Three Chapter members receive national Club awards

Michele Perrault, Patrick Colgan, and Ruth Gravanis to be honored

Three Bay Chapter leaders are being honored with Sierra Club national awards this year.

Michele Perrault

Lafayette resident Michele Perrault will receive the William Colby Award, honoring outstanding leadership, dedication, and service to the Sierra Club.

Michele has served at all levels of the Club, including three years as Club president and many years as Club international vice president. She has been instrumental in stopping offshore-oil-drilling proposals off of both Massachusetts and California. At the same time she has served on the Bay Chapter Executive Committee (in 1981) and remained a leader in local projects such as creating the Round Valley Regional Preserve, improving the Contra Costa County General Plan, and making sure that the proposed Palos Colorados development does not disrupt a wildlife corridor.

Michele excels in organization, strategic planning, dedication, and the ability to work in coalition with equity and economic groups, including her activity on the President's Council on Sustainable Development, and co-organizing the Bay Area Alliance for Sustainable Communities. She also excels at drawing in environmental and economic experts as senior Club volunteers.

She keeps her eye on the ball and is hard to sidetrack. She has the ability to operate effectively in the halls of power.

Patrick Colgan

The 2005 Oliver Kehrlein Award is going to Patrick Colgan. The Kehrlein Award honors outstanding service to the chapter or national outings program. And Patrick has been outstanding at both levels.

He helped found Inner City Outings (ICO) in 1971 and has been active in it ever since. If you were to ask Pat about it, he'd most likely say something like "Aw shucks." He saw the need for bringing urban kids into the out-of-doors, and he led them into the woods on hikes and on overnight backpacking. He's been there for countless kids who otherwise wouldn't have had the opportunity. Up to last year, he was still leading five to 10 ICO trips a year.

Patrick has 38 years of leadership, not only for the Bay Chapter's ICO but also for the Club's national Outings Program. Since 1980 he has been very active in leading international outings, including the Club's first hike-and-bike trip to Ireland, its first bike trips to China and to Yugoslavia's Dalmatian Coast, and trips to Madagascar, all the Himalayan countries, Burkina Faso, Mali, Greenland, and Svarlsbad (Spitsbergen).

That's 38 years of service to the Club! In those years he has inspired numerous trip members (on ICO, national, and Chapter outings) to become trip leaders.

What sets Patrick apart from other leaders is his sense of humor. He is a man who has the ability to just be himself when interacting with other people. He is a gruff teddy bear of a man. His humor and ease with himself have helped him out (and everyone else around him) when things were getting (in his words) "a little out of hand".

Ruth Gravanis

In recognition of her long-term and unselfish dedication to improving San Francisco's environment, Ruth Gravanis has won the Sierra Club's Special Service Award.

A long-time champion of San Francisco's natural environment, Ruth received San Francisco Tomorrow's Jack Morrison Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002 and its Unsung Hero award several times before that. She has served on the Bay Chapter Executive Committee, and was Chapter chair in 1992. In the 1990s, she served as unpaid coordinator for the San Francisco Natural History Series at the city's Randall Museum.

Her particular environmental focus has been on San Francisco Bay's wetlands, along the city shoreline and on Treasure Island. She has worked for small-scale sewage treatment facilities in San Francisco and restoration of the California quail population in our parks. On a regular basis, she generates articles for the Yodeler and drafts comments for the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations on wetlands issues.

In the mid-1990s Ruth noticed a huge void of community involvement in the redevelopment planning for the closing military bases on Treasure and Yerba Buena Islands. She became the unofficial environmental watchdog for the islands. Since June of 1996, when the Draft Base Reuse Plan said that it would be impossible to create wetlands on Treasure Island, she has continued to research wetlands-construction technology, attend workshops, obtain funding for studies, talk to community groups, and pester the decision-makers until the creation of wetlands for pollution prevention, wildlife habitat, recreation, and education became an accepted idea. In addition, Ruth has drawn on her past advocacy work on natural-areas protection and restoration, smart (and enjoyable) transportation, energy and resource conservation, Public Trust compliance, open-space preservation, and respect for San Francisco Bay to promote environmental sensitivity in the redevelopment of Treasure and Yerba Buena Islands. All environmentally sane aspects of the conversion of the islands will in large part be due to Ruth's efforts.