Huey Johnson: West Marin Environmental Hero

Huey Johnson, one of Marin County’s most ardent and active environmentalists credited for his role in preserving seashores and natural landscapes from the entire Marin Headlands as well as other significant landscapes all over the world, died Sunday in his home in Corte Madera.

Huey Johnson was very connected to Slide Ranch and all of us mourn his passing, sending much love to Huey's family and friends.

In 1969, through the joint efforts of Marin attorney and conservationist Doug Ferguson and Huey Johnson, then Western Regional Director of the Nature Conservancy, Slide Ranch was purchased and protected the land from commercial development and cocaine cowboys.

Once the deal was done, Susie Washington-Smyth, who was one of Slide Ranch's co-founders with her husband Ed, recalls bounding down the ranch's precarious driveway with Ferguson and Johnson only to be confronted  by shotgun-wielding drug dealers on horseback. "These guys had on cowboy hats and big duster coats and snarled at us, 'What the hell do you want here'" she recalls. "Huey (Johnson) looked at them and yelled, 'I'm your new landlord and you got 30 days to get out of here'. I was convinced they were going to shoot us. When they left, they just trashed the place."

“As a former academic who specialized in the conservation of federal public land I believe Huey protected more land for public use than either John Muir or David Brower,” said Bern Shanks, a 40-year friend and colleague.

Mr. Johnson worked to preserve West Marin open space including the Marin Headlands while serving as the Nature Conservancy’s first western director from 1968 to 1972. Mr. Johnson then went to found one of the nation’s largest environmental organizations, the Trust for Public Land, to expand public lands. And that's not all, he was Secretary of Resources for the State of California and from there he founded the Resource Renewal Institute.

Read the full tribute to Mr. Johnson in the Marin IJ here. 

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