Send this story Print this story

Adjust text size

Going green: White hunter, green heart
Eco pioneer Huey Johnson still has his guns blazing for the environment

by Carol Inkellis

Long before global warming entered the national lexicon, before the EPA was established and the first Earth Day celebrated, Huey Johnson was working toward making the world—and the county—a greener place.

And he's still at it. Currently, Johnson is president of the Resource Renewal Institute (RRI), which develops comprehensive, long-term environmental strategies. Decades ago, this visionary leader served as the Western regional director and then president of the Nature Conservancy and as the Secretary of Natural Resources for the state of California.

In addition to founding RRI, Johnson was the force behind various organizations and programs, including the Trust for Public Land, the Grand Canyon Trust, the Environmental Liaison Center in Nairobi, the Green Belt Movement and more. He has been recognized nationally, with the President's Award for Sustainable Development in 1996, and the U.N.'s Sasakawa Prize in 2001, in honor of his outstanding contributions to the environment.

In spite of this extraordinary resume, the Mill Valley resident doesn't talk much about his achievements—though he's happy to discuss fishing. We managed to pull him away from his treasured pastime just long enough to find out what he has to say about environmentalism in Marin today.

• • • •

What first brought you to California?

I worked all over the country for corporate America. They made the mistake of sending me to San Francisco for a couple of weeks once, and I went salmon fishing and hiking and I thought—hey this is where an intelligent human being would live.

How did you become a leader in the environmental movement?

Well, I always had an interest in the environment. As post-Depression, poor, small-town, Midwestern children, we assumed we all wanted to be affluent so that's what we should do. But once I was on track to do that I wasn't that happy. I dropped out, bummed around the world alone for a couple of years; came back, went to graduate school, studied environmental policy. And was very fortunate to get a position in San Francisco with the Nature Conservancy, which at the time was small...I was the eighth employee, and the only one west of the Mississippi.

What was your involvement with the ill-fated Marincello development?

Marincello inspired a dream a group of us shared, that of establishing a coastal recreation area—a federal recreation area—during the Nixon administration. And it was critical, because it was right beside the Golden Gate Bridge and [the land] was owned by an oil company and a huge, powerful New York developer [who] proceeded to wheel and deal by frightening people, contributing to politicians or whatever it took to get to his goal of putting 17 high-rises around the hills above the Golden Gate Bridge. He got the supervisors to overturn zoning. We worked hard to get zoning and I was really upset about that, as were some others. And we decided, by golly, we're going to take him on and we did. I went back about eight times to sit down with the oil executives in Pittsburgh to assure them they were never going to be able to develop, and here's why. And they finally agreed with me, and they let me buy it. I had a hundred dollars in the bank and I wrote out a personal check to option a $12 million parcel. And that was it [laughs] And we got Congress to put up the 12 million and the Park Service to acquire the property.

That's an amazing story. I guess that couldn't happen today.

Oh, it probably could. I think that's an interesting point, though, that there are fewer and fewer needs. I think we had a wonderful time in that era—we saved everything whether it needed saving or not. The list of relevance is much shorter now. There are huge, huge numbers—thousands—of land trusts and they're scrambling to find someplace to warrant their energy and money.

What are the most pressing environmental issues today in Marin?

I think Marin has to be seen as a part of the greater whole, the state and the nation. And one of the interesting conditions has been huge changes in the environmental movement since the open space days. I think we've had so much development in information. Back when I was saving land, we didn't ever think of air quality, nor did we think of water quality, nor did we think of problems in the ocean. It was all so narrowly defined. But then, as things started to happen of a different scale, the energy crisis and water crisis, we suddenly started to have to know a lot more. You had to be multifaceted, it wasn't enough to be a specialist in one area. This has become increasingly true.

Name an eco problem that's under the average person's radar?

The tragic collapse of the salmon is affecting Marin as it is the Pacific coast all the way from Washington. And the problems are complex. They're not just that we've got to set shorter seasons. You've got problems of pollution. The biggest problem is water. We've sent too much to Southern California.

How do you rate the current Administration's record on the environment?

Bush [has been] the worst of all. If you look at his budget during the years he's been in office, the Defense [department] grew by 70 percent, EPA shrunk by 10 percent, Department of Interior shrunk by 11 percent and so on. Anything in NASA or the space program and Iraq just grew happily. NASA has grown 18 percent during Bush's time. And in my view, it's not a priority. We should start catching up on problems.

Is there a political solution to reversing the setbacks of the last seven years?

The most important environmental problem is the need for campaign finance reform. That is just dominating politics today. That's why the NASA budget and Iraq budgets are up so high, because they have more lobbyists than anybody. And the environmental side has very few.

Politicians are so vulnerable to special-interest gifts and developers, oil interests and others. It's kind of funny, even the energy spending in Bush's [administration] went way ahead, but it's pretty much research in coal and oil—they don't spend any money on alternative energy.

How can we as individuals hold the administration accountable?

I think we have to accept the fact that we didn't work hard enough in the last election. And we'd better do better this time. I think all three people running for president are intelligent and have an adequate record as environmental voters. One of them is going to be president. It'll be much better than what we've had.

Closer to home, how do we deal with the traffic that disrupts our lives and damages our environment?

Well, traffic is again, part population, [part] water. How much density can we actually handle? What is our current capacity? Nobody ever wants to look at that.

We used to make decisions in isolation and think we were doing wonders, but there's a comprehensive set of relationships that need to be considered: transportation, population, water, a range of other issues—air quality standards, etc.

Europe has moved aggressively in that direction. And they now have major environmental quality programs that manage things comprehensively. In Europe, interestingly, the corporations were the lead. But here, oil has been the symbol. So they [oil interests] have dominated business thinking.

We're going to have a Green Plan conference in October and bring over European and Asian leaders and others. It's going to be part of the Bioneers conference, the day before.

You hunt and fish...

Yes, I hunt in part because I'm a meat-eater and I don't want somebody else killing my meat all the time for me. I feel a moral obligation to go through my own experience. And I think there are no chemicals in venison.

And you refer to urban hunting. What does that mean?

Well, it's kind of in two dimensions. One, I think that any philosophical concept that's going to affect policy today has to have its roots in the cities. Cities have grown so large and that's where the votes are. The hunters tend to be out hunting and the fishermen out fishing and the anti-hunters are in the cities working to "kill" hunting. So things get out of balance. I would like to see hunters and environmentalists working closer together again, which they once were, during Teddy Roosevelt's time...but they've drifted apart.

Another dimension that's kind of fascinating: in, I believe, Princeton, New Jersey, where deer were numerous—as they are all through Marin—they were bothered by traffic accidents with deer as well as by Lyme disease. Deer are a vector for ticks and humans get Lyme disease. So they passed ordinances allowing you to hunt in town. You get a license, and you have to do it with a bow and arrow and the game warden and the police say OK, you can shoot at a deer between this point and this point, but you can't aim over there. So now that's spread around the East in a number of cities. I think we should allow archery hunting in the GGNRA, for instance.

White Buffalo Inc., the group hired to kill nonnative deer in Pt. Reyes National Seashore, shoot the deer, don't they?.

Yes. They're very skilled, very merciful people who are there to kill them. On Angel Island a few years ago, there were too many deer out there. Normally, the rangers were quietly going out there at dawn before any tourists came out and they would decide how many ought to be culled, and they did. The Humane Society said, No, we've got to trap 'em all, neuter them and move them off. So it cost hundreds per deer. And all the deer died [after release]; they released them someplace, but there were already deer there that didn't like the newcomers.

Being a hunter and an environmentalist—is that an oxymoron?

Well, people are often surprised at that because the Humane Society and PETA work hard to be active in the environmental organizations and split off the hunting groups if they can—and they've done that quite effectively. But, one in six Sierra Club members buys a hunting license. And more than that buy fishing licenses.

What is something positive each of us can do for the environment and for ourselves?

Well, I think the most important thing is to learn and to write letters to your politicians. So you can say, not only am I taking the bus this morning, senator or supervisor, but I know that the place is falling apart, the streams are polluted, there's oil leaking in the bay and dammit, it's time we turned things around—we've had enough.

And we're not going to take it anymore!

The complexity and rate of change is so rampant and the popular thing to do is wrap your arms around a redwood tree or small parcel someplace and adopt it and forget the world...Marin conservationists have pretty much ended up doing that.

I remember Harold Gregg, head of the Marin Conservation League long ago; he went and laid down before logging trucks up on the North Ridge. And I was scared to death. It's a wonder he didn't get killed, 'cuz those big trucks don't stop easily going down hill. And by gosh, we established statewide forest policy by his initial act for the Marin Conservation League—getting out front and taking risks. How many years has it been since the League has taken risks?