Huey Johnson — fought to preserve public landscape
Huey Johnson, an often pugnacious environmentalist who challenged wealthy builders and the government during a grassroots campaign to protect the Marin Headlands from development and who helped create the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, died Sunday at his home in Corte Madera.
The founder of the environmental group Resource Renewal Institute, who for a halfcentury championed sustainability on the local, state and national levels, died of complications from a fall. He was 87.
Johnson, known as much for his bluntness as he was for his ethics, was himself a force of nature, said his friends and colleagues.
“He understood the survival and wellbeing of humanity hinges on the health of the planet,” said Deborah Moskowitz, president of the institute. “Yet in the face of all the challenges, his was a message of optimism and a rallying cry that we must persevere.”
He came of age when he lived in Mill Valley in the 1960s, fending off developers of Marin County open space from Bolinas to Sausalito. He helped found the Trust for Public Land, which established the model for using private resources to purchase land for the public good, and later led state efforts to preserve natural resources during Jerry Brown’s first stint as governor.
Johnson’s most obvious local impact was in the Marin Headlands, where he was one of the key figures who prevented the construction of Marincello — a 2,100acre development proposed in 1964 and envisioned as a selfcontained “new town” for 30,000 residents just north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
While opponents were plentiful, it was Johnson, in his post as the western regional director for the Nature Conservancy, who spent years in discreet negotiations with investors. The effort bore fruit in 1972, when the conservancy purchased the land for $6.5 million and then transferred it to the National Park Service.
These bare hills are now a key part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
A similar effort preserved the Bolinas Lagoon, on the coast north of Stinson Beach. Johnson also helped the San Francisco Zen Center purchase what now is Green Gulch Farm, a widely cherished, 115acre retreat near Muir Beach.
“It has been a wonderful, wonderful adventure all these years,” Johnson commented in an oral history for the Mill Valley Historical Society in 2016. “I’ve been able to use Marin as a kind of a fort from which to struggle with all kinds of environmental issues off in the world, here and in other countries.”
Green Gulch Farm is where, in 1978, thenGov. Brown met Johnson for a private dinner where he offered Johnson the cabinet post of secretary of resources. Johnson had mixed feelings — “You need an outside critic worse than you need an inside sycophant,” he told Brown, according to the oral history — but he accepted the offer and remained until the end of Brown’s second term.
“Protecting the landscape and the environment, and not letting wouldbe exploiters get away with it,” is how Johnson in 2016 described his approach to the one government post he ever held. “I would issue a press release and accuse them of being horse thieves or whatever . ... We had wonderful shootouts.”
In a 1980 profile of Johnson, Chronicle environmental columnist Harold Gilliam described a Sacramento office where Johnson’s desk was a redwoodburl slab, and the wall decorations included a photograph of Aldo Leopold, the famous author, forester and conservationist.
Johnson, in fact, referred to Leopold as his “drum” — the inspiration for his life’s work.
“Huzzah,” he inscribed inside his copy of Leopold’s book “A Sand County Almanac” in 1962. “I may have found my drum.”
Huey Dernier Johnson grew up in rural Michigan, close to a streamlaced park where he recalled his mother taking him on wildflower walks during the Depression. A few years later, his father would take him camping and hunting.
After college, though, Johnson got a job at Union Carbide, where he was paid well and traveled frequently. This included a conference where Johnson, then in his late 20s, stayed on the company expense account at the Fairmont Hotel.
“One day I took the cable car to Fisherman’s Wharf and went salmon fishing the next day,” he told the magazine Bay Nature in 2013. “It wasn’t long before I thought, why would anyone think to live anywhere else?”
After leaving Union Carbide, and working such jobs as a fish and game biologist in Alaska, he earned a master’s degree at Utah State and a Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, both in resource management. He then was offered the job of western director for the Nature Conservancy, and he and his wife, Susan, headed west — camping several nights on Muir Beach. They found a home in Mill Valley and stayed in that house for 50 years.
In 1982, Johnson started the Resource Renewal Institute — an environmental nonprofit based in Mill Valley that focuses on land preservation and sustainable agriculture. He also was a cofounder of the Grand Canyon Trust and author of the book “Green Plans: Blueprint for a Sustainable Earth.”
His many achievements were recognized in 2001, when the United Nations presented him with one of its highest honors, the Sasakawa Environment Prize.
“He has understood that responsibility for conservation and environmental protection lies with every single member of the human community,” Kofi Annan, the U.N.’s secretarygeneral at the time, said in awarding Johnson the $200,000 award.
His longtime friend, Ronaldo Lovitt, a retired trial attorney, said Johnson was an avid hunter and fisherman who ate everything he shot and always had a freezer full of meat. He described Johnson, whose idea of a swear word was “dagnabbit,” as extremely compassionate but impatient with those who did not live up to his ideals.
“He was a very sensitive, loving man and he didn’t make any bones about it, but he showed no quarter to the people who he thought deserved it,” said Lovitt, who cycled with Johnson from Mill Valley to the Sausalito ferry every morning for 10 years in their younger days. “He was very blunt and outspoken. He didn’t mince words about things.”
Johnson was, until the time of his death, fighting plans to thin the tule elk herd at Point Reyes National Seashore to make way for more ranching and farming. He also recently started a pilot project to raise fish in flooded rice fields in the Sacramento Valley during the winter and then use them for food. The feeding fish reduce methane caused by rice cultivation.
Moskowitz said Johnson had completed his memoir of life’s lessons a week before his fall. When she told him on his death bed Sunday that the publisher was excited, he whispered “huzzah.”
Mr. Johnson is survived by his wife of 58 years, Sue Johnson of Corte Madera; daughter Megan Johnson of San Francisco; son Tyler Johnson of Corte Madera; two grandsons and his beloved dog, Django.