Bill Hedden

Bill Hedden lived for nearly 50 years in the redrock country outside Moab, Utah with his wife Eleanor and two daughters. For half of that time he supported his family by building museum quality furniture while engaging deeply as a citizen in the public lands issues facing the region, such as the US DOE proposal to locate the nation’s high level nuclear waste repository adjacent to Canyonlands. This work led to Hedden being elected in 1992 as a County Councilmember in Grand County, home of Arches and parts of Canyonlands national parks and the intensively visited Moab District of the BLM, as well as the remote BookCliffs, and the Manti LaSal National Forest. In that elected role, he became the founding chairman of the Canyon Country Partnership, which brought together local, state and federal resource managers to improve management of all those public land treasures.

While still serving as Councilmember, Hedden became the Executive Director of the Grand Canyon Trust, a regional conservation group working to protect and restore lands in southern Utah and northern Arizona. Under Hedden’s leadership, the Trust helped clean up emissions from the region’s coal fired power plants and remove radioactive wastes from the bank of the Colorado River.  Hedden developed a leading program for reducing grazing damage on public lands, including purchasing two ranches covering 850,000 acres on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim. The Trust worked to reform the management of millions of acres of state lands in Utah and Arizona and purchased key open space in national forests and monuments. The organization led in developing the largest forest restoration program in US history in northern Arizona. The Trust partnered with Native American tribes on sustainable economic development and ultimately helped win designation of the Bears Ears National Monument.

Hedden has a B.A. and Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University.  He served on the Board of Directors of High Country News, the Utah State Board of Parks and Recreation, the Board of Trustees for The Nature Conservancy in Utah, and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and the Board of EcoFlight. He was Ditchmaster of the local irrigation company for 46 years.