Mark Pearson is no stranger to challenging corporate and governmental interests to protect public lands.
Over his three decades at the helm of San Juan Citizens Alliance, he led the nonprofit in efforts to protect some of Southwest Colorado’s most striking natural landscapes and push for more environmentally conscious policy at the local, state and federal levels.
Pearson and SJCA’s work has been wide-ranging.
He advocated for the Colorado Outdoor Recreation and Economy Act, opposed construction of a base village at Wolf Creek Ski Area, and lent his voice to citizen advisory boards addressing issues such as Colorado’s wolf reintroduction and designation of the Hermosa Creek watershed as a wilderness area.
Now, Pearson – also a longtime columnist for The Durango Herald – is stepping down as the alliance’s executive director.
Reflecting on his career, he said the love for America’s public lands is as strong as ever. At the same time, he said, increased pressure for resource extraction and rollbacks of environmental protections make the alliance’s work more important than ever.
Pearson first fell in love with Southwest Colorado’s public lands through the University of Colorado’s Wilderness Study Group, which surveyed the area now encompassed by Canyons of the Ancients National Monument, according to his SJCA bio.
After school, he moved to Durango and began volunteering with SJCA in 1993. The nonprofit was founded in 1986 by La Plata County residents seeking to guide policy decisions protecting public lands.
“We had a volunteer public lands task force for San Juan Citizens Alliance, which was half a dozen of us who get together monthly,” Pearson said.
Throughout the 1990s, he worked to grow the organization and acquire grant funding. Toward the end of the decade, SJCA had grown large enough that he was appointed executive director. The organization’s growth enabled it to better continue the work of previous advocates.
“All our wilderness areas in Colorado exist because there were such passionate people in the ’60s and ’70s who were the champions of them,” Pearson said. “There was a volunteer ethic because it wasn’t any paid environmental staff. It was just people who would roll up their sleeves and work for the places they cared about.”
He said the love of America’s public lands is as strong now as it was then – evident in the surge of professional conservation groups like SJCA that employ full-time staff members.
“What’s changed is there’s now such a robust amount of professional conservation staff, particularly in Durango,” Pearson said. “A lot of groups have moved here to start up either regional offices or headquarters. So it’s really changed dramatically in the 30 years when it was just volunteers.”
Another change is how the debate about public land management has become more political, he said. Where environmentalism was once largely nonpartisan – the Environmental Protection Agency was created by Richard Nixon – support for or opposition to environmental protections has become an issue of party politics.
“What’s changed is that our conservation issues have gotten more partisan, unfortunately,” Pearson said.
He pointed to public outrage that followed the Trump administration’s attempt to sell off large swaths of public land for development in 2025. The deep unpopularity of the potential sale showed Pearson that most Americans value public lands.
“What you see with the broad opposition to Sen. (Mike) Lee’s land sales proposal is that it doesn’t matter what your political persuasion is,” he said. “So many people who live in our part of the world enjoy public lands for all the various activities that they pursue.”
The mission of a nonprofit like San Juan Citizens Alliance is to help shape policy decisions at the local, state and federal levels that benefit public lands.
Andrew Gulliford, a professor of history and environmental studies at Fort Lewis College, said Pearson has been a “force for conservation and wilderness for the past 30 years.”
“These are values that we share, and we need to make it clear to politicians who seem to have their ears full of wax that this is deeply meaningful,” he said. “This certainly crosses both Democrat and Republican lines.”
Gulliford said now is a particularly difficult time to be a nonprofit in the United States. But that makes the work Pearson and SJCA do even more important, he said.
A core challenge for a nonprofit like SJCA is taking big, challenging geopolitical issues and addressing them locally.
“We here in Southwest Colorado aren’t going to have any effect on the Paris Climate Accords, right?” Pearson said. “Or even what the Congress does in Washington, D.C., on climate legislation. But we can certainly make an impact on where our local power supply comes from.”
Take climate change. In addition to protecting public lands, he said SJCA has worked with local utility providers such as La Plata Electric Association to encourage transitioning to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels.
Gulliford said this moment in American history is a particularly challenging one for environmental nonprofits like SJCA. That is precisely what makes their work so important, he said.
“It’s a difficult time to be at a nonprofit anywhere in the United States, much less here dealing with environmental issues,” he said. “Mark has done a great job, but we need to keep the pressure on.”
Pearson is confident SJCA will be able to do just that. He said the nonprofit is in a strong financial position to continue advocating for the environment and public lands, and he is confident that his successor, whoever that may be, will carry the mission forward. He said the organization hopes to have someone hired by April or May so he can enjoy the summer outdoors.
“We have really strong staff who were, you know, functioning at a high level, and we have a really good board of directors and really comfortable financial position,” he said. “It’s a great time to look for new blood and hand over the reins to somebody to charge forward.”
The preservation of some of Southwest Colorado’s most beautiful public lands is a legacy Pearson is proud of, he said.
“So many of the places you can go to today that I went to 30 or 40 years ago are still just as undeveloped and wild, and, you know, we’re not the dominant force everywhere,” he said.
sedmondson@durangoherald.com
