5-term Sierra Club chief, Edgar Wayburn, dies

[Kadie]

5-term Sierra Club chief, Edgar Wayburn, dies
Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, March 8, 2010


One day in the late 1940s, a physician named Edgar Wayburn gazed across San Francisco Bay at the Marin Headlands and Mount Tamalpais, two of his favorite hiking areas, and marveled that no cities or suburbs interrupted the greenery.

"I wondered," he told a reporter many years later, "how long that miracle would last."

Dr. Wayburn went on to devote his life to preserving such natural wonders - a pursuit that led him to serve five terms as the president of the Sierra Club. He remained an honorary president when he died Friday night in his San Francisco home at age 103, surrounded by family.

"He has saved more of our wilderness than any other person alive," President Bill Clinton said in 1999 when he awarded Dr. Wayburn the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

It was long before that, in a postwar period of seemingly unstoppable suburban development, that Dr. Wayburn launched the first of his many long-odds preservation projects.


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/08/MN5O1CCB1S.DTL#ixzz0hc7M7mXI


Dr. Edgar Wayburn led decades long campaigns to save millions of acres of wilderness in the United States.

[blm]

1. RIP, dear sir.

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