Lynn Ryan has a secret-a powerful one. And for more than 30 years, it has been the key to her success in saving some of her favorite forests, beaches, mountains, and quiet wild places.
"It really comes down to grassroots organizing," says Lynn. "There's a joy in it."
Grassroots organizing means working with the people who care about a problem to come up with and achieve a solution together, from the ground up. This simple but brilliant plan is the reason why California's King Range, with its famous "Lost Coast"-the longest stretch of undeveloped coastline in the U.S. outside of Alaska, will remain wild and free forever.
Lynn was born in Wyoming and raised in Wisconsin, where she lived until she graduated from nursing school at age 21. At that point, she left her family's home, driving West in a Volkswagen bus to find new adventures. "I was amazed at the open spaces. I remember the towering ponderosa pines. I was enthralled by the beauty," she says.
Lynn landed in Santa Barbara, CA where she lived until the late 70s. "When I graduated from nursing school, I realized I could get a job anywhere, and I found that the cheaper I lived, the less I had to work, and the more time I had to spend outdoors," says Lynn.
While living in Santa Barbara, Lynn learned her first lesson about grassroots organizing. There was a beach she liked to visit. However, the neighbors were complaining about dust on the road to the beach and were concerned about acts of violence that had been occurring in the area. Lynn and local residents formed an ad hoc group to address the problem. Working together, they decided to work to close the road to the beach and put the parking lot a half mile away. "Closing that road decreased dust and noise and that made the neighbors happy. The fighting and violence also went away, and wildlife came back. The place was healed. It was grassroots organizing that did it, though I didn't know that at the time," says Lynn.
In 1981, she moved to the town of Arcata in Northern California. "It was beautiful, and I met the most wonderful people who believed in the same things I did - connectivity of habitats, conservation biology, and the importance of wild places."
Arcata was a small community with a whole lot of wild land. It was a nurturing place for Lynn's burgeoning activism for wild places. "When I was living in Arcata, I learned that wilderness didn't just happen. It's not magically there and the government doesn't make it on its own. Somebody had to do something to protect it."
Soon after moving north, Lynn discovered the King Range and the Lost Coast. "I had heard about the Lost Coast, so I went to the BLM office in 1982 to ask how to get there. ‘You'll never find it, it's lost. You should just go to established state parks,' I was told. But I did find it and found the BLM was in the process of trying to open the area to vehicles. So we fought back," says Lynn.
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency which manages the King Range, was working to open the area to roads and vehicles, in large part so that logging companies could access the area and its ancient Douglas fir and redwood trees.
At this time, very few people were aware of the BLM lands in the area, nor the threats they were facing. Lynn was seeking allies and was directed to the California Wilderness Coalition, which put her in touch with other local people in its network. "There was an increasing awareness of the threats facing ancient, old growth forests in the area. People wanted to protect their backyard areas and they started to communicate and get networked. In five years, we made big changes in how BLM managed these lands," she says.
Lynn and other local citizens worked in the 80s and 90s to defend the King Range, South Fork Eel, and Yolla Bolly areas from logging and road building. Their tactics included education, hikes, letter writing campaigns, and non-violent direct action. "We kept those areas wild and roadless until they could be protected as wilderness."
Lynn was truly the keeper of the King Range. Over the last seven years, she marshaled local citizens to advocate including the entire area in the wilderness legislation that was being developed for the region. "It started locally and blossomed from there," says Lynn of the effort. Of all the activities she undertook to protect the King Range, she is most proud of the hikes she lead. "Getting people out there - that's the thrust of the whole thing. Introducing people to wild areas and getting them involved. Wilderness is for everyone. You tell people you're just trying to keep things the way they are and preserve the beauty of the place and they get that."
More than 20 years after Lynn's love affair with the King Range and other BLM areas began, she reaped the fruits of her labor with the passage of the Northern California Coastal Wild Heritage Wilderness Act in the fall of 2006. The legislation designated approximately 275,000 acres of wilderness, including the South Fork Eel, King Range, and additions to the Yolla Bolly Wilderness. If it wasn't for Lynn's work over the past two decades, these areas may not have remained in their wild state, and wouldn't have qualified for the gold standard of congressional wilderness protection.
Ryan Henson, Policy Director for the California Wilderness Coalition, speaks on behalf of many individuals involved with the North Coast Wilderness effort when he says, "Lynn was absolutely instrumental in the effort to protect the King Range as wilderness. She has been working to preserve the area's wild character since the 1970s, and over the last few years we started calling her 'Ms. King Range.' I wish all wild places had friends like Lynn."
Today, Lynn Ryan continues her advocacy work by serving on the North Coast Environmental Center's board of directors. "This wilderness thing isn't over," says Lynn. She points out that the California Wild Heritage Act, Senator Barbara Boxer's statewide wilderness legislation, inadvertently left out a number of wild places in Northern California. "The Trinity Alps, Siskyou, Snow Mountain and Yolla Bolly Wilderness Additions in the neighboring congressional district were all left out. We need to put those places back in the bill," says Lynn.
This activist sums up her philosophy on wilderness protection in this way, "Places and creatures have a right to exist. They have intrinsic value. Humans have the power to destroy that if they choose, or they can choose not to destroy it. But protecting places is joyful work. That's all we're trying to do."
We salute Lynn Ryan for her decades of work to defend and protect the King Range and other spectacular wild places, and for leading others into the wilderness and helping them to make the choice to protect wild nature.
