The Loma Prietan
March/April 2001
Disasters from Watt to Exxon
Energize ‘80s Environmentalism
by Dale F. Mead
By the 1980s, the environmental movement was firmly entrenched in the political fabric of the nation. At the local level, including the Loma Prieta chapter, participation had been institutionalized by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and ten years of experience with the tools it provided—especially the Environmental Impact Reports required for all development projects.
The chapter’s structure also was fully developed, with 17 activity groups and 17 conservation issue committees. In addition, the chapter had rich connections with environmentally committed legislators at every level—local, state and federal. Chapter activists eagerly assisted their campaigns with endorsements and volunteer work as well as awards and other recognition, and those leaders in turn listened to chapter members’ concerns. State and federal representatives like Byron Sher, Tom Lantos, John Vasconcellos, Zoe Lofgren, Arlen Gregorio, Don Edwards, Norman Mineta, Alan Cranston, Ed Zschau, Dan McCorquodale Delanie Easton, Diane McKenna, Leo McCarthy, Tom Campbell, Anna Eshoo, Ted Lempert, Dominic Cortese and Jackie Speier sported strong environmental credentials that earned them perennial Club endorsements.
But after the immense strides of the 1970’s, the conservation community spent the next ten years hunkered down against a conservative backlash that propelled Ronald Reagan and then George Bush into the White House. The goal was to keep hard-fought protections from being gutted by relentless anti-conservation lobbying.
Reagan led off the decade giving environmentalists a perfect issue to organize and rally around. Soon after his inauguration in January 1981, he appointed as Secretary of the Interior James Watt, a foe of conservation so rabid that he provoked nearly universal terror and contempt within the ranks.
The February 1981 Loma Prietan pointed out that Watt came from the Mountain States Legal Foundation, “a heavily financed and sophisticated front for a pack of private interests exploiting public lands for their private gain,” including the Joseph Coors brewery; Chevron, Exxon and Shell oil companies; paper-maker Boise Cascade; Morrison-Knudsen Construction; and Colorado Iron and Fuel Corp.
The first big bomb he dropped fell within chapter boundaries as he revived an oil lease off the San Mateo County coast. The move cynically reversed the decision of his predecessor, Cecil Andrus, who had declared the area off-limits the year before. With local opposition to off-shore oil drilling here nearly universal among Democrats and Republicans alike, Watts couldn’t have picked a better way to isolate himself politically. The June 1981 LP carried a two-thirds-page petition to oust him.
Nationally, the reaction to the man was the same; the Sierra Club led a “Dump Watt” campaign. Although he appeared to embrace the controversy he ignited, he resigned in November 1983, just ahead of a U.S. Senate resolution to have him dismissed.
In retrospect, he probably did the environment a huge favor by being a blatant stereotype of the black-hatted enemy of conservation. In effect, he and Ann Burford, Reagan’s choice for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, mobilized a conservationist backlash against the conservative backlash that energized environmental activists into the 1990s.
The other defining issue to start the decade was the Peripheral Canal, a plan to move water around the Sacramento/San Juaquin Delta to complete the California Water Project. Approved by the state legislature in 1980, it also promised more dam construction on California’s remaining wild rivers. The proposal sparked a Sierra Club-backed referendum in 1982 that enabled voters to reject it resoundingly. In chapter boundaries the “no” vote was more than 90 percent.
Chapter activists also threw themselves into lobbying efforts for the “Bottle Bill” to support recycling of beverage containers. In the 1970’s, local volunteer organizations had set up recycling centers for beverage containers and other recyclables on college campuses and at other locations. The “Bottle Bill” gave containers a monetary value and their recycling a formal structure.
Locally, a number of battles that began years earlier continued, demonstrating that the pressure for development is relentless in a populous and popular area such as ours. Continuing campaigns focused on
• San Bruno Mountain in San Mateo County;
• Coyote Valley in south San Jose (still being waged by the chapter). In 1983 the San Jose City Council approved a 548-acre industrial park for Tandem Computers, which, the LP reported, “in effect, opens up the entire 5,000-acre Coyote Valley for development.” (The Tandem facility was not built.)
• The Pacific coast in San Mateo County, with the chapter suing the California Coastal Commission over a 4,000-acre residential development near the Ano Nuevo State Reserve. The chapter sued in 1983 to halt construction of 35 luxury homes. In 1989, Cascade Ranch Health and Fitness Lodge and Whitehouse Creek Campground provoked a new lawsuit in August.
• Measure A, a San Mateo County referendum in November 1986 sparked by grassroots skepticism about the commitment of the Board of Supervisors regarding environmental issues. The far-reaching measure required county voter approval for weakening or repealing coastal safeguards, approval of oil drilling, and approval of non-rural use of rural areas and removal of safeguards on environmentally sensitive areas. It won handily.
• Henry Coe State Park in Santa Clara County. County conservationists pushed for its expansion.
• Devil’s Slide on the San Mateo County coast. A bypass proposed by CalTrans starting in the 1960s that would have split McNee Ranch State Park with a freeway was fought for years as unneeded. Three lawsuits—but no resolution—marked the struggle in the 1980s.
• The oil drilling moratorium on the California coast. This was perhaps the most heroic of a number of struggles by chapter members (described below) with a strikingly positive outcome.
• Mountain lion slaughter. Attempts to reinstate 1971-85 moratorium failed, 1989 California Wildlife Protection Initiative launched.
• Superfund sites. After Superfund program was created in 1979, by 1984 studies had put more than 90 sites in Santa Clara Valley on the EPA’s National Priorities List—the biggest concentration in the United States. Sites were contamination threatened underground water aquifers. South Bay Ground Water Contamination Task Force.
• Apanolio Creek landfill in Digges Canyon, SMC. (Brown-Ferris Industries)
• BART extension to SFIA. (Nov. 1987)
• Toxics standards including heavy metal and pollutants for South Bay cities. (Jan. 1989)
San Jose’s decision on Tandem was part of a much bigger debate. San Jose leaders saw the city as a bedroom community for a burgeoning high-tech industry centered in cities up the peninsula, soon to be dubbed Silicon Valley. So the council also forged a General Plan aimed at intensive industrial development in then-agricultural sections to strengthen its tax base, and that plan remains the foundation of current Coyote Valley disputes.
In San Mateo County and coastal points north, oil interests were lobbying intensively to explore and set up oil platforms off the Outer Continental Shelf as had been achieved in Southern California—despite the fact that an oil tanker, the Puerto Rican, exploded on Oct. 31, 1984, and sank partly in the Farallon Islands Marine Sanctuary.
For most of the 1980’s, anti-drilling advocates had an exhausting challenge of protecting the coast one year at a time by lobbying Congress for temporary moratoriums.
During this time Don and Jeanne Morris, chairs of the chapter Off Oil Committee and ExComm members, led the charge with mailing alert after mailing alert to flood Congressional leaders with protests to the proposed drilling. One such alert saw them take 40,000 letters to the post office for delivery.
In 1985, a 15-year deal was negotiated between federal officials and state Congressional representatives promised a more long-term solution than the one-year moratoriums that anually pitted conservationists against the oil companies. Then Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior Donald Hodel reneged, leaving the state without a deal or moratorium in 1986. Activists threw themselves into a new, intensified political battle to get it reinstated in 1987 while President George Bush announced ‘full speed ahead’ on off-shore oil development.
The oil industry itself turned the political tables in March 1989 with the historically disastrous Exxon Valdez disastrous oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska. U.S. Rep. Barbara Boxer responded by introducing the California Ocean Sanctuary and Fisheries Protection Act, and Santa Clara County Rep. Tom Campbell stood out as the first Republican to back it.
The chapter celebrated its 50th anniversary in June 1983 with a day-long set of activities at the founding location, Frank Duveneck’s Hidden Villa Ranch in Los Altos Hills. Planned by Marj Ottenberg, the day featured 250 people participating in hikes, sing-alongs and slide shows, a barbecue and presentation of awards by the late Wallace Stegner, a renowned environmentalist and neighbor of the Duvenecks.
“I started working on it in 1982,” Ottenberg recalls. She arranged to present gold-plated, etched Sierra Club cups for the four remaining founding members attending: Duveneck, Don Woods, Ruth Parrish and Dorothy Kinkade. Their presence was augmented by a number of pre-war chapter leaders.
Entertaining the 250 people proved tricky, Ottenberg remembers, because “Elizabeth Dana, Duveneck’s daughter, said we couldn’t have more than 125 people on the site. While I’m talking to her we sneaked in Ollie Mayer,” recipient of the first Duveneck Award who was due to receive an award from Stegner for her work on trails. (Mayer is still going strong in San Mateo County conservation.)
The event occurred 15 months after the chapter spotlighted its 15,000th member, Michael Bailey, and 27 months before Duveneck died “in his sleep at his Hidden Villa home on Sept. 2, 1985,” according to the Loma Prietan obituary.
Meanwhile, the activities groups stayed busy as always. They included Backpacking, Cycling, Camera, Day Hiking, Inner City Outings, Family Outings, Peak Climbing, Rock Climbing, Sierra Singles, Sierra Singleaires, Ski Touring, Weekend Walkers and White Water.
The activities segment of Sierra Club changed forever, however, in 1987 when Sierra Club insurance rates tripled over the previous year. Faced with crippling premiums payments, the club precluded climbing activities requiring use of hardware, thus putting an end to support of climbs that had earned its members headlines since modern mountain climbing began in the 1920’s. Other activities involving physical risk, such as the White Water section, also lost chapter sanction, although they still received promotional support.
The decade ended with another cycle of environmental regeneration. In 1989, the year Executive Committee member and stalwart San Mateo County activist Wim Dewit received the Conservationist of the Year award from the Peninsula Conservation Center, two other events were in the works.
First, the volunteer recycling centers of the
decade were being replaced by municipal curbside recycling programs to
satisfy state legislation requiring a 50 percent reduction in landfill
waste. Second, Denis Hayes, executive director of the first Earth Day in
1970 and recipient of the Sierra Club’s 1985 John Muir Award, was
ramping up for Earth Day 1990, which would propel environmental concern
back into the media and the popular consciousness.