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AZ: Barnard steps down at Grand Canyon Trust
"A mentor of mine once said that a person needs re-potting every few years, and this is a chance for me to help the community in other ways, while supporting the outstanding work of the Trust," Barnard said in announcing he is stepping down to become a senior adviser with a focus on fund-raising and external relations. Barnard came to the nonprofit conservation organization in 1995 after 23 years with The Nature Conservancy. He has expanded the Trust's field of vision to encompass the entire Colorado Plateau while not neglecting the Trust's Flagstaff home base, playing a major role in the formation of Friends of Flagstaff's Future and Greater Flagstaff Forests Partnership. Under Barnard, the Trust played a major role in the creation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and lobbied forcefully for the Grand Canyon Parashant National Monument in 2000. The Trust helped to raise $3 million from public and private sources that helped protect 247 acres in the Dry Lake volcanic caldera from development. It also retired 800,000 acres of public lands in Utah and Arizona from cattle grazing. At the Canyon itself, the Trust has helped to clean up the air by negotiating a consent decree that will force the installation of pollution controls on the coal-fired Mo-have Generating Station in Laughlin, Nev. Under Barnard, it is litigating to restore the Colorado River within the Grand Canyon and benefit native fish, and it has lobbied Congress and the FAA to reduce air tours over the Canyon. "He is one of the country's leading conservationists, and his leadership, experience and energy will be hard to replace," said Charles Wilkinson, chairman of the board of trustees and himself one of the country's leading experts on water rights. Bill Hedden, the Trust's Utah conservation director, will assume
executive management duties while the board conducts a search for
a new president. |