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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
WildEarth Guardians protects and restores the wildlife, wild places, wild rivers, and health of the American West. We have four programs—Wildlife, Wild Places, Wild Rivers, and Climate & Energy—that bring people, science, and the law together in defense of the American West.
Our Wildlife Program leads the fight to end cruel and senseless wildlife management practices, defend imperiled species, and create policies to ensure that native carnivores thrive.
Our Wild Places Program protects and connects terrestrial and aquatic habitats for native species on federal public lands, while also promoting restoration of these lands, countering a legacy of logging, road building, livestock grazing, and motorized vehicle use on public lands in the West.
Our Wild Rivers Program seeks to restore clean water, healthy flows, and resilient communities—both human and non-human—in river systems across the West.
Our Climate & Energy Program is focused on defending the American West from fossil fuel extraction and advancing solutions that confront the climate crisis and shift to a fossil-fuel-free American West.
Founded as Forest Guardians in 1989, the original mission of WildEarth Guardians' grassroots effort was to fight a logging project on northern New Mexico's Elk Mountain in the Santa Fe National Forest. As the evidence of environmental threats continued throughout the West, Guardians’ efforts and programs expanded as well.
Since then, we've grown to protect the entire American West—with 40 staff, living in eight states across the West. Guardians is proof that a group of committed, visionary, idealistic, and passionate caretakers of the wild can take on the most daunting adversaries—and win.
Colorado is a priority state for WildEarth Guardians in our fight to protect the Wild.
Organization name
WildEarth Guardians
other names
Guardians, Forest Guardians, Sinapu
1989
Category
Environment
Organization Size
Large Organization
Address
3798 Marshall St. Suite 8Headquarters
301 N. Guadalupe, Suite 201Jefferson County, CO, US
CO, US
Adams County, CO, US
Boulder County, CO, US
Summit County, CO, US