Farewell to Chip Rawlins & Darrel Short

by Nancy Debevoise

Two of our favorite volunteers have left the WOC board to pursue adventures overseas.

Three-term board member Chip Rawlins and his wife, University of Wyoming College of Law professor Deb Donahue, will take a freighter to New Zealand in January. During their year abroad, Chip will finish a book on mountain streams and start another on his summer as a field research assistant in the Wind River Range. Deb's sabbatical will be spent studying New Zealand conservation law and policy and teaching part-time at the University of Auckland.

"I'll miss Wyoming and WOC," Chip says. "The most important lesson I've learned from my WOC board service is that by coming together in an organized way, ordinary citizens can gain extraordinary power to do good."

Darrel Short joined the board in 1999, a year after he retired from a 35-year career as a range conservationist and area manager for the BLM in Nevada, Idaho and Wyoming. Darrel played a key role in launching WOC's grazing reform campaign in 2000, and spent much of his time documenting overgrazing on the Smiths Fork and Cumberland/Uinta allotments.

While Darrel will continue to investigate land-management abuses by the BLM and grazing permittees on these and other allotments in the coming months, he and his wife Marcia are preparing for an overseas mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

"It's been a pleasure and a privilege to serve on WOC's board," says Darrel. "After decades of political interference in my work for the BLM, it has been truly gratifying to work with an organization that shares my commitment to the proper management and protection of our public lands."