News Subscribe to Our Newsletter Sign up for Email Updates CGF In the News Press Inquiries Past Articles Calendar			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. Page last updated December 11, 2002 .