Reprinted by permission of Mountain Light Press.

{Rowell interviewed a variety of Bay Area environmental visionaries}

According to Galen Rowell: "A week before, I had spent a hot fall afternoon in Diablo’s shadow with another champion of Bay Area open space. Dr. Mary Bowerman had also made a personal connection in the thirties with land she eventually worked to save, but unlike Nonette Hanko, she had not been a young child at play. In 1930 she was already a botany major at the University of California, working on her senior project on Mount Diablo."

Galen Rowell: "Sixty-six years later, this delightful woman of eighty-eight drove her own car to meet me at an air-conditioned hotel over tea and a shared chocolate dessert. As we began talking about her role in the founding of Save Mount Diablo and the organization’s continuing efforts to acquire more private lands to add to Mount Diablo State Park, I donned reading glasses to write down notes to supplement the words picked up by my tape recorder. My first entries were about Bowerman’s conspicuous lack of glasses; hands that look like those of a woman half her age, with straight fingers and small joints; and a similarly youthful mind. I observed how she walked slowly but confidently, like some of the older Sherpas and climbers I’ve known. The years seem to count differently for those who actively enjoy nature. One of my first questions was whether she had been hiking on the mountain lately."

Mary Bowerman: "I still go out some, but rarely with groups. My old walking companions are now incapacitated, and I don’t travel as fast as the younger people anymore."

Mary Bowerman: "Back in the thirties, there weren’t many trails. I started going up there every week about a year before the top became a state park, in 1931. There was a private toll road with a steep entrance fee, but when I went to the owner in Oakland and told him I was studying all the flowering plants and ferns and didn’t want to pay each time, he graciously agreed. I was usually working on private property, even after the park was created. If I went to Sycamore Canyon, for example, I’d knock on a door, tell the occupants what I was doing, and ask their permission to proceed; they would always say yes. If there was no house or owner nearby, I would just go anyway."

Galen Rowell: "What was it about the mountain that was special for you?" I asked, hoping to glean an anecdote about an instant emotional connection with the land.

Mary Bowerman: "I don’t think I thought of Mount Diablo as being anything special, at least in the beginning. I was a student at Berkeley, and Professor Mason had suggested I do a study to identify all the plants up there, and that was all there was to it. I wasn’t sufficiently knowledgeable to realize whether anything was special on Mount Diablo because I’d been living in England and then Pasadena. My father would have sent me to Stanford, but I said no. He saved himself some money because my botany teacher at junior college in Pasadena said I must go to Berkeley."

Galen Rowell: "How did you come to choose botany?" I asked.

Mary Bowerman: "That’s a good question. My father had always wanted to be a physician, and he picked out the courses I should take at junior college, hoping to steer me in that direction. I was generally unhappy in my human physiology class, but I had seen this nice classroom with plants in it through an open door, so I switched to botany about two weeks after I registered. Though I had never taken a botany or biology course, my interest went back a long way. My kindergarten teacher had sent a note home remarking that I was especially interested in natural history. When I was fifteen, I thought I wanted to be a landscape gardener."

Mary Bowerman: "The year after I graduated from the University of California, I began working under the world famous botanist Willis Linn Jepson, who had been on leave. When he saw what a big project Mount Diablo had turned out to be, he approved my request to work toward a master’s thesis on it. A year later I made my way into Jepson’s inner sanctum in the Life Sciences Building at Berkeley, and when I announced that my thesis was not going to be a doctoral dissertation, he looked a little startled and fell silent."

Galen Rowell: "Your decision?" I asked, similarly surprised at her boldness.

Mary Bowerman: "Yes. I had decided. I remember standing there while he discussed the pros and cons. After a while he said, ‘All right.’ I eventually listed more than 600 species of trees and flowering plants in a book, The Flowering Plants and Ferns of Mount Diablo, California: Their Distribution and Association into Plant Communities, which wasn’t published until 1944. During my studies, I became more interested in ecology than in straight identification. I kept track of which plants were growing together because it was all so completely fresh to me. In the beginning, there was some advantage to being a complete ignoramus as far as this part of the world was concerned. People into botany who grew up here already knew things of that sort and weren’t likely to question them."

Mary Bowerman: "I soon realized that Mount Diablo is in a unique geographical location. It’s part of the inner Coast Ranges yet is subject to coastal influence owing to the absence of high mountains to the west over the Bay. It’s also a pivotal link between the differing vegetation units of the north and south Coast ranges. The broad variations in temperature, rainfall, wind exposure, and altitude account for its wide variety of plant life."

Mary Bowerman: "My botanist’s reasons for urging preservation of the whole of Mount Diablo go well beyond its being a refuge for some endemic and rare species. Because there’s so much variation between different parts of the mountain, we need preservation of the whole to understand the whole ecological picture."

Galen Rowell: "Jepson’s unconditional support of Bowerman’s botanical work on Mount Diablo came as no surprise to me. My aunt, Marion Avery, an amateur naturalist born in 1896, knew both Jepson and Bowerman. My father, born in 1884, had read me Jepson’s romantic plea to preserve East Bay open space for wildflowers from a booklet published in 1909 by the Women’s Auxiliary of the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley, where both he and Jepson were members. Anticipating the land ethic to be expressed by Aldo Leopold three decades later, Jepson spoke of "the right of the flowers, children of the Sun, to possess the cañons, slopes, and fields" and how that right of "exceedingly ancient origin" was being infringed on by "our own house-building and pasture-inclosing people who left scarcely a common where the delicate first inhabitants might live." Jepson went on the predict: "some time there will be here in Berkeley a wild-flower protection society, just as in the older States, and those who have wide grounds will give the wild flowers a corner—all their own." Recalling this scenario, I asked Bowerman to tell me about her first direct involvement with protecting Mount Diablo."

Mary Bowerman: "I joined the Sierra Club in 1942 and became involved with its Natural Science Section. After I moved out here to Lafayette, I joined a local Sierra Club conservation group. In 1971, a member named Art Bonwell came up to me and said, ‘Don’t you think we ought to do something about Mount Diablo?’ He was referring to how moneys appropriated by the state to buy additional lands for Mount Diablo State Park had been diverted to buy Franks Tract in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for a state recreation area."

Galen Rowell: "Bowerman vividly remembers the result of suggesting that Art Bonwell, who was an electrical engineer at DuPont, organize a meeting of representatives of local groups."

Mary Bowerman: "On December 7, 1971, fifteen people came, and I stated my dream that the whole of Mount Diablo, including its foothills, should remain open space. We formed Save Mount Diablo that night, elected a president, and set objectives to educate the public and acquire lands rather than to maintain the existing park or promote recreation."

Mary Bowerman: "I served as vice president for resources until the end of 1995, and I’m still on the Land Acquisition Committee. The state park started out with an initial 1,463 acres at the top of the mountain in 1931. From 6,778 acres in 1971, we’ve brought it up to 18,393 acres in 1996."

Mary Bowerman: "I’m most concerned about the habitat. Mount Diablo State Park has more of a mandate to preserve vegetation for the future than do the regional parks, which are more recreation oriented, but I’m afraid the mountain isn’t going to stay as wild as I would like it to be, no matter how much more of it we acquire."

Mary Bowerman: "My word—I’m talking like an old mother hen! Of course, I should have mentioned that we didn’t do this alone. We encouraged the State Department of Parks and Recreation and the California legislature to add these parcels, about one third of which were obtained without cost to the state. Other public agencies have acquired open space lands around the mountain, but ten or fifteen thousand more acres are needed to preserve the core of the ecosystem. With the rapid population growth in Contra Costa County, we need to include all the lower slopes of the mountain soon, before they’re developed and lost forever."

Mary Bowerman: "Right now, our Land Acquisition Committee is Bob Doyle and me. Bob has been the backbone of our organization. He came to our first meeting back in 1971 as a high school student, and he was our president from 1978 to 1989. I believe he was first inspired by a local biology teacher, Jane Helrich, a friend of mine who became a member of our board. Perhaps Bob would have been involved with us anyway. You should ask him about that."

Galen Rowell: "As a matter of fact, he’s on my short list to interview," I responded, "but mainly about his other land acquisitions while working for the East Bay Regional Park District. Before we conclude, is there anything else you’d like to add?"

Mary Bowerman: "Yes. We need a fairy godfather who will give us twenty million dollars. There’s no money coming in from the state at this time. What’s left in private ownership on the mountain are mostly multimillion-dollar parcels that will probably be developed if we don’t have the funds to buy them when they come on the market. We continue to be optimistic and believe that ‘our mountain’ can remain wild—and a joy to all of us."

Galen Rowell: "I later learned that the place where Bowerman mentioned she used to botanize on private property, lower Sycamore Canyon, had just been added to the park after years of negotiations. Developers had purchased 300 acres there on which they proposed to build forty-four large homes. They persuaded Contra Costa County to approve a negative declaration, meaning no environmental impact report was necessary, but the canyon does have some rare species, like the Mount Diablo sunflower, the Alameda whipsnake, and a pair of peregrine falcons nesting on its cliffs. Save Mount Diablo appealed, won, and convinced the developer to donate 252 acres to the park."

Pages 187-191, Galen Rowell’s book Bay Area Wild, Mountain Light Press, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1997. Rowell also interviews Bob Doyle, who mentions Mary. Doyle interview pages 191-195: