop, destroy key habitat for the Canada lynx and other imperiled species, and deplete flows available to downstream agriculture, cities, and ecosystems.

Climate & Energy

Guardians is a leading advocate in the fight to transition our nation off fossil fuels and to embrace a clean energy future. One hot spot in the West is along the Colorado Frontrange, which is suffering through a clean air crisis. We are using a diversity of tactics including legal engagement, political and administrative lobbying, communications, grassroots organizing, and state-level legislative engagement to help clean Colorado's air—and it's working. In May, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled in a Guardians legal case, that Colorado’s air pollution permit for Arch Coal’s West Elk coal mine failed to meet Clean Air Act requirements for monitoring harmful smog-forming compounds.