Marin County’s Green Pioneers
In the mid 1930s four Marin women in lives of comfortable circumstance,
who did not have to take on the task of saving Marin’s natural
resources, did so. Sepha Evers, Caroline Livermore, Portia Forbes
and Helen Van Pelt, environmentalists before the term was coined,
shook the powers that be to start a movement that eventually saved
many of Marin’s open space treasures – and founded
an organization that still carries on their activist tradition.
The four feisty ladies, members of the Marin Garden Club, became
alarmed that completion of the Golden Gate Bridge would make Marin
an easy car commute from San Francisco and bring an influx that
would jeopardize the county’s open hills and valleys.
Calling themselves The Citizens Survey Committee, they raised
$2,500 to pay for a planning study that produced Marin County’s
first set of planning maps and a report to guide the county’s
future growth. Many of the report’s recommendations had
to do with the preservation of open space “before it was
too late.”
The Marin Independent Journal
wrote in editorial alarm in January 1934: “Our picnic
spots are nearly gone. ‘No Trespassing’ signs are
posted all over. We must act if we believe in building for the
future. Papermill Creek, inviting bay beaches, from Tiburon
to Santa Venetia, must be saved. No community on earth is more
favored than Marin with the wealth and beauty of potential playgrounds.
If we don’t acquire some of these lands, the opportunity
will surely slip away from us.”
MCL’s first conservation battle was Mount Tamalpais State
Park. Together with groups such as the Tamalpais Conservation
Club, MCL worked to expand the park from its beginning nucleus
of 200 acres in Steep Ravine. From Mount Tam MCL turned westward,
envisioning a major park effort that would preserve the County’s
western shore. MCL efforts created Tomales Bay State Park and
assisted in the creation of the Golden Gate National Recreation
Area and Point Reyes National Seashore. MCL also fought to save
the Marin headlands and Richardson Bay and helped to purchase
a number of other park and natural resource areas in both east
and west Marin.
One of the most dramatic chapters in MCL history was the battle
to stop 879 acres of Richardson Bay from being filled - by bulldozing
the Tiburon hills into the bay - and turned into a town for 10,000
people. The regulatory agencies that would have halted such a
tideland development did not exist in 1949 when this proposal
came forth. MCL leaders worked their political and fundraising
magic to bring together a coalition of local forces to defeat
the development and effect purchase of the property. It took a
decade but in 1958 clear title on lands from Belvedere to Strawberry
Point established the sanctuary that is now known as Tiburon Audubon
Center.
Another of MCL’s most publicized achievements was thwarting
plans for commercialization of Angel Island when it was declared
surplus by the federal government and negotiating to have it added
to the state park system instead. The island is the site of military
installations and immigration encampments dating back to 1775
and home to abundant and diverse animal and bird life. When the
government decided to abandon it after World War 2, MCL jumped
in to underwrite interim fire and police services rather than
let it go on the auction block for private development, and then
led the charge to fold it into the state park system. When Angel
Island became a park in 1954 MCL worked for another 14 years to
ensure that its master plan precluded commercial enterprises and
protected its wildlife and habitat areas.
“We really saved that
from becoming a cheap Coney Island, which a Nevada firm hoped
to develop,” MCL leader Caroline Livermore said later
about the campaign to preserve Angel Island.
In the early 1960s MCL worked with the Nature Conservancy to
defeat plans the Bolinas Harbor District had to build a resort
hotel and yacht harbor complex in Bolinas Lagoon. It was a scheme
that seems bizarre today: dredging mud from the upper section
of the lagoon and placing it on Kent Island to increase the size
and height of the island to make it possible to build a hotel,
parking lots, an office, a helicopter pad, docks and other facilities.
MCL worked for a year and a half to assemble funds to buy the
island and arrange to have it given to the County. The island
passed into the public domain by a vote of the Board of Supervisors
which took place only hours before the Harbor District was going
to file a condemnation suit to block the County’s action.
MCL worked in 1972 for the passage
of a measure to create the Marin County Regional Open Space
District. In the late 1970s MCL campaigned vigorously to protect
sensitive areas of California’s coast from offshore oil
drilling.
The early 1970s were also the time of Marin’s battles with
logging. Events leading to Marin’s ordinance regulating
logging began in November 1968 when MCL learned that an Oregon
logging firm had purchased timber rights to a ranch on Bolinas
Ridge. MCL leaders went to battle, the logging firm wound up in
court and eventually was restrained from lumbering due to environmental
and public health issues. In 1971 Marin enacted a ordinance regulating
logging, which, however, became moot in 1982 when regulation of
timber harvesting was turned over to the California Department
of Forestry.
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Samuel P. Taylor State Park |
The League’s Water Committee’s efforts contributed
directly to defeat of a peripheral canal in 1982 – a massive
political effort to divert Northern California water to the Southland
and a threat that continues to periodically raise its head. MCL
President Ted Wellman served as Chair of the Marin County Unit
of the California Coalition against the Peripheral Canal and was
a major force in halting the water diversion plan at the ballot
box.
Increasingly, MCL found that it was important to help develop
public policy relative to environmental issues and work toward
implementing that policy. This involves constant research, careful
evaluation and preparation of position statements.
Today MCL takes stands on government proposals, development
projects and ballot propositions. Its citizen watchdog committees
are monitoring dozens of projects at any one time and their members
constantly appear before governmental bodies to encourage decisions
that protected the environment. |
