George Whitten and Julie Sullivan
Blue Range Ranch, Saguache, Colorado
For George and Julie every day is a chance to bridge the gap between environmentalism and agriculture. Personally and professionally, they work to dissolve the prejudices between ranchers and environmentalists, urban and rural people, and to build bridges between them.
They strive to find real solutions to heal the planet and keep family agriculture alive in the U.S.
In his 27 years as an active member of the ranching community, George has worked towards collaborative forward-thinking management of resources in the San Luis Valley. A practitioner of Holistic Management for over 20 years, George adjusts these practices to fit the land and operation under his management. Julie taught interdisciplinary environmental education at the college level for 15 years, including a decade at Audubon Expedition Institute (AEI) of Lesley University. Julie spent those years challenging students to look beyond surface conflicts between environmentalism and agriculture, and to see the common values and goals shared by both points of view.
George has reduced aquifer depletion while increasing the diversity and vigor of irrigated meadows and uplands. This land held onto its productivity in the worst of the drought, due to decades of attention to soil porosity, plant diversity, and soil cover.
Julie and George also closely monitor their BLM grazing lease lands. They note, and the BLM confirms, an increase in wildlife on these lands.
George and Julie collaborated with Holistic Management International and the New Mexico State Land Office in their work at La Semilla, near Albuquerque. They used cattle to restore a severely degraded piece of land, at a former test site of Kirtland Air Force Base.
They have assisted the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in determining appropriate use of livestock on the new U.S.F.W.S. Baca National Wildlife Refuge near Crestone, Colorado, to improve wildlife habitat, maintain water flows and wetlands, and control invasive species.
They have come to understand profoundly that it is all about relationships -- between husband and wife as partners in their particular adventure, between themselves and the land which sustains them, and between the ecological processes within the soil, on which all the other relationships depend.
Their management illustrates that ranching can restore and increase healthy biological processes while providing a livelihood to a ranching family and contributing to a sound and peaceful rural community.
