Activist Ruth Gravanis appointed to Commission on Environment

Cozy at her desk, surrounded by vast dunes of documents related to Treasure Island and other San Francisco environmental concerns, Ruth Gravanis one morning in July took a phone call.

Can you be at City Hall at 2:30 today to be sworn in to the city's Commission on the Environment?

The call wasn't a total surprise. Ruth had applied for the position, and the mayor had called her a week earlier about it. She said: yes, I'll be there, knowing that on the short notice neither her husband Jim nor many of her many close friends and co-workers would be able to join her. (There was a good reason for the short notice: the appointment had to be completed soon so that she could attend the next commission meeting.)

Soon Ruth stood in the paneled inner sanctum of Mayor Newsom's office. Following the protocol, she promised to uphold the laws of the city, state, and federal governments. We could hardly wait to depart and cheer.

Ruth is no novice. Her environmental activism includes working with the Alliance for a Clean Waterfront, the Treasure Island Wetlands Project, the Public Trust Group, the California Native Plant Society and the Audubon Society. She has served as the director of the Restoring the Bay Campaign of the Save San Francisco Bay Association and as executive director of the San Francisco Friends of the Urban Forest. Her countless volunteer hours include a year as chair of the Sierra Club Bay Chapter and many years on the San Francisco Group's Conservation Committee.

She's been honored with the Sierra Club's national Special Service Award (see September-October 2005 Yodeler, page 19) and the Jack Morrison Lifetime Achievement Award from San Francisco Tomorrow. Now she has a prestigious and hopefully influential position in our city government.

There are two lessons here. The first lesson is one of volunteering. As Sierra Club members, we all do our share. When prompted we call or write to the authorities and tell them to save this or that forest, pass this or that bill. We progress into helping staff offices or stuffing envelopes or phone-banking. A next obvious step in our personal activism is to volunteer for a committee, to organize campaigns, to speak out in public. And we should learn from Ruth an important next step - to look to bigger challenges and step into public service. Who will better represent us than we ourselves? It's scary and a big time commitment, but we all should think about it - either running ourselves or supporting a fellow environmentalist.

The second lesson is that San Francisco did a great thing a decade ago in creating the Department of the Environment. It has made major contributions to solid-waste disposal, green building, reducing air pollution, and many other areas. For an introduction to the department, check out its web site www.sfenvironment.com and in particular the Sustainability Plan it organized for San Francisco (www.sfenvironment.com/aboutus/policy/sustain).

The department has the potential to do so much more, and that's why it's important to have Ruth Gravanis on the Commission helping to guide it and urging it on.

Pinky Kushner