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September 2006
It is easy, for both visitors and residents alike, to take that open space for granted, but it could so easily have been otherwise. No land is preserved by accident, and San Francisco's backyard wilderness was no exception.
For all his accomplishments, Ed Wayburn was never a full-time conservationist. A practicing physician and a family man, he dedicated his spare hours and weekends to the health of the planet. Neither is he well-known, even within the environmental movement, having never gained the wide recognition of such contemporaries as David Brower and Ansel Adams. The low profile has suited him fine. Dr. Wayburn prefers to do his work quietly, behind the scenes. He is a born facilitator and diplomat, someone who exudes the kind of authority and integrity that gets people -- even powerful people -- to listen. When the National Park Service opposed Dr. Wayburn's plan for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, favoring the establishment of a much smaller park instead, Nixon's Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton was called upon to testify before the Senate Interior Committee. No great fan of environmentalists, Morton surprised everyone by supporting the Sierra Club's proposal in full. Morton told the shocked hearing: "The Park Service wants me to support their plan, but I went out there to the site with my friend Dr. Wayburn, and he convinced me otherwise."
That devotion to ecological principles guided him through many subsequent wilderness campaigns, including the decades-long struggle to found, and later expand, Redwood National Park. Years of travel in the Alaskan backcountry with his late wife Peggy -- herself a prominent wilderness advocate -- led eventually to his crowning achievement: Passage of the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, which created ten new national park units and effectively doubled the size of America's National Park system.
By his own account, Dr. Wayburn was neither a "joiner" nor an "organization man," but he saw the Sierra Club as both a way to explore his beloved Sierra Nevada and as the most effective way to salvage the wild character of an America he saw vanishing before his eyes. In 1939, when he paid his first dues, the Sierra Club numbered only 3,000 members. Today it has more than 750,000, and Ed Wayburn carries the title of Honorary President. Looking back, Dr. Wayburn recalled for his friend Harold Gilliam how it all began one day in the 1940s in San Francisco, as he gazed across the Golden Gate to the Headlands and Mt. Tam. "It seemed incredible to me that there were no cities or suburbs built on those Marin hills so close to San Francisco. I wondered how long that miracle would last." Thankfully, he did more than wonder. He did something about it, and the miracle lasts to this day. Read more from Pat Joseph, Sierra Club writer/editor, in The Compass, our blog.
Photos: Of Dr. Wayburn (top) courtesy John Calaway/Sierra Club Collection; book jacket, Your Land and Mine, Sierra Club Books; Ed and Peggy Wayburn courtesy Sierra Club Collection. All rights reserved. Photo of Redwood National Park courtesy NPS. Up to TopHOME | Email Signup | About Us | Contact Us | Terms of Use | © 2008 Sierra Club |
Just north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate, the rugged Marin Headlands marks the edge of an unlikely wilderness -- a hodgepodge
of discrete but nearly contiguous parks covering an area many times larger than the city itself. For the more than
six million inhabitants of the San Francisco Bay Area, that blessedly undeveloped landscape -- comprising among
other public lands the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, Mount Tamalpais State Park, and Point Reyes National Seashore --
is a near-at-hand escape to a place where urban man exists in startling proximity to elk, coyote, and ancient redwood.
The man who, more than any other, deserves credit for keeping this much
of the Bay Area wild is Dr. Edgar Wayburn, a five-term president of the Sierra Club and America's most effective
(and least known) wilderness advocate. Dr. Wayburn, who celebrates his 100th birthday on September 17, 2006,
was the leading force in the expansion, first, of Mt. Tamalpais State Park, from a mere 870 acres to more than 6,000 acres.
He also spearheaded the establishment of Point Reyes National Seashore, the first national park unit of any size near a major
metropolitan area. That would be followed by the formation of Golden Gate National Recreation Area, which would tie
together nearly all the open space in south and west Marin, and even some lands in San Francisco and beyond,
including the city's beaches, Alcatraz and the Presidio. All told, it amounts to some 200,000 acres. No other city in America --
perhaps the world -- has anything that can compare with it.
Dr. Wayburn may be a diplomat, but he has never been keen on compromise. Where others might have been content to save random parcels of land
-- whatever scraps could be spared by the agents of so-called progress -- he has wanted nothing less than the protection of whole watersheds.
As he explains in his memoir, 
When Dr. Wayburn was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999, President Clinton said of him,
"He has saved more of our wilderness than any person alive."
