Photo: SierraClub.org
I never met conservation patriarch Edgar Wayburn, who died last week at age 103. But in another life, I did once help his daughter, Laurie, create an early publication for the Pacific Forest Trust, a worthy organization that she helped to found and that has pioneered forest preservation as a strategy for addressing the climate crisis. In the four or five remembrances of Wayburn that I have read over the last few days, I have not seen it mentioned that this is also part of his legacy: that his DNA continues to power important conservation work.
Wayburn, a physician by trade, was a passionate amateur conservationist who served five terms as the president of the Sierra Club and is in some measure responsible for helping to preserve huge stretches of wild country and important close-to-home recreation lands.
From the New York Times obituary:
When President Bill Clinton awarded Dr. Wayburn the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999, he said Dr. Wayburn had “saved more of our wilderness than any other person alive.”
Dr. Wayburn had central roles in protecting 104 million acres of Alaskan wilderness; establishing and enlarging Redwood National Park and Point Reyes National Seashore in California; and starting the Golden Gate National Recreation Area in and around San Francisco.
His methods were the old-fashioned ones of writing letters, raising money, commenting on environmental studies and attending public hearings. He was widely respected for the authority and persistence he brought to lobbying public officials, always softly, with a courtly Georgia accent. . .
Dr. Wayburn helped transform the Sierra Club from the 3,000-member outing and skiing club he joined in 1939 into a powerful force in environmentalism today with 730,000 members.
Another very interesting post about Wayburn can be found on the blog of the Anchorage Daily News — which includes in its entirety a profile of the conservationist that first appeared in the newspaper in 1988, when he was relatively 82 years old and visiting Alaska to raft a river.
Wayburn’s Sierra Club has been a particular target of animosity in Alaska. From the days of the bumper stickers threatening “Sierra Clubbers Kiss My Ax” to the present, the environmentalists rallying around Wayburn and his cause have been called every conceiveable name, some printable, most of them not.
And the sad thing is that Wayburn never really wanted anything very different from what the average Alaskan probably wants.
This man is no evil ogre. He is no self-serving elitist who wants to turn Alaska into a private playground with no concern as to whether it leaves Alaskans bankrupt or suffering.
What Wayburn wants is to hang onto a little piece of what American once was, to preserve for future generations the wild lands that can challenge the body and the spirit. The 82-year-old physician is himself is a testament to the value of such lands.
Someone once told me that history is made by the people who stay to the end of the meeting. By most accounts, Edgar Wayburn was such a person–not necessarily the loudest voice in the room, but a person whose personality, persistence, and persuasiveness helped to make a better world for us all.
