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Enid Pearson and Florence LaRiviere have spent more than 60 years as each other’s most reliable co-conspirators, though neither can quite remember how they met.
Pearson served 10 years on the Palo Alto City Council, where she authored the city’s Park Dedication Ordinance, a law that protected every acre of Palo Alto parkland from development unless voters said otherwise.
LaRiviere, working a few miles away, helped found the Citizens’ Committee to Complete the Refuge and spent decades building the political coalition that created the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge, the nation’s first urban refuge. Between them, they helped keep most of the South Bay shoreline out of developers’ hands, one council meeting, lawsuit and petition at a time.
The two women are connected by more than history. They are friends who occasionally see each other, and the ease between them, quick to tease, quicker to defend one another, makes it clear the decades haven’t dulled a thing.
On a recent afternoon, the two women, each now over 100 years old, joined the this news organization for an interview inside Pearson’s home. They were joined by LaDoris Cordell, a retired judge and former Palo Alto City Council member, and Karen Holman, a former Palo Alto mayor who currently serves on the board of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District. Amid shelves sagging with books, trees crowding the windows and walls lined with photographs, including one of Annapurna, the mountain that Pearson once climbed toward, the two environmental pioneers reflected on their legacy of fighting for conservation.
Enid Pearson: Preserving beauty
Palo Alto today has fewer city council members, hundreds of protected acres, and a landmark ordinance standing between the Baylands and a bulldozer. Enid Pearson had a hand in all three. At 101, she still tells the story like it happened last week, and it usually starts the same way: she got annoyed, and she said something.
The politics started almost by accident. The city wanted to turn her street in downtown Palo Alto into a one-way. Her husband told her to do something about it, so she did. She started showing up to council meetings and saying her piece. “The more you blab, the more you get involved,” she said.
That “blabbing” turned into a decade on the council – where she served between 1965 and 1975 – and, eventually, into the ordinance that protects every park and open space in Palo Alto, including the Baylands, from being built on without a public vote. Pearson also led the fight to stop 550 homes from being built on the steep hillside above Arastradero, a battle bolstered by the Livingston Blaney study, which found it would cost the city more to service the homes than to simply buy the land outright.
“It was trying to preserve the beauty of it all,” Pearson said, “Of course, we both thought that no one else could see it except Florence and I. They were all blind.”
That kind of teasing, sharp and affectionate, runs through everything the two of them say about each other, evidence of a partnership built as much on humor as on shared purpose. When Pearson found out a preserve had been named for her in 2004, she didn’t hesitate. “I thought it was appropriate,” she said, prompting an immediate correction from LaRiviere: “Oh, for crying out loud, you could be a little humbler, just a little bit.” Pearson didn’t budge.
The fights, though, were not always so gentle. Being a woman in Palo Alto politics in the 1960s and 70s meant absorbing insults that had nothing to do with policy, Pearson recalled.
“I was told to go home and take care of my children,” Pearson said, “And I didn’t think that was very nice.”
The mayor once made that point publicly, she said, and the council called her names, including “harridan.”
“They weren’t very nice to women,” she said. “It was held against us because we were women with families and we were being political and doing things when we should have been feeding the kids and cleaning the house, for God’s sake.”
In the same spirit, Pearson led the fight in 2011 to preserve a 10-acre parcel next to wastewater plant as parkland, even as many local environmentalists lobbied to construct a waste-to-energy facility on the parcel. Proponents of the plant lobbied to place Measure E on the ballot, which would “undedicate” parkland in the Baylands for a new plant. Pearson led the “No on E” campaign alongside former Councilmember and erstwhile ally Emily Renzel.
“When the government looks to our parks for public works projects, and voters allow it, NO park will ever be safe from such land grabs,” the group wrote in their argument. “Once irreplaceable parkland is gone, it’s gone forever.”
Pearson’s camp lost the battle, with nearly 65% of Palo Alto voters approving the measure. But she and her allies have apparently won the war. Citing high costs and engineering complexities, Palo Alto has largely abandoned its plans for a new industrial plant and plans are now underway to restore “parkland” status to the 10 acres, preserving it for park use in perpetuity.
Pearson’s advice to young women who want to do the same kind of work is almost defiantly simple: write your speech, stand up, and if they tell you to sit down, keep standing there and read it anyway.
It is advice she has clearly taken herself, through 10 years on the council, multiple lawsuits against the city, and decades of showing up even when told to stay at home.
There is real tenderness underneath the toughness, too, especially when Pearson talks about what it means to lose a park.
“When you lose a park, you’re not just losing a park,” she said. “You are losing a lifestyle.”
Florence LaRiviere: Finding her voice
It all started at a worn-down picnic table. In 1951, Florence LaRiviere and her husband Philip, a Navy physicist, moved into an affordable home in Palo Alto, a phrase that sounds almost like a punchline today, and on hot evenings they’d load their kids and dinner into the car and drive down to the edge of the Bay.
“There was an old broken down picnic table there, and we fell in love with the land,” LaRiviere said. “We just loved it there.”
That love turned to alarm when they noticed what the city was doing to the marsh they had grown attached to.
“The scooping of the clamshell dredge, and swinging the arms out over a beautiful tidal marsh,” she said, describing how the city dumped dredged mud onto the wetland to maintain its harbor, clearing the way for a proposed development of hundreds of yachts.
LaRiviere and a small group of women started showing up at council meetings to object, the beginning of what would become a lifetime of advocacy.
“I went to the city council meetings to advocate for the land, and as time went by we had two constant good votes on the council,” she said, referring to Pearson and fellow councilmember Emily Renzel.
Even then, she understood the stakes of local politics. “You have to be careful who you vote for … even at local levels.”
Speaking up did not come naturally to her. By her own account she was shy, someone for whom standing in front of a room of strangers was genuinely difficult. But she learned that conviction changes the equation.
“If you feel passionate about something, it’s a lot different than talking about something general,” she said. “If you’re really trying to convince someone of something, it’s a lot less scary to speak up.”
Even so, she added, “it doesn’t completely take away the fact that it’s difficult to stand up before strangers who have power over you,” she said, nodding at Pearson beside her, unable to resist a jab. “Here attending, not included,” she quickly added.
That persistence eventually helped deliver one of the great conservation victories on the Bay: the campaign to save Bair Island in Redwood City. Environmental groups from across the region joined forces to convince a Japanese developer to sell the 3,000-acre island for preservation as a tidal marsh and wildlife habitat, a two-year effort that culminated in a provocative full-page advertisement in the New York Times.
LaRiviere remembers the moment they knew they had won. “It was such an exciting time, I can’t tell you how much,” she said. “They called the Fish and Wildlife Service, and said, ‘Let’s talk,’ and that’s when we knew we were going to get the land.”
Today, she said, the transformation still moves her. “You can drive by it today, it was just barren and brown, and you go now, and it’s coming back, beautiful marsh.”
Her ambitions extended well beyond her hometown. In the early 1970s, LaRiviere was part of a grassroots effort to create a national wildlife refuge in the Bay. According to an account published by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, she and her group met with environmental groups, fraternal organizations, garden clubs and area lawmakers to lobby for the cause.
The work bore fruit in 1972, when the U.S. Congress passed a bill by the U.S. Rep. Don Edwards established the national wildlife refuge, legislation that was signed by President Richard Nixon. Today, the marshy refuge stretches north and south of the Dumbarton Bridge and also includes Bair Island in San Mateo County. It provides a habitat for hundreds of bird species, including the red-shouldered hawk, the bald eagle and the Western snowy plover. It also serves as a refuge for the California clapper rail and the salt-marsh harvest mouse, both of which are endangered species.
LaRiviere is quick to point out that the movement she helped build never broke down along party lines, something she considers one of its great strengths. The original bill establishing the refuge, and the later bill expanding it, both sailed through Congress with support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
“It didn’t matter what party they were from,” she said. The first bill was signed by Nixon, the second by Reagan, both Republican presidents, a fact she still marvels at given the environmental legislation of that era.
“During those years, even with those Republican presidents, we got some wonderful legislation passed,” she said. It’s part of what makes the current moment so painful for her.
“It hurts me now to see that some of that legislation is threatened,” she said. “It’s painful to watch them destroy what you think maybe you saved once.”
Her bond with Pearson, forged over decades of shared meetings and campaigns, runs deep, the kind of friendship that has outlasted every fight it was built in. Asked to describe Pearson, LaRiviere didn’t hesitate:
“She’s worse,” she said, responding to Pearson’s description of Florence as “terrible,” albeit in the best way possible.
When asked what quality best defines her long-time friend and ally, LaRiviere landed somewhere warmer: “I would say persistent, for good.”
Even now, well past a century old, LaRiviere hasn’t fully stepped back. She remains active with the Citizens’ Committee to Complete the Refuge, the volunteer group she helped found in 1985, and she still worries about what could be lost.
She is particularly concerned by cities still approving development along the fragile seam where marsh meets dry land, especially with sea level rise bearing down.
“What troubles me is the fact that there are still cities on the Bay that are voting for developments along the joining of the tidal marshes and the dry lands,” she said. “And with sea level rise, there’s going to be a lot of trouble with development in that area.”
For all the acreage she’s helped protect, LaRiviere insists the real reward has been the people whom she met over her journey.
“I always tell people who are new to a town, find a wetlands protection group,” she said. “They are the kindest, most interesting, and most affectionate people you will meet.”
