Nine years ago Kelly Burke, Larry Stevens and I announced in the Boatman’s Quarterly Review a new organization dedicated to protecting and restoring wild nature in the Grand Canyon ecoregion. Since then the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council has steadily worked to do just that.
The Grand Canyon ecoregion is a vast area extending from the pristine, 11,000-foot wilderness headwaters of the Little Colorado in the east to the Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in the west. The ponderosa and mixed conifer forests of the Mogollon Rim dramatically delineate the southern boundary while the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument and the headwaters of Kanab Creek and the Virgin River define the ecoregion’s northern reaches. At its heart lies the Grand Canyon.
“The last word in ignorance,” wrote Aldo Leopold, arguably the father of the progressive science of conservation biology, “is the man who says of animal or plant: ‘What good is it?’”
If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.
Protecting and restoring wild nature requires saving all creation’s natural pieces remaining in the landscape. These “pieces” include designated wilderness and roadless areas, wild and free-flowing springs, steams and rivers, old growth forests and intact grasslands.
Leopold also understood that one of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds… An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who see the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.

Following the lead of the scientists and other conservationists of The Wildlands Project and The Rewilding Institute, our other mission is to heal those wounds we collectively inflicted on the land. Healing the wounds, or “rewilding,” means restoring native vegetation, restoring “natural” fire regimes, restoring natural flows to depleted steams and springs, and restoring effective populations of all native species, especially highly interactive, critical species such as prairie dogs and large carnivores.
One major effort developed by Grand Canyon Wildlands is the conceptual development of a wildland network, a series of protected wildlife habitat linked together by compatible use areas to assure the long-term viability of all native species in natural patterns of abundance and distribution. If you want to learn more about these terms and ideas, please give us a call.
In the same bqr issue announcing the formation of the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council, I presented an account of the Canyon’s “last Timber Wolf.” It was (and is) our hope that together, we will restore natural fire and old growth forests, heal the scared landscape, and provide sanctuary for all wild creatures. And if we will it, if we passionately pursue it, wildness will heal the land. The wolf will return.
In concert with other groups such as the Defenders of Wildlife, the Sierra Club, the Center for Biodiversity and others, the Grand Canyon Wildlands Council embarked on the “Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project”, a bold but practical effort to restore wildlands and provide habitat hospitable to all wildlife, and return the wolf to its rightful place—the plateaus and forests of the Grand Canyon ecoregion.

Kim Crumbo

P.S. If you’re interested in helping out with our volunteer ecological and wilderness inventories and associated projects, check out our website at
grandcanyonwildlands.org or give us a call at 928-
556-9306.