Dave Foreman

Dave Foreman is a legendary conservation leader and wilderness strategist.  His half-century career in conservation has changed, and bettered, the course of the wilderness movement.

Dave’s professional work in conservation has included serving as Southwest regional representative for The Wilderness Society (1973-1980), co-founder of Earth First! (1980), publisher of Wild Earth magazine (1990-2005), co-founder of The Wildlands Project (1991), co-founder of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance (1997), and founder of The Rewilding Institute (2003).  In these capacities, Dave has coined the phrases and articulated the concepts behind Earth First!, No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth, Rewilding, and Born to Rewild.  He has officiated the marriage between wildlands advocacy and conservation biology. He has empowered the conservation community to think BIG, to strive to protect and restore the whole biotic community, not settle for preserving a few remaining scraps.

Among Dave Foreman’s many outstanding conservation accomplishments are getting big additions to the Gila and other Wilderness Areas, blocking numerous timber sales in National Forests, blockading logging roads into various old-growth forests, forcing the Forest Service to re-do its inadequate Roadless Area Review and Evaluation, serving as lead author on several wildlands network designs, co-founding Wild Earth magazine, and getting rewilding adopted as a fundamental goal in conservation.  Dave received the 1996 Paul Petzoldt Award for Excellence in Wilderness Education and was recognized by Audubon Magazine in 1998 as one of the 20^th century’s most important conservation leaders.

Dave has shared his visionary ideas on big connected wild places complete with top carnivores through hellfire & brimstone public sermons and through his books.  Dave’s books include such landmarks as The Big Outside (the first roadless areas inventory since Bob Marshall’s a half century earlier), Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Rewilding North America, Man Swarm, and The Great Conservation Divide (all available through rewilding.org).