A Voice Crying for the Wilderness : Tireless, Innovative Chief of East Bay Conservation Corps

One of Joanna Lennon’s two brothers is a doctor, the other a lawyer. She sometimes calls herself an Indian chief, and in a sense she is.

Lennon loves taking charge, and gets things done when she is at the helm. Acquaintances say that since childhood she has been independent, loyal, altruistic and strong minded. Without question, she is the heart of the East Bay Conservation Corps.

“She is the driving force behind the program,” said Scott Pineo, manager of watershed and recreation for the East Bay Municipal Utilities District, which has a $226,400 contract to hire East Bay Corps workers. “She is highly respected.”

Lennon’s brother, Michael Lennon, 35, a Los Angeles physician, remembers that his sister commanded respect from an early age. In high school, he said, she was respected as well as moralistic, idealistic and independent.

Michael’s twin, Rick, a state public defender, said: “From day one she was strong minded. She was always real strong minded and independent.”

As an eighth-grader, Lennon felt the Catholic school, where she was getting straight A’s, was “very repressive. It was not the kind of place where I could ask questions. I was constantly getting in trouble for asking a lot of questions.” So her parents moved to Beverly Hills to give her the best public schools. At Beverly Hills High, she swam competitively, became an expert skier, modeled for the Ford Model Agency and earned a 3.6-grade point average.

Designer Her Own Major

In 1965, Lennon entered UC Berkeley, where she designed her own major: Political and Social Philosophy. “I made it up,” Lennon said. “It was a combination of history, political science, philosophy and sociology. Mainly I was interested in why people thought the way they did.”

She was active in student politics during the tumultuous late 1960s. Charles F. Palmer, a Los Angeles attorney who was student body president at Berkeley in 1969, remembers her as being “very effective at involving the more conservative students in progressive political activities.”

Then, as now, Lennon tended to take on more than anyone could handle. In her junior year, she carried 24 units of class work (the norm is 16) and held three jobs, including student head of campus orientation programs, a responsibility that entailed supervision of 10 other students. The heavy course and work load, combined with an all-night Halloween party that provided the last straw, exhausted Lennon, and led to a serious bout with pneumonia that forced her to drop out of school for a quarter.

“She bites off more than even she can chew,” said Jennifer Sansome, a college friend who lives in Cardiff-by-the-Sea.

Lennon doesn’t talk much about it, but during her college years she also played tennis on the university’s women’s club team and spent a lot of time competing in downhill and cross-country ski races.

In a move that would have considerable impact on her future, she became an examiner for the Far West Ski Assn. (now called the Professional Ski Instructors of America-Western Division), which meant she could certify other ski instructors.

Lennon graduated from college in December, 1969. The day she finished school she moved to Sun Valley and skied for four months. She then joined Outward Bound, the international wilderness survival group, where she eventually became an instructor. She also taught at the National Outdoor Leadership School in Wyoming. “I was discovering a whole different way of looking at things,” Lennon said.

Earned a Certificate

In 1973 she moved to Soda Springs, near Lake Tahoe, and managed a cross-country ski school. For the next five winters she managed ski touring schools in the Tahoe area, including a major school at Squaw Valley. Along the way she earned a certificate from the National Avalanche School, where she learned about everything from the physics of snow to where to build ski resorts.

Lennon worked as a firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service in the summer of 1974. The next summer she became a naturalist in the Tahoe National Forest, getting promoted to head naturalist the following summer. She designed and implemented the first visitor information center in Tahoe Natural Forest.

She married artist Craig Meacham in 1975, after having lived with him for six years.

In her free time--and somehow she managed to find quite a bit--Lennon taught wilderness survival. She also became deeply involved with the Special Olympics in the Lake Tahoe area, an activity in which she remains active.

“I was finding there’s an amazing variety of ways to teach, and that the best teaching combines a student’s mental and physical capabilities,” she said.

It was not surprising that Lennon found a relationship between outdoor activities and the philosophy of teaching. Both of them are important to her. “She loves to be outside, doing anything and everything related to the outdoors,” noted her college friend, Jennifer Sansome, who lives in Cardiff-by-the-Sea. “And she likes people who think in terms of the bigger picture instead of just being zeroed in on their own little thing. She likes to go off on big philosophical discussions.”

Her deep interest in teaching took Lennon back to UC Berkeley, where she earned a teaching credential in 1979.

Appalled by Students

As a student teacher in Richmond, Lennon was appalled by high school students who could neither read nor write. She asked a 10th-grade boy to look up a word that starts with “p.” “He started on page one of the dictionary and began thumbing through it,” she said, still angry and incredulous seven years after the incident. “He didn’t know the alphabet.”

She went to the principal, who, Lennon recalls, offered nothing but bromides. Then she spoke at a board of education meeting, telling the board there were illiterate students being passed from grade to grade. “The board took it ‘under advisement.’ It was at that moment that I decided to leave teaching.”

Since she had hit a stone wall with Richmond school officials, Lennon turned her attention to UC Berkeley, where she organized 17 of the 19 student teachers in her class, and petitioned the School of Education to make revisions in its curriculum.

“We thought a lot of the stuff we were being taught was garbage,” Lennon said. “Some of our teachers hadn’t been in a high school classroom in 25 years. Berkeley was very big on theory but very little on practice.”

Lennon said that because of the student petitioning and subsequent discussions the university dropped social science student teaching for two years while the program was revamped.

Disillusioned with the prospect of teaching high school, Lennon enrolled in the master’s degree program in forestry at UC Berkeley. She had no goal except to “help give people control of their environment.” Lennon remained in the program for 2 1/2 years, long enough to earn a master’s degree and do all her course work for a doctorate.

“She stood out for her enthusiasm and dynamism,” recalled Henry Vaux, a professor emeritus who held seminars in the Forestry Department when Lennon was there. “She was an imaginative person with all kinds of bright ideas, and she was not afraid of anything just because she was young. She had a lot of leadership capabilities.”

Recommended to Pritchard

In the spring of 1980, Thomas Pritchard, head of Great Britain’s Nature Conservancy Council lectured at Berkeley. Arnold Schultz, Lennon’s “guiding professor” recommended to Pritchard that he hire Lennon to help with a project he had in England.

“She was highly respected,” Schultz said. “She could do anything she set out to do, and she did it.” As to why he specifically recommended Lennon for Pritchard’s project, Schultz said, “I felt she was the only one of my students who could pull it off.”

Synergy between Pritchard and Lennon was immediate. “He finished my sentences and I finished his,” Lennon said. “It was incredible.”

Among the reasons for their philosophical meld were three ideas they held in common:

--Decisions made from the top of an organization don’t usually work because the people who must implement those decisions don’t feel any responsibility for them.

--People must take charge of their own environments.

--People don’t (but should) define “environment” to include “their neighborhood, their community, their friends.”

Pritchard invited Lennon to London to work on the World Conservation Strategy, which is a worldwide effort to improve the environment.

Lennon split with her husband (she married again last December, to writer Gene Knauer) and flew to England. There, Pritchard assigned her the job of developing the educational element of the Welsh component of the worldwide environmental effort. Lennon also helped pull together other elements of the Welsh program. True to her philosophy, she built a broad-based support system, everyone from dime-store clerks to the Archbishop of Wales. “Most decisions in the United Kingdom are very class-oriented. They are made from the top,” she said. “We organized a classless group and made decisions from the bottom.”

The group put together a conservation plan that considered the Welsh environment from perspectives ranging from agriculture to ethics.

Lennon worked for six months on the Welsh plan. Then she spent another six months in London developing a strategy for an overall British conservation plan.

When she came home to Berkeley in January, 1983, Lennon was determined to get the United States into the World Conservation Strategy by getting “the bellwether state of California” to lead the way.

Concerted World Strategy

“She believes we need to develop a concerted world strategy for protecting the environment,” her husband, Gene Knauer, said. “In terms of people in that environment, she feels strongly that we need to develop some sort of plan for our human resources. We have turned our backs on such a large segment of the population that unless we help them to help themselves, that disenfranchised segment of our people will come back to haunt us.”

Lennon made her move toward bringing California into the World Conservation Strategy by forming a nonprofit institute, organizing a board of directors, and starting to raise money. In the process, she spent her entire $4,500 savings and had no way to support herself.

In the spring of 1983, she put the project on hold after one of her former professors asked her to apply for a job directing the proposed summertime East Bay Conservation Corps.

The job fit her needs to an uncanny degree. It offered a chance to help the environment by helping people help themselves.

“I got the job, and with it $170,000 and a room in a condemned Hayward elementary school,” Lennon said. The money came from a coalition of public agencies and private companies interested in youth and the environment.

Since then she’s increased the budget more than sevenfold and turned the program into a year-round endeavor.

It is a bigger, better rounded, still developing program, a program driven now as it was the day it began, by Joanna Lennon’s passion to serve youth and the environment.