FoundSF

Historical Essay

by David D. Schmidt, 2026

An excerpt from the book, San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History, by David D. Schmidt (Backcountry Press, 2025).

Edgar and Peggy Wayburn.

Photo: courtesy Sierra Club

Edgar Wayburn first came to the Bay Area in 1927, when he visited his aunt and uncle in San Francisco, after a year at Harvard Medical School. They took him to Yosemite, and having grown up in Georgia, he was astounded. “It was so unlike anything I had seen before, it brought tears to my eyes,” he recalled, more than 70 years later. He climbed Mount Tamalpais, and toured the Santa Clara Valley by car, at a time when fruit orchards covered the valley. In 1933, he moved to San Francisco.

Dr. Wayburn joined the Sierra Club in 1939 so he could go on one of their annual High Trips to the Sierra. During World War II, he was away in England with the Air Force. When he got back, the Bay Area had changed dramatically, with growing cities expanding across farms and hillsides in every direction. He recognized the threat to the Bay Area’s natural landscapes, and by 1948 was leading an effort by the Sierra Club and Tamalpais Conservation Club to add the southern slopes of Mount Tamalpais, above Muir Woods, to Mt. Tamalpais State Park. The park was then only about 1.4 square miles. By the 1980s, they had increased it to nearly 10.

Also in 1948, Dr. Wayburn married Peggy Elliot, a chain-smoking ad writer. She gave up smoking; he gained a partner in exploring wildlands and working to save them. She co-authored The Last Redwoods (1967), a Sierra Club book that helped build support to pass the bill in Congress to create Redwood National Park on California’s North Coast. The Wayburns also made their first trip to Alaska in 1967 and loved its vast wild areas so much that they returned year after year, as Peggy gathered material for her book Alaska: The Great Land (1974). The book publicized the club’s campaign to pass the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, an audacious bid to protect over 162,000 square miles of Alaska wilderness.

The tireless Dr. Wayburn served as president of the club in 1961-64 and 1967–69, while teaching at the Stanford and UC San Francisco medical schools. Meanwhile, Peggy helped found People for Open Space (see Dorothy Erskine, this chapter). She was also a key player in the decade-long effort to pass the Alaska bill.

In 1964, during his first term in the U. S. House of Representatives, San Francisco Congressman Phillip Burton spotted Wayburn in a restaurant having dinner with the Sierra Club’s lobbyist. Burton joined them and listened while they bemoaned the difficulty of getting any environmental bills past the powerful chairman of the House Interior Committee, Wayne Aspinall of Colorado. Impatiently, Burton cut in: “We’ll get rid of him.”

Wayburn discounted the prideful boast, but nevertheless found his most powerful ally in Burton. In the late 1960s, the club’s top priority was the bill to create Redwood National Park, introduced by Berkeley Representative Jeffrey Cohelan. Burton rounded up the votes to pass it in 1968, but not before Aspinall had slashed the park’s extent from 141 square miles to 78, more than half of which were already protected in state parks.

By 1970, the Nixon Administration was considering making Alcatraz Island a national park, to end the abandoned federal prison’s occupation by Native Americans, which had started in 1969. The federal government was also planning to construct a new archives building in the scenic Land’s End area of northwest San Francisco, and a new prison at Fort Mason, near Fisherman’s Wharf, where San Francisco’s Mayor Joe Alioto wanted to build high-rise condominiums.

In 1971 Dr. Wayburn joined with Amy Meyer, a leader of San Francisco residents fighting these development proposals, to form People for a Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA)—an urban park that would include undeveloped military lands on both sides of the Golden Gate Bridge. Photographer Ansel Adams had come up with the idea in the 1950s while living in his old childhood home on the edge of San Francisco’s Presidio, where he enjoyed a panoramic view of the Marin Headlands. But Amy Meyer organized the citizen lobbying campaign that passed the GGNRA bill, working long hours with volunteers in her living room, sending out mass mailings and phoning environmentalists to ask them to call their Congressional representatives.

Edgar Wayburn and Amy Meyer.

Photo: Eric Luse, courtesy San Francisco Chronicle

The National Park Service endorsed a minimalist five-square-mile version of the GGNRA, but Meyer and Dr. Wayburn wanted more. They mapped out larger alternatives. Meeting with Burton, Wayburn presented one of the maps. Burton asked pointedly, “Is this what you want?” Wayburn admitted that he preferred the most expansive plan, with 40 square miles, but didn’t think it was “politically feasible.” The famously short-tempered Burton reportedly shouted, “Get out of here! You tell me what you want, not what’s politically feasible. I’ll get it through Congress.”

Burton was a master of legislation: he cleverly crafted the GGNRA bill to prevent development within the future park’s boundaries before it even got a Congressional hearing. It banned the occupancy of homes built there after July 1, 1971 -- two days after he introduced the bill. That put landowners on notice that if they built anything, they would be unable to use it. Burton also included a provision making the Presidio part of the new park, if the Army ever closed it as a military base (which happened 23 years later, in 1994).

President Nixon signed the GGNRA bill just before the November 1972 election. Aspinall lost his bid for re-election that year, and left Congress for good. Throughout the 1970s, as the Sierra Club’s membership expanded five-fold, Dr. Wayburn provided Burton many more maps of land that the club wanted to protect. Expansion of Redwood National Park was at the top of the list.

In 1977, when Burton became chairman of a House subcommittee on parks, he seized the opportunity. “We’ll do things no one has ever thought possible,” he told subcommittee staffer Cleve Pinnix. His first goal was to double the size of Redwood National Park, where many of the gigantic trees were being undercut by erosion from logging outside the park’s boundaries. But the timber industry, local businesses, labor unions, and North Coast Congressman Don Clausen were dead set against the park expansion.

Burton flew to Eureka, in the heart of logging country, for a public hearing. Lumber company managers gave workers the day off and urged them to give Burton hell if they wanted to save their jobs. Just before the hearing, they held a noisy rally where speakers exhorted the angry crowd of more than 5,000 to “let the SOBs know” how they felt.

The crowd filled the hearing venue, an old movie theater, to double its capacity. When Burton walked onto the stage, they booed him continuously for several minutes. Yet he was fearless, even defiant, telling the nearest loggers, “You’re not so tough. I’ve got longshoremen in my district who are much tougher than you are.” Speaking to the crowd, Burton pledged three times that he would “take care of the workers.” But he and Pinnix needed a police escort to help them leave the building when it was over.

Burton amended the bill to include $40 million to assist workers displaced by park expansion.(1) That won the support of the national Carpenters Union and the nation’s most powerful labor alliance, the AFL-CIO. The bill passed, and President Jimmy Carter signed it in March 1978.

The Sierra Club’s wish list was long, but Burtons’ strategy got nearly all of it done at once: He combined all the proposed national parks, monuments, park expansions and historic sites that had been languishing for decades as separate bills sponsored by representatives from 44 states. His $1.4 billion National Parks and Recreation Act passed both houses, and President Carter signed it on November 10, 1978. In California, it added Mineral King Valley to Sequoia National Park (long a Sierra Club priority), and created the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area.

Burton engineered passage of two more major park bills in 1980. The first added more than 12 square miles to Point Reyes National Seashore and the GGRNA, expanded Olympic National Park in Washington State, established Channel Islands National Park off Southern California, dedicated historic sites honoring Martin Luther King in Atlanta and Georgia O’Keefe in New Mexico, and created a Women’s Rights National Historic Park in Seneca Falls, New York.

Later that year, Burton pushed through the Alaska lands bill that Edgar and Peggy Wayburn had been promoting for more than a decade. At one stroke, it doubled the land in the entire national park system and tripled the area of wildlife refuges and protected wilderness. It was the biggest single land preservation bill ever enacted. President Carter signed it in December 1980. Philip Burton’s park bills of 1978-1980, backed by the Sierra Club, had protected more land than all previous Presidents—combined!

Amy Meyer.

In April 1983, at age 56, Burton died suddenly from a heart attack, the victim of his own atrocious health habits—he drank heavily, smoked constantly, dined on fatty beef, and never relaxed in the parks he had created—or anywhere else. Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the originator of Earth Day in 1970, paid him the ultimate compliment in 1991: “I spent 32 years in elective office, and I only met one absolute political genius. That was Phil Burton.” Today in San Francisco’s Fort Mason, near the GGNRA park headquarters, stands an imposing larger-than-life stature of Phillip Burton, a green giant, arm extended in mid-speech.

Congressman Phillip Burton statue at the Great Meadow in Fort Mason

Photo: Chris Carlsson, 2010

In 2006, 23 years after Burton’s passing, amateur naturalists Chris Atkins and Michael Taylor discovered the three tallest trees on earth in a section of Redwood National Park saved by the 1978 park expansion. Had the bill not passed, financing acquisition of that section for the park in 1980, loggers would have leveled it by the end of the year.

Wayburn retired from medicine in 1985, at age 78, but not from the Sierra Club. In the 1990s, as honorary president, he maintained an office at the club’s San Francisco headquarters, chairing its international committee and Alaska Task Force. He mourned the passing of David Brower in 2000, and his wife Peggy in 2002. By that time, he was credited with protecting more parkland and wilderness than any living American. He passed away in 2010, at the age of 103.

Questions? Email the author: davidnaturesf@gmail.com

Notes

1. Jacobs, John, A Rage For Justice: The Passion and Politics of Phillip Burton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

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Excerpted from David D. Schmidt's San Francisco Bay Area: An Environmental History. Available from Backcountry Press.