(October 18, 1947 – September 19, 2022)

Dave Foreman was one of the most inspiring and visonary conservationists of our time.

As Conrad Reining of The Wildlands Network puts it: “Anyone who met Dave knows he was a force of nature—in more than one sense.”  At the end of his fiery speeches, he would lead everyone listening in a wild wolf howl.  He had a great sense of humor, too. At the 2014 Wilderness Act 50th Anniversary, he had the people substituting the “chickadee -dee -dee” warble, arguing that we needed to protect not only iconic mega-fauna species like wolves, but even the little birds in the forests like Chickadees.

Dave’s passionate, uncompromising advocacy for the natural world in its primeval forms made many  uncomfortable.  But as Reining says, “Yet his vision —  of healing a world of wounds, of valuing wild nature in its own right —  is a lodestar for millions of people across the world.”

Most famous perhaps as a co-founder of the “no compromise for Mother Earth” environmental organization Earth First!, but most important is his vision for continental-scale “rewilding.”  The word was coined by Foreman in 1992. Since then rewilding has gone mainstream; the United Nations recently embraced it as one of several strategies for meeting a 10-year global goal to restore 2.5 billion acres, an area roughly the size of China, in an effort to slow climate change and species extinctions. 

Foreman co-founded the Wildlands Network  in 1991. In 1997, Foreman co-founded the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance. In 2003, Foreman and the board of directors of the Wildlands Project founded a new think tank, the Rewilding Institute, dedicated to “the development and promotion of ideas and strategies to advance continental-scale conservation in North America and to combat the extinction crisis.”

He was the influential author of regular columns titled “Around the Campfire, published for years in both the Earth First! Journal and later in the more intellectual magazine Wild Earth for many years. He continued new columns of “Around the Campfire” on the Wildlands Project website.