Dr. Edgar Wayburn

Posted October 9, 2008, 6:14 pm


Dr. Edgar Wayburn
Born: Sept. 17, 1906

Dedicated environmentalist; former five-term president of the Sierra Club. Wayburn's work helped establish the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (the largest urban park in the United States) and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. One of America's legendary wilderness champions, Dr. Edgar Wayburn was a tenacious and tireless leader of the Sierra Club since the 1940s and perhaps the least-known yet most successful defender of America's natural heritage.

After the Age of Seventy

• At age 89 (1995), he was awarded the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism.
• At age 92 (1999), President Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. President Clinton claimed that Wayburn had "saved more of our wilderness than any person alive."
• At age 97 (2005), he published his memoir, Your Land and Mine: Evolution of a Conservationist.
• Headed the Sierra Club's Alaska Task Force, which sought to stem logging and oil drilling in the Alaskan wilderness.

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