Marin Women's Hall of Fame

Innovator -- MALT

Phyllis Faber listened with concern to the tale of yet another farmer uncertain of the future:

        “My husband and I love this farm. He bought it in the 40’s and I came here as a bride. We raised our family here. Now our kids may leave. So many farms are being bought out by developers. We thought we were building something that would last for generations. Now, with all the uncertainty about farming in Marin, I just don’t know. I wish there was something we could do about it,” Ellen Strauss, the farmer’s wife, sighed.

“Maybe there is something we can do,” Phyllis replied.

        Phyllis began by organizing a series of farm tours to look at the problems close-up. The issue of uncertainty was related to other issues she had dealt with for years in her work as a California Coastal Commissioner. She had focused on the problems of  protecting the coast from development. Preserving agriculture along the coast was a part of that. She realized that farmers were threatened by development, too.  How could farmers become confident about hanging on to their farms and continuing their families’ agricultural lifestyle into the future?

        As farmers received offers from developers to buy their land, they began to think of their farms as the source of money for retirement. Even though some farms had been in families for generations, farmers stopped thinking about passing their land down to their own children, And their children were beginning to look for jobs outside the farming community. But farmers are a committed lot. They want to stay on the land. If there were a way to ensure their way of life and receive some compensation in exchange for rights to develop the land, they would prefer to stay put. But such a thing was unheard of ­ until Phyllis Faber and her friend Ellen Strauss.

        With a master’s degree in microbiology from Yale University and a decade of studying and working in the coastal regions and marshlands of California, no one could question Phyllis’ credentials as an expert on preservation of Marin’s natural resources. What Phyllis also brought to the efforts to maintain working open space in Marin was an extraordinary talent for bringing people together to focus on a common goal.

        As Phyllis describes it, “MALT developed at a particular moment in time. All the right people just happened to be working on related issues at that time. We had Gary Giacomini as Supervisor ­ he took preserving ranches to heart. Ralph Grassi was Land Use Chairman for the Farm Bureau. Jerry Friedman had been working to create an alliance between environmentalists and farmers in West Marin since the mid-sixties. Ellen Strauss was facing the problem firsthand. We all came together to try to find a solution to the problem.”

        “Certainty was what was missing. Farmers and ranchers couldn’t be sure how long  agricultural zoning would last at A 60 ­ permitting one house on sixty acres of land. They had stopped investing in improvements for their farms and dairies. Their children were leaving the ranches to work elsewhere. Agriculture was poised to disappear from the county.”

        The concept of an agricultural land trust was an innovation and was intended to develop certainty. The point was to remove the development potential from the land by purchasing development rights. If a farmer had a 600 acre ranch under A 60 zoning, he could build ten houses, or one house per 60 acres. When MALT bought his development rights, MALT placed a conservation easement on his land and he could build only one house on his 600 acres. The conservation easements are in perpetuity, that is, they last forever.

        Today, farmers and ranchers in Marin county no longer feel helpless to prevent development. They can sell development rights to their land to MALT, which gives the farmers some compensation for their land, and guarantees that no one else can subdivide it in the future. Open spaces will remain in Marin county.  So far, MALT has purchased development rights to over 30,000 acres of productive land, 25 percent of Marin’s agricultural land. Other states have copied MALT’s ideas about buying development rights to agricultural land to maintain open spaces. The influence of Phyllis’ most important innovation continues to grow.

        Phyllis devoted 10 years to MALT, from the time MALT was just an idea in 1980, until she retired from MALT’s board in 1990. When Phyllis decides a project is worth her time and effort, she commits years of her time. She has committed herself to a number of projects during her life.
 

California Coastal Commission

        “All of the work I have done in California can be placed in the context of my work with the California Coastal Commission. When my family and I moved back to California in 1970, the state legislature had just failed to pass a bill to protect California’s coast from development. Many people who were interested in protecting the coast were coming together to work on getting Proposition 20 onto the ballot so people could vote directly on the issue. I joined the effort.”

        Phyllis had moved from Connecticut, where she had worked hard to see that legislation protecting Atlantic wetlands passed. Fresh from the success of that effort­the strongest of the three bills pending before the Connecticut State Legislature passed­Phyllis brought a wealth of experience to her work on Prop 20.

        When Prop 20 passed with the highest margin of votes of any California proposition to date, Phyllis was selected to serve on the California Coastal Commission. She served on the Commission for nine years and as Chairman of the North-Central Regional Commission for two years. Her commitment to the preservation of California’s coastal environment has continued ever since. Whether she was developing innovative programs like MALT or the Environmental Forum, teaching environmental classes in high schools, restoring a marsh, or publishing botanical field guides, Phyllis sees all of her work related in one way or another to her years spent on the Commission.

        Peter Douglas, Executive Director of the California Coastal Commission, was working as a natural resource consultant for the California State Legislature when he first met Phyllis. He remembers her political work, “Throughout the heat of political struggle, Phyllis maintained high standards of integrity and scientific honesty. Her compassion for other creatures with whom we share this planet was matched by her sensitivity to the needs of people and individuals with whom she came in contact. Whenever volunteers were needed in the course of the seven year campaign to enact California’s pioneering and bitterly fought over coastal protection program in the 1970’s, Phyllis was there ready, willing and able to do all she could to help the cause....As an active member of a variety of environmental and civic groups, she became deeply involved with the appointment of coastal commissioners and the citizen watchdog efforts to ensure that the new coastal laws would be effectively carried out. In 1976, she was in the forefront of the fight in the State Legislature to enact the California Coastal Plan and make permanent the California Coastal Commission and the network of strong coastal protection policies recommended in the Coastal Plan. After that massive effort succeeded, Phyllis spent the next 17 years working to maintain the integrity of the 1976 Coastal Act.”
 
Educator -- Environmental Forum

        In 1971, Phyllis taught in a biology and ecology training program at Audubon Canyon Ranch. Located at the edge of Bolinas Lagoon, the Ranch preserved a nesting space for egrets and herons in a grove of redwoods. Out of her efforts in developing a training program (a docent program), Phyllis and others developed the idea for an Environmental Forum.

        Phyllis was a founding member of the Forum, which offers participants an opportunity to learn about many of the issues impacting the environment. These include planning and zoning, plant communities, geology, and open space. The Environmental Forum also acts as a network for environmental groups in Marin. Many people who first became interested in the environment through the Forum have made their own contributions to maintaining the natural resources of Marin County and throughout the Bay area.

        For twenty-seven years, Phyllis served as an instructor for the Forum. She taught classes in wetlands ecology, plant communities, soils and agriculture of the bay. During those twenty-seven years, Phyllis had hundreds of students and trainees.  She inspired a deep interest in the environment in all of them.

        One of her trainees at the Second Environmental Forum was Chip Wray, then a teacher at Redwood High School. He says of Phyllis, “She brought such enthusiasm and professional expertise to those classes that she was the first person I called to help me set up Redwood High School’s first Environmental Education class. She volunteered to spend many hours establishing the curriculum as well as teaching the field classes at Phoenix Lake. I hasten to add that Phyllis was a marvelous role model for the girls in the class. Positive, well-educated, totally competent, and caring. And for all her achievements, students saw her as someone to whom they could relate. At the end of the semester, Phyllis was voted by the sixty students as one of those very special persons from whom they had learned a great deal.”

Marin Adventures

        In addition to the Environmental Forum, Phyllis became involved in another educational program called Marin Adventures.  Part of the Marin Community College District, Marin Adventures was a natural history and outdoor education program for adults and families. The director of the program, Bill Noble, describes Phyllis’ involvement, “After Prop 13, it became clear that many community education programs could not survive within public institutions. Phyllis headed an advisory board that was key in negotiating an independent non-profit existence for the program. Marin Adventures became Marin Discoveries, the only college program to achieve independence and a vigorous independent life. For most of Marin Discoveries eight-year existence, Phyllis served as President and chair of its Board of Directors, building a program that, at its peak, offered more than 700 programs a year, and became a national innovator.” The effects of Phyllis’ work with Marin Discoveries are as hard to measure as the ripples created when a rock is thrown in water.
 

Wetlands Expert

        Phyllis first became interested in wetlands when she took a position on the faculty of Thomas School, a girls’ school in Rowayton, Connecticut in 1968. She replaced a science teacher named Joy Lee. Phyllis says, “Joy had become enthralled with salt marshes and was determined to preserve each and every one of them. She profoundly affected the direction of my life.” There were three bills then pending in the Connecticut state legislature regarding wetlands. “Step by step, Joy taught me how to lobby Congress people,” Phyllis remembers. The strongest of the three bills eventually passed, safeguarding Connecticut’s Atlantic marshlands. And Phyllis had become enthralled by wetlands as well.

        From 1976 to the present, Phyllis has worked as a biological consultant specializing in coastal wetlands.  n 1979, she began a long-term biological monitoring study of the San Francisco Bay marshes.  Phyllis was not content to simply study what was happening to marshlands along the coast. In the mid-seventies, she spearheaded efforts to restore Muzzi Marsh in Corte Madera. Phyllis’ environmental consulting firm, Madrone Associates, was hired to study the environmental effects of dredging a channel to establish a ferry terminal in Larkspur. To compensate for the loss of wetlands that building a ferry terminal would cause, Phyllis’ firm identified the Muzzi Marsh area for both a mitigation and a restoration site. The restoration of Muzzi Marsh has been another long-term project for Phyllis. She documented all the efforts made to bring the marsh back to life, including planting native species in place of the exotic species of vegetation that had taken over.

        Over the years, Muzzi Marsh became the subject of presentations Phyllis made to various scientific gatherings:  in 1980, she presented “Marsh Restoration as a Mitigation” to the Sixth Annual Conference of the Coastal Society in Arlington, Virginia; in 1983, she presented “Marsh Restoration with Natural Revegetation:  A Case Study in San Francisco Bay” to the Third Symposium on Coastal and Ocean Management in San Diego, California; in 1987, she wrote “A Marsh Revived”; in 1988, she presented “Monitoring a Tidal Restoration Site in San Francisco Bay” to the National Wetland Symposium; in 1991, she presented “The Muzzi Marsh, Corte Madera, California:  Long term observations of a restored marsh in San Francisco Bay,” and in 1999, she wrote “Salt Marsh Experience in the San Francisco Bay Estuary” with Philip B. Williams.
 

California Native Plant Society

        Part of Phyllis’ work in wetlands involved learning about the kinds of plants that traditionally grew there. As species of plants from other parts of the world have been introduced to California, some of them have replaced the native species. Restoring marshlands to their original state involved reintroducing native plants. This work led Phyllis to become involved in the California Native Plant Society, a group that studies and works to promote the species of plants that naturally evolved in California environments. She became active in the Society’s state coastal committee. In her academic work, Phyllis wrote books and papers about native wetlands plants. Some of her articles were published in the California Native Plant Society’s quarterly journal Fremontia. As she became more involved with the Society, she was asked if she would become the editor of Fremontia. She agreed and served as editor for 17 years. During her tenure as editor, Phyllis developed Fremontia into one of the leading publications of its kind in the entire country. From 1989 until 1999, she served as the Society’s Vice President in charge of publications, overseeing the publication of many popular and technical books and pamphlets in addition to Fremontia.
 
Publisher

        “One of the things I am most proud of is my work in publishing,” Phyllis declares. She has two long shelves of books to prove it.  In 1982, Phyllis wrote a book entitled Common Wetland Plants of Coastal California.  She submitted the manuscript to one publisher after another, but not one was interested. However, Phyllis was convinced that the information in her book was important for others to learn. She decided to establish a publishing company to publish her book and other books that were of interest both to scientists and the general public. Others agreed about the importance of Phyllis’ first book:  she received two awards for it in 1982. Phyllis named her publishing company Pickleweed Press, after a common species of plant which grows in saltwater marshes. In 1989, Pickleweed Press published Phyllis’ next book entitled Common Riparian Plants of California.  Her experience with Pickleweed Press and her interest in California native plants naturally led Phyllis to create a press for the California Native Plant Society.

        Working as publisher for the California Native Plant Society Press, Phyllis tackled larger projects. They include large format books such as California’s Wild Gardens, Plant Life in the World’s Mediterranean Climates, and California’s Changing Climates. She has also published a number floras, books that provide a means for identifying plants. Flora of Sonoma County, Monterey County, Santa Cruz Island, Butte County, and Lassen County are all works that enable scientists and non-scientists alike to identify plants that may only exist in a limited area of the state.

        Phyllis currently works as co-editor of the Natural Sciences division of the University of California Press. Her work in publishing has provided Phyllis with a way to use her training as a scientist to benefit non-experts who are interested in learning more about their environment.
 
Educational Background

        Phyllis’ father was from Oakland, but he and her mother moved to New York City before she was born. Phyllis grew up in the city. “Living in New York City was to me a kind of torture,” she said. “Especially in the spring, I spent my time trying to escape from our 11th story apartment.” When Phyllis was in middle school, her family moved to Long Island. There Phyllis rode her bicycle everywhere. “Riding my bicycle was heaven,” she recalled.

        When it came time to select a college, Phyllis’ family provided a unique opportunity. She had two aunts, one on the faculty at Mount Holyoke, the other at Bryn Mawr. She went to visit her Aunt Brenda, also known as Professor Putnam, at Mount Holyoke. Aunt Brenda told her she could choose which college she wanted to attend:  Mount Holyoke or Bryn Mawr. Phyllis looked around Mount Holyoke, liked what she saw and decided to stay there.

        The science faculty at Mount Holyoke inspired Phyllis. “There were women scientists who had worked so hard to gain respect and prestige in their fields. I developed wonderful friendships with them.” Phyllis graduated from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts in 1949 with a major in zoology.
 
        “When I was young, I just assumed I would become a doctor. My grandmother, who I greatly admired, was a doctor, so I thought I would be one, too. But my parents were quite opposed to this choice, so I was not able to pursue that plan. My father thought a medical education would be too expensive. My mother remembered what it was like to have a doctor for a mother, and she didn’t think it would be the best choice for me.”

        “I found myself looking around for something to do, and went to work as a research assistant at the Rockefeller Institute in New York. “Part of my job was to keep Dr. Mirshy informed of what was happening in each lab in the Institute. He wanted to know all the details. So each week I would go and have tea in other labs. So many of the giants in the science world were working there at the time. There were lectures every Friday afternoon. I attended all of those. It was exciting and great fun. Of course, they also taught me to do things accurately and well. They trained me so well, I have never applied for a job I didn’t get.”

        Phyllis’ work seemed to be leading her into the field of health. From 1953 to 1955, she was the supervisor of the chemistry lab at Meadowbrook Hospital in Hempstead, New York. From there, she went to Eli Lilly & Company in Indianapolis, where she supervised one phase of the safety testing of polio vaccine.

        In 1953, Phyllis married Ed Faber. They had three children. From 1956 until 1967, Phyllis concentrated on her family, which she describes as “the fun years.” She passed on her interest in science to her children and their friends, taking them on hikes and teaching them how to observe their surroundings from a scientific point of view. They went on plant hunts and Indian digs and camping trips. Phyllis discovered she loved teaching.

        By the early sixties, Phyllis says, “I found myself in need of some intellectual refreshment.” She determined to continue her scientific studies. During a brief sojourn in the Bay area, Phyllis began work on her master’s degree taking field biology classes at California State University San Francisco. When her family moved back East again, she continued her graduate work at Yale University and began working as a research associate at the Yale Medical School Microbiology Department. She received her Master’s degree from Yale in microbiology in 1968.

        Work in microbiology was highly technical and Phyllis felt it demanded a full-time commitment she was not able to make. Instead, in 1969, she accepted a position as the Chairman of the Science Department of Thomas School in Rowayton, Connecticut. She volunteered for  the job of faculty director of the student organization Protect the Environment (PYE). While she was the faculty director in 1970, PYE received two important awards: a National Wildlife Award and a Special Presidential Award.

        When Phyllis and her family moved to Marin County in 1971, Phyllis and several other environmental scientists formed a company called Madrone Associates, Inc.  They worked as consultants specializing in biological studies. It was during this time that Phyllis became fascinated with the biological systems of the marshlands along the California coast. She continued working as a consultant with her firm until 1976. Since then, she has worked as an independent biological consultant specializing in coastal wetlands.

        Simultaneously, in 1972, Phyllis became a instructor in the biology department of the College of Marin in Kentfield.  She taught classes there until 1989.

        Meanwhile, from 1980 to 1985, Phyllis worked on the graduate faculty in the Natural Systems Program at Antioch University in San Francisco.
 

Recognition

        Phyllis’ decades of hard work and determination caught the attention of numerous groups. In 1983, she received the Coastal and Ocean Management Award, Coastal Zone ‘83, from the American Society of Civil Engineers. In 1990, she received the Marin Green Award from the Marin Conservation League in San Rafael and was also named Environmentalist of the Year by the Marin Environmental Alliance. In 1995, Phyllis was inducted into the Marin Women’s Hall of Fame.

The Work Goes On

        In 1999, Phyllis stepped down as editor of the California Native Plant Society’s publication Fremontia to take on yet another job:  editor of the Natural Sciences division of the University of California Press.

        “I see myself as a bridge between the scientific community and the public,” Phyllis declares. After thirty years of highly successful work protecting California’s coastal environment, Phyllis is not done. As she points out, “The work will never be done.” And Phyllis is right there to do it.