Review Magazine
December 2002

Ever green

Lennie Roberts reflects on the past, present and future of the Coastside environmental movement

By Jim Welte

Committee for Green Foothills legislative advocate Lennie Roberts has been an advocate for environmental protection on the San Francisco Peninsula for nearly 25 years. She sat down with the Review to discuss her first connection to the environment, her greatest concerns for the Bay Area and California, as well as the environmental implications of the results of the November 2002 elections.

Review: Tell me about your first memory of what sparked your interest in and concern for the environment.
Lennie Roberts: My grandparents had bought a ranch up in Mendocino in the 1920s, so my cousins and I had many summers up there running around and riding horses and helping them on the ranch. This is up in the Anderson Valley, where the forests were being logged very extensively when I was growing up. There were 20 lumber mills in a 12-mile-long valley. I was very concerned about this huge grove of old-growth redwood trees called the Hendy Woods, and I wrote to Governor Earl Warren, and asked him to do what he could to save that Hendy Woods, and I got a personal letter back from him a week later, and he said he shared my love of the redwoods and would pass my letter on to the head of State Parks. And I still have that letter. That was probably my first act of real political, environmental activism. And it was rewarded, not because of my letter of course - but the state did buy the Hendy Woods and it is a state park now.

R: So did you go on to major in environmental studies in college?
LR: No, I went to Stanford and majored in art.

R: So what brought you to the Committee for Green Foothills?
LR: My husband was in the Naval Reserves through college, and we were in the Navy for two-and-a-half years after college. He came back to Stanford to get his MBA, and afterward he took a job in the finance department at Stanford, where he stayed for 22 years. During that time, I taught nursery school, and was the manager of a public recreation district and then a board member of a public recreation district. Then I became a board member of the Committee for Green Foothills in 1968. In 1978, I started being a legislative advocate for the committee, and I've been in that position since then, so I know all of the little secrets and I'm familiar with the ongoing issues in almost every area of the county.

R: What's your single greatest accomplishment or achievement?
LR: Getting the first-ever county-wide vote by initiative qualified for the ballot in 1986 and then getting that approved by the voters. It was Measure A, which took the key policies of our Local Coastal Plan for the county, such as protecting resources and providing a permanent boundary around Half Moon Bay and the Midcoast so that this area can't sprawl out over the agricultural lands, and asked the voters to approve them. It also prohibited onshore facilities for offshore oil drilling, which was a big issue at the time. The opponents of the bill spent $400,000 to defeat the measure and the Board of Supervisors was unanimously against it, and they put a competing measure on the ballot, so we had to convince the voters to vote for ours and against theirs and we won. We got 63 percent of the vote, and it changed the political attitudes of some of the elected officials in the county, so I think it had a lasting effect beyond the provisions of the measure itself.

R: There are innumerable issues that you probably consider potential threats to the environment, but can you identify what you consider the greatest threats at this time, both regionally and nationally?
LR: Most of them come down to the population issue, and the pressure of how many people we have and how many more want to come here, both to our country, to the state and to this area. And it's not just the population itself, but also the standard of living that we have in this country in terms of consumption of resources that are not sustainable. We all like to see everyone in the whole world have the same standard of living, but if you think about what that would do to the resources that we all take for granted, it's a very difficult issue. In California, water is one of the biggest limiting factors, both in terms of geography and how we're using it. If we had no agriculture, we could probably support a huge population. But in this state it's very important to keep agriculture viable, so we're going to have a lot of battles over water, which we've had in the past and will continue to have.

R: Describe your feelings as you watched the elections returns come in this year.
LR: To be perfectly honest, I decided very early on that I didn't even want to watch the results come in. It seemed pretty excruciating, and I knew that there were going to be a lot of close calls. Lots of times I will go to an election-night party, but I decided ahead of time that I didn't even want to watch the whole thing this year. I don't feel out of touch to some other parts of the country, so it is hard for me to imagine how these things happen in other parts of the country.

R: Because California elections statewide went Democratic, that flies in the face of what happened nationally. Are Californians out of touch with the rest of the country?
LR: On the one hand, our country has a very strong community interest nationally. On the other hand, we have such regional differences that it's hard to believe that you can elect some of these people, repeatedly in certain parts of the country, that are so different from what I see as the collective point of view of people in this part of California. To have one party in charge of the Senate, the House and the Presidency, we will have a lot more challenges for the environmentally concerned in this country. There are a lot of special interests that have been waiting for this opportunity. It's pretty discouraging. I guess it's one of those, 'Take two aspirin and wake up in two years' things.

R: So should California just go ahead and secede?
LR: To think we brought about Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson. No, I don't think we should secede. We have to work at making the rest of the country understand what Californians already know. My great-great-grandparents came across the plains in a covered wagon to buy land in California and if they saw what happened to California today, they would be horrified. But on the other hand, people that live here have a special appreciation for the qualities of the state that make it so attractive, and people see that as something they don't want to overwhelm or destroy.

R: Talk about the disconnection between many environmental groups and the Green Party. They don't seem to be in unison, and many environmentalists have expressed frustration over the way the Green Party has affected elections.
LR: The best way to achieve environmental goals is to have the major parties, both of them, change their attitudes, to incorporate environmental protection into those two parties. When I first got involved with the Committee for Green Foothills, the Republicans were the ones being conservative about many of these issues, and now the situation has been turned around. The real challenge is for environmentalists to transmit these environmental concerns, which I think are totally at the basis of our survival, to incorporate them into the major parties. I don't think the Green Party will get there, and in the meantime it causes a lot of collateral damage in the outcomes of elections.

R: And strains between a lot of like-minded people.
LR: Absolutely. There are a lot of good people working on behalf of Green Party candidates.

R: So it comes down to two choices. Support people whom you largely agree with idealistically who have virtually no chance of making a difference or try and influence the candidates with whom you don't have total agreement and hope to get their ear on a more regular basis.
LR: Yeah. That's a challenge because of campaign financing and how people get elected through special-interest money. The Democrats are just as much in that boat as the Republicans are. It really becomes very incumbent upon the people who have concerns about the environment to try to counteract that with logical and persuasive arguments. Whether or not that overcomes money is a big question.