Conservation Partners

Wildlands Network and The High Lonesome Ranch

Wildlands Network is a conservation organization that creates networks of people protecting networks of land. For the past fourteen years Wildlands Network has been fostering a new kind of conservation movement that fills people with hope. This begins with a positive, science-based vision for wildlife, people, and nature in the twenty-first century.

Working on continental, regional and local scales, as exemplified by some of the conservation efforts at The High Lonesome Ranch, Wildlands Network focuses on restoring, protecting, and connecting North America's best wild places and on working with private landowners and public lands to make sure nature has enough "room to roam," to survive for the long-term. Americas public lands system has been unable to provide security for some key native species, due to outdated policies that do not account for the interrelation of all species and their habitat needs. Because protected lands such as national parks and reserves are in short supply, working landscapes such as The High Lonesome Ranch are critical to creating habitat connectivity for wildlife and for sustaining fauna and flora, especially in this time of rapid global climate change.

Wildlands Network honors the openheartedness and true conservation ethic (compassion for nature) of many ranching families in the Westan ethic embodied by The High Lonesome Ranch and its staff, which includes many people who have ranched on this landscape for multiple generations. Working ranches managed for sustainable uses of resources can play a key role in saving nature in the West. These lands provide winter range for ungulates, places where we can restore native species such as bison, pronghorn Antelope, condors, and native predators such as the wolf, grizzly, and jaguar, which now occupy only 1 percent of the their previous geographic distributions in the US. Ranchlands also provide refuges from poaching and other unfortunate practices that have led to the decline of many wildlife species.

Accordingly, Wildlands Network has formed a conservation partnership with The High Lonesome Ranch, working closely with ranch managers and scientists in an advisory capacity on the vital science, ecotourism, and environmental educational programs at the ranch. A key aspect of their partnership involves Wildlands Spine of the Continent initiative, a 5,000-mile-long wildlife project extending from Alaska to Mexico along the Rocky Mountains and other uplands. This cordillera spans the Arctic to the sub-tropics, what most people think of as the Wild West, and contains everything from polar bears to Mexican wolves to Jaguars. Along this pathway Wildlands Network president and co-founder Michael Soul and his colleagues are building capacity for conservation and collaborating to connect areas within a compatible use matrix that includes public and private lands.

The High Lonesome Ranch represents an important part of this cordillera, situated in NW Colorado, in an area that provides one of the missing links in the connectivity Wildlands Network has been fostering. Wildlands Network helps ensure that ecological restoration efforts on the ranch are relevant on local, regional, and continental scales. By using the best available science, and with advice from conservation partners such as Wildlands Network, The High Lonesome Ranch is making a real and lasting contribution to conserving the Wild West in the fullest sense of this term.