Tony Look: A Life Devoted to the Land
by Robert Reid
It began almost by accident, a handful of concerned citizens responding to a crisis. It grew into an organization of 14,000 supporters raising hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for the preservation of open space.
The Sempervirens Fund success story is a remarkable one, and no one has played a more important part in that story than founder and retired executive director Claude A. (Tony) Look.
“We progressed because we had a mission,” Tony said as he reminisced about his 18 years with the Fund. “We came along at a time when there was tremendous pressure for development in the Santa Cruz Mountains. We saw the other side – the need to preserve open space close to metropolitan areas where people could go to enjoy unspoiled nature.”
The story began in 1968 on the slopes of Mount McAbee in Big Basin Redwoods State Park. A land developer was planning to subdivide a magnificent 320-acre site on the mountain. The State of California has until May 1 to buy the land. Unfortunately, the state was unable to commit the final $12,000 needed for the purchase.”
Enter the concerned citizens...
“Allen Jamieson, Claire Dedrick, Howard King, and I decided we’d try to raise the money,” Tony recalled. “We called ourselves the May Day Committee. When the deadline arrived, we’d surpassed our goal by $16,000.”
The story might have ended with the successful addition of Mount McAbee to the park. But other emergencies threatened and committee members saw the need for an organization with ready cash to meet these emergencies.
Such an organization could take an active role in planning park land acquisitions, assuring that thoughtful foresight, not eleventh hour confrontations, would guide the future of the park.
At the same time, a second group was working to secure protection for the Castle Rock area east of Big Basin. Under the leadership of Dorothy Varian, Doris Leonard, and George Collins, Conservation Associates had purchased 500 key acres in the region in the hope of creating a state park. The park became a reality in June 1968, just two months after the completion of the May Day campaign.
“Their group had such similar goals to ours,” said Tony, “that it made sense for us to join forces with them. The two formed a new organization, which had fund raising as its principal purpose. With a bow to the turn-of-the-century Sempervirens Club, which had been responsible for the creation of Big Basin, they named the new organization Sempervirens Fund.
With the help of the state parks department, the newly-established Fund prioritized 12 key parcels in Big Basin and earmarked them for eventual purchase.
Then it took on one of its grandest schemes, a walkway in the sky that would link Castle Rock with Big Basin. The Skyline-to-the-Sea Trail was opened less than a year later during a weekend which may have witnessed the setting of a world record for trail building.
“It’s one of my fondest memories,” Tony recalled. “It was our first Trail Days, and we had more than 2,500 people working on the project. In that one weekend we built 26 miles of trail.”
The pressures of development mounted but the Fund grew quickly, taking on challenges one by one. It even had an office by then – the back room of Tony’s pharmacy – and a volunteer coordinator – Tony. In 1976 Tony at last became salaried as director.
By now Sempervirens’ principal fund raising programs were well established. The Commemorative Grove Program, for example, enabled groups and individuals to purchase five and 10-acre sites in the parks. And Help-Plant-A-Forest, in which trees were planted as gifts and memorials, had already become a Bay Area institution.
“I’d observed other organizations doing similar things, though not with trees,” Tony explained. “I saw that by giving people a chance to purchase seedlings as memorials and gifts, we would build our base of contributors, generate publicity, and best of all, help reforest the parks.”
The key to continued success, Tony believes, lies in linking the idea of preservation with progress.
“People need to understand that the preservation of undeveloped land is a good thing, a progressive thing,” he said. “We’re getting boxed in. We need development, yes, but we also need open space. It’s important that we plan carefully for both.”
He looked to the day when Sempervirens Fund will turn its attention to other parks, working to round them out to their natural ecological borders just as it has in Big Basin and Castle Rock.
He envisioned a grand network of trails stretching all the way from Santa Cruz to Point Reyes. All of this will be in the fulfillment of goals he has had from the beginning.
“I saw potential for trails and space for the people of this area,” he said. “My specific goal has been the preservation of redwoods and the completion of Big Basin and Castle Rock. But more generally, I’ve wanted to get people to use the parks. Protection of the landscape and use by people. Those are my achievements.”
-former Sempervirens Fund staffer Robert Reid is author of “A Treasury of the Sierra Nevada". |
