Wyoming native Tom Bell founded the group in 1967, along with Carrol R. Noble, Margaret E. “Mardy” Murie, Dr. Harold McCracken, Ann Lindahl and others.
[3] The new plan also focuses on ensuring good stewardship for Wyoming's 30 million acres (120,000 km2) of federal public lands, with a particular emphasis on protecting the state's landscapes, as identified by the council.
[5] Bell is a decorated World War II veteran, who flew with the 15th of the US Army's Air Forces on bombing missions throughout central and southern Europe.
On May 10, 1944, Lieutenant Bell was bombardier of a B-24 on a mission to bomb an enemy aircraft factory in Austria, when he was severely wounded by a burst of flak, causing him to lose his right eye and suffer shock and loss of blood.
[14] The Wyoming Outdoor Council also strenuously opposed and campaigned against the so-called Wagon Wheel project — a federal proposal to explode nuclear bombs underground in the Upper Green River Valley to release natural gas that was trapped in the rocks.
[14] In 1975, the Council joined with the Sierra Club to create a “citizen’s lobby” that would have a presence in the state capital, Cheyenne, during Wyoming's legislative session.
That year the citizen's lobby helped secure the passage of the Industrial Development, Information and Siting Act, which strengthened the state's clean air and water regulations and bolstered its regulatory power.
Wyoming's congressional delegation — Senators Alan Simpson and Malcolm Wallop and then-Representative Dick Cheney — used that overwhelming public support to win approval in Congress.
The Outdoor Council also fought against legislation in the early 1990s that would have created a site in central Wyoming for storing America's radioactive waste, called the Monitored Retrievable Storage project.
The Wyoming Outdoor Council mounted a statewide campaign against the initiative, and in 1992 helped convince Governor Mike Sullivan to veto the bill.
[20][21][22] The group has also worked to raise awareness of the state's Upper Green River Valley, where high levels of air pollution caused by energy development have led Wyoming to recommend the Environmental Protection Agency designate the area “nonattainment” for national ambient air quality standards for ground-level ozone levels.
[23] The Outdoor Council has also worked on issues related to massive water production and documented contamination resulting from coal-bed methane development in northeast Wyoming's Powder River Basin.