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Remembering Claire
and Kent Dedrick
by Tom Jordan, CGF Board of Directors

Claire and Kent Dedrick, two of the early environmental leaders on the mid-peninsula in the 1960s and early 1970s, have died within the past year in Sacramento where they had lived since 1975. This is written to remember them fondly as friends and to record their many accomplishments.

I first met them in 1965 when they were both board members of the then young CGF organization, which met monthly in Lois Hogle's living room and sometimes at Gary Gerard's in Palo Alto.

Kent had a PhD in Physics from Stanford and worked at SRI. Claire had a Stanford PhD in Microbiology and worked on immunology research at Stanford. They lived on Alameda de las Pulgas in Menlo Park near the Sand Hill Road intersection and had become active environmentalists while having to deal with the widening of that street into their front yard.

Their scientific training joined other talents on that early board that included a geology professor, a civil engineer, a research chemist, an architect, two landscape architects, a PhD in physics from SLAC and other assorted scientific and academic skills. It was an extraordinary board at the beginning when we were trying to cope with widespread environmental degradation.

The Dedricks were leaders from their first involvement, and Kent was president of CGF from 1972-1973. They both had particular focus on San Francisco Bay. This was before Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and many environmental laws we take for granted today. The filling of San Francisco Bay had been stopped in 1965 by a state moratorium on fill, while a state-appointed commission studied the environmental and economic effects of the filling. In 1969, the study culminated in the passage of the law creating the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. During this time CGF had several board members who served concurrently on the board of Save San Francisco Bay Association and worked closely with them. Particularly important were several law suits brought by Save the Bay against the cities of Alameda, Emeryville and Albany for illegal filling. They also sued the State Lands Commission and the Corps of Engineers to compel them to do their job of protecting the public interest in the tidelands which were being filled.

Kent, a research scientist to the core, laid the factual foundation for key legal rulings in these cases holding that the bay belongs to the public, not to the Leslie Salt or Ideal Cement or others who claimed it was their private property. He took his canoe through the sloughs and established through scientific observation, by studying old maps of the 1800s and hearing the testimony of aging fishermen, where high tide was before the filling and diking. No one knew more about the history of the bay — and particularly where the high tide line was in 1849, when the practice of filling the bay began — than Kent. After several years, about the time of the passage of BCDC in 1969, Save the Bay, aided greatly by Kent's expert testimony, succeeded in getting the State Lands Commission and the Corps of Engineers to start doing their job of protecting the public interest up to the high tide line. It was tough, even heroic, work.

While Kent was out on the bay, Claire was working with Janet Adams and others on the political steps necessary to pass the BCDC law. BCDC seems so obvious now, but in 1969 its passage in Sacramento was a close, hard struggle, which only narrowly succeeded.

Out of the successful fight over the bay, culminating in the 1969 passage of the BCDC law, came the passage of CEQA in 1971, which extended to all state and local government actions the requirement of advanced environmental study and public participation before state and local action could proceed. At a 2003 lunch at the Berkeley Marina honoring the founders of Save the Bay, Harold Gilliam of the San Francisco Chronicle said in concluding his speech to the founders: "You set out to save the bay and in the face of huge organized opposition you really did it — you saved the bay."

In addition to her work on the bay, Claire, in 1970, was a leader in setting up the Peninsula Conservation Center and was its first Executive Director.

She then turned her attention to Proposition 20, the 1972 State Ballot measure that created the California Coastal Commission — which was basically extending the BCDC approach to the 900-mile long California coast.

In the early 1970s Claire was elected Vice President of the National Sierra Club.

In 1975, Governor Jerry Brown appointed Claire to his cabinet as Secretary of the State Resources Agency, where she was responsible for timber, fish and game, parks and recreation, water resources, the Coastal Commission and the State Energy Commission. She was the first woman to hold the post.

Claire's appointment required Claire and Kent to move to Sacramento and took them away from working closely with us here. Kent went to work as a senior researcher for the State Lands Commission, retiring in 1993 at age 69.

The appointments kept coming for Claire:
1977 – named to the five-person State Public Utilities Commission and was the first woman on the PUC
1981 – named to the State Air Resources Board
1982 – named Executive Director of the State Lands Commission

In 1989 Claire became a consultant in Sacramento on environmental and energy matters.

These two good, intelligent, concerned people, who were so focused and effective, had a major impact on our CGF area, the bay, the coast and the entire state. Claire and Kent always worked as trained scientists with diligence and humor. They were good friends to all who worked with them.

I saw Kent in 2003 at the Berkeley luncheon honoring Save the Bay founders. He was still working on his maps and out in the field. He was still playing bass from time to time with small combos and still skewering polluters and land skinners with his cartoons. To the uninformed eye, Claire and Kent appeared to be plain ordinary people, but they were giants.