Sally Ranney

Sally is first and foremost a passionate activist for wildlife protection and biodiversity preservation as well as an ardent climate change solutions advocate. She has dedicated her life to these issues since she was 18 years old. Always an outdoors enthusiast, she spent most of her childhood outside when not in school. However, while living on a working cattle ranch owned by her former husband’s family is when she became necessarily intimately connected to the cycles of nature, land stewardship, and the critical needs of many wildlife species. Sustainability was not a theory; it was a necessity of practice if both productivity and livelihoods were to endure, and wildlife species benefit as well.

It was in those years she was catapulted into environmental movement serendipitously. A timber clear cut proposed for the family’s Forest Service grazing permit area and watershed in the Gunnison Valley, caught her eye in the legal notices of local newspaper. She became involved, and ultimately actively opposed the timber sale based upon inadequate to no review of its impacts and the lack of public transparency. She consequently challenged the then Forest Supervisor to a public debate – and won per the local newspaper covering the event. To this day, the area has not been logged.

That experience exposed her to the politics, policies, special interests and legal framework surrounding America’s public land estate. She observed there were many exploitive activities that did not in her estimation serve the public interest as a whole, nor wildlife and water resources in particular. It was at that point, recognizing she was one of the public who paid taxes and who ‘owned’ our public lands, that she because an activist. If she didn’t show up and speak up, get informed and get involved to make things better, she felt couldn’t legitimately berate any action or policy.

Traded Cowboy Boots for High Heels

So she decided to trade in her cowboy boots for high heels. With the training, help and guidance of The Wilderness Society, she learned everything she could about public land history and management, government agencies and departments having jurisdiction, how Congress worked and legislation got proposed and passed, and how to participate effectively as an informed American exercising her citizenship rights.

After a divorce and moving from the high mountain valleys of Colorado to the big city of Denver, she was recruited by The Wilderness Society to become a full time employee. That was heaven to her as it combined her love for the outdoors with her passion for the wild, in the form of a job that she needed as a single mom. As way leads on to way – this opportunity soon led her into a lifetime career.

With an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts (she thought she would be an artist), and a Masters in Education (teaching geology and art for a short period of time in secondary school), she was later selected for a full paid fellowship (the R.K Mellon Fellowship) to study and do doctorial work at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Past Positions and Service

Ranney was a founding Board member of the Grand Canyon Trust, and served for three years as a Patron of Nature for IUCN (International Union of the Conservation of Nature) and on the Board of Directors of the Gallmann Nature Conservancy (Kenya). She was a Resource Policy Analyst for The Wilderness Society, after which she co-founded American Wildlands, serving as its President for twenty years and orchestrating the development of Corridors of Life, the largest GIS mapping and land management project ever undertaken by an NGO at the time. She also was an Advisor to Round Rock Partners, LLC. Sally served on John Denver’s Windstar Board and Board of Advisors for almost two decades, along with chairing the Windstar Award Jury for several years.

Affiliations and Organizations