Dan Dagget

I’m a writer, speaker, and consultant. I have written two books—Gardeners of Eden, Rediscovering Our Importance to Nature and Beyond the Rangeland Conflict, Toward a West That Works, contributed articles and editorials to a variety of magazines and newspapers, and given hundreds of presentations across the West. My first book, Beyond the Rangeland Conflict, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Gardeners of Eden, was described as “the most important environmental manifesto since Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic.” I’m an unlikely candidate to be the originator of a conservative environmentalism. I’ve been an environmental activist since the early 1970s, a fairly radical one, actually. I started out fighting coal surface mines in southeastern Ohio. Then I moved to Arizona where I worked to designate wilderness, fought to increase protection for mountain lions and black bears, and helped initiate a campaign to ban uranium mining in the vicinity of the Grand Canyon. My involvement in that latter campaign included helping to organize some of the first direct actions of Earth First!. In 1992 I was designated one of the 100 top grass roots activists in the United States by the Sierra Club.