Jean Siri - a leader who worked for healthy cities

Sierra Club Books is scheduled to release in March Legacy: Portraits of 50 Bay Area Environmental Leaders, with photographs by Nancy Kittle and text by John Hart, and is graciously allowing the Yodeler to reprint the portion about the Siris.

You can obtain this book from your local bookseller, or at the Sierra Club store at:

www.sierraclub.org/books
or (415) 977-5600.

When climber, nuclear physicist, and conservationist Will Siri set off for Nepal in 1954 to lead an expedition up the great Himalayan mountain Makalu, he lived with his wife Jean in a hillside home in Richmond. When he returned six months later, it was to an address in El Cerrito. Nothing had moved but a boundary. Dissatisfied with Richmond city services, Jean found a way for their hillside street to change jurisdictions. It was also during that half year that she really got going on her own career as an environmental activist.

Jean Brandenburg came to the Bay Area from North Dakota to study medicine, a pursuit she dropped to free up money for the education of two brothers. She went to work instead running the animal-research section at Donner Laboratory in Berkeley, part of the University of California. There she met Will Siri, who had come to the region to take part in the atomic-bomb project. Both later moved up the hill to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where Will did pioneering work on the medical uses of nuclear radiation, writing the first book on the subject. "That's the book I typed," Jean remembers. "Oh, how boring!"

After their marriage in 1949, the two took up climbing. "He always wanted to, and so he dragged me into it, kicking and screaming," Jean remembers. "Wherever there's a rock outcrop in the Bay Area, I think we've climbed it." They went on to more ambitious trips in the Sierra and elsewhere, and Will to some of the most arduous peaks in the world.

The Siris followed a classic path: from enjoying the outdoors to working for its protection. "I suppose those early trips brought us into contact with Mother Nature and all her good and bad things," says Will, "and it just grew from there." He almost immediately got involved in the Sierra Club at the highest levels. He served on its Board of Directors for many years in the 1950s and 1960s and was its president for eight. He campaigned to keep dams out of the Grand Canyon, chainsaws out of the redwoods, and clear-cuts out of the North Cascades. On the anti-Brower side in the 1960s schism, he counts David Brower's departure as one of his successes.

Jean Siri's activity found a local focus. After learning the ropes in the usual way - by attending meetings and watching the system at work - she took on a series of campaigns involving crucial pieces of the Bay shore. "I was trying to take the kids to the water," she remembers, "and I couldn't get to the Bay. And it made me mad." That Point Isabel and Brooks Island in Richmond are public parks today is largely her doing. But maybe the most satisfying of her successes was the one at Point Pinole.

Point Pinole is a green, triangular peninsula sticking out into San Pablo Bay north of the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge. It was long the site of an explosives factory and so had been left undeveloped. When that use ended in 1960, the land was purchased by Bethlehem Steel, with a major plant in mind. Tipped off by a reporter, Jean Siri says, "I went out to see what we were missing. And I fell in love with the place. And I thought, this is ridiculous, to give this up."

Acting before the steel plant plan made headlines, Siri sought ammunition from the state. "I went to California resources secretary Hugo Fisher, and I told him about this place that would make such a superb state park, and I just went on and on and on. I didn't tell him it belonged to Bethlehem Steel! So he sent one of the guys from State Parks down to survey it. He did a wonderful survey about what a wonderful park it would be."

When the coin dropped about the ownership, the state's interest waned. "But I had this wonderful survey. I just got people organized around it, and we won." Faced with bad public relations and shaky economics, the company sold the land to the East Bay Regional Park District in 1971.

Jean Siri's attention also turned at this time to pollution and toxic waste. Her interest was kindled when her frail father, visiting from out of town, fell ill from inhaling fumes from the Stauffer chemical plant. "I went to the air pollution board and studied them and studied the staff, and studied where all their weaknesses were, and their penchant in favor of industry, every time."

In the 1970s, Jean began working with the African-American community in North Richmond, adjacent to the huge Chevron refinery. "I taught them all I knew about air pollution, and I took them over to meetings. They talked about their children who had asthma, and how much cancer there was, and all that." It was one of the first efforts nationally in the field now known as environmental justice. "So we started the West County Toxics Coalition. Now they travel all over the country, teaching other people from other minority communities how to do it.

"Then I decided to see how it would be to sit on a commission or a board and make decisions instead of standing out in the audience berating them." She ran first for the board of a sanitary district and then for City Council in her town of El Cerrito, serving twice as mayor. Then she was elected to the Board of the East Bay Regional Park District, whose holdings she had done so much to increase. She finds this post a delightful change from years of high pressure debate. "Everything they do is so nice. Everybody loves it."

Despite their accomplishments, the Siris are frankly pessimistic about the problems facing the planet and its people. Will hopes that young scientists will consider the consequences of their research more carefully than his generation did. Back then, he says, the attitude was: "We have this problem in the laboratory, let's see if we can find a solution. If I were growing up now with the interest I had in science, I would definitely [be concerned] by what else is going on in the world."

"Here's the only advice I have for young people," Jean says. "If you see something that should be remedied, that you think something should be done about, do it, for heaven's sakes."