Elna Bakker; Author and Environmentalist

Elna S. Bakker, a self-taught naturalist who wrote the classic book “An Island Called California,” about the state’s natural history and ecology, has died. She was 73.

Mrs. Bakker, an elementary school teacher who married a professor of biology, died in her native Los Angeles on May 26, it was learned this week.

In addition to her respected 1971 book, often reprinted by UC Press, Mrs. Bakker was the co-author of “The Great Southwest,” published in 1972, and “Desert Journal,” printed in 1977.

A lifelong resident of Los Angeles who traveled the globe, Mrs. Bakker once told The Times during a jaunt along the Angeles Crest Highway: “You can stand here and point out five or six different natural communities, [such as] coastal sage scrub, riparian forest and moist slope woodland. You can’t do that anywhere in Kansas. That’s what is so exciting here, the diversity!”

An environmental activist since the 1940s, Mrs. Bakker was a founding member of the Committee for the Preservation of the Tule Elk and made documentary nature films about the American Southwest, the Caribbean and Africa.

She served for 12 years as executive secretary of the Southern California Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, during which time she was instrumental in the group’s acquisition of the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve.

She was an educational consultant to the Oakland Museum, the Los Angeles County Nature Centers and Earthside Nature Center in Pasadena.

Mrs. Bakker had served on the boards of several environmental organizations and at the time of her death was president emeritus of the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wildflowers and Native Plants.

The former Elna Sundquist was educated at UCLA and was married to the late Gerhard Bakker Jr.