Stegner Giving Circle

The Stegner Giving Circle celebrates our most dedicated Green Foothills members, those who give $500 or more annually. While all of our members play an important role in protecting local open space, the Stegner Giving Circle is our way of recognizing those who make extraordinary contributions to our work.

About Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner, Green Foothills’ founder and first board president, was a staunch advocate for protecting our wild lands. As an acclaimed author, professor, environmentalist, and Board President, Stegner spent his life speaking up for the protection of open space both near and far.

One of his most notable impacts on the conservation movement was his famous Wilderness Letter on the importance of federal protection of wild places. This letter was used to introduce the bill that established the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1964. In the letter he wrote:

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste . . . ”