Champion of Nature’s Wealth Richly Rewarded for Activism

The unconventional way Lucy Blake defines wealth has made her, unexpectedly, a conventionally wealthy woman.

On Tuesday, Blake won a MacArthur Foundation grant of $500,000, to be spent any way she pleases. It’s a reward, MacArthur officials say, for the simple but profound message she has preached in towns and cities scattered across the spine of the Sierra Nevada for the last six years. Her sermon: The region’s wealth includes alpine vistas, pure streams and historic downtowns. Economic prosperity and environmental health need not be separated.

Blake has united more than 500 business, environmental and local government groups behind her nonprofit Sierra Business Council. The name makes the group sound like a chamber of commerce knockoff, but since Blake created it six years ago the council has won national recognition for its ecumenical approach.

News of Blake’s honors last week was delivered by solar-powered phone to the lodge in Costa Rica where she was vacationing with her husband.

“They seem to be looking for people with some kind of proven track record of creative enterprise, and they invest fully and unconditionally in those people,” said the wiry, spirited long-distance runner, who lives on a cattle ranch north of Truckee. “It’s a remarkable program.”

Blake winces at mention of the “genius” label often attached to MacArthur Fellowship winners. She said she’s not sure yet what she’ll do with the $500,000 coming to her, no strings attached, over the next five years. For now, she said, she’ll show up for work as usual in her cramped second-story office in downtown Truckee, where her desk is a slab of glass propped on two file cabinets.

Someday, said Blake, the MacArthur money may afford her the time and financial security to sell nationally and globally what she calls “a new reality”--the notion that the free services of nature, from water filtration to pollination, are essential elements of prosperity.

“In this country we pride ourselves on caring about environmental quality, but we’re really backward in the way we understand the natural world,” said Blake, who studied history at Brown and grew up abroad as the daughter of a California-bred diplomat. “We don’t understand it as a system that supports . . . our societies.”

Those who have watched the Sierra council swell from a two-employee operation to a force with a staff of 18 credit Blake’s powerful writing, curbed ego and common-sense arguments for its success.

“What you have in these sorts of regions is a really polarized environment,” said Roger Kahn, owner of four Lake Tahoe ski and snowboard stores. “You have the pine-cone-eater kind of people, who want to preserve everything in its pristine state. Then you have a whole other group of business, economic folks that years ago would have paved the lake if not for environmental groups. Then here comes the Sierra Business Council and says, ‘Wait a minute. This isn’t what it’s all about. It’s about creating a sustainable environmental and economic organization that supports us all.’ I really believe in that formula.”

Three summers ago the council produced a handbook for rural communities trying to accommodate thousands of new residents without destroying the natural beauty that attracted newcomers in the first place. Lately, the council has been trying to take its own advice by helping Placer County identify its richest ecological resources for preservation.

Throughout the Sierra Nevada in the last 25 years the population has tripled to nearly 700,000, but 70% of the residents live in three counties just east of Sacramento: Placer, El Dorado and Nevada.

“If nothing happens there, it will look like Orange County,” said William Stewart, chief of fire and resource assessment for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “It will be wall-to-wall subdivisions.”

The Sierra council helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars to fund the landmark planning effort in Placer County, which aims to reduce conflict by earmarking the most valuable open space before it is overrun by subdivisions. Nevada County recently teamed up with the council to launch a similar effort.

The council is also known nationally for its Sierra Nevada Wealth Index, first published in 1996 to track the region’s social, natural and financial capital.

It used 42 measures, including teenage pregnancy rates, computer ownership, old-growth forest acreage and tourism taxes, to provide a snapshot of a region where the economic engine is no longer logging or mining but a quality of life--including natural beauty, low crime rates and good schools--that attracts retirees, high-tech entrepreneurs and small-business owners.

The hard numbers in the council’s report give businesspeople greater faith in dealing with environmentalists and planners, said Stewart, who helped write the first wealth index report.

After nearly a decade as executive director of the California League of Conservation Voters, Blake said she came to realize that the best vehicle for change might be a cadre of forward-thinking businesspeople with credence in the community and money to invest. A recent recruit is Chico-based Tom DiGiovanni.

“As a developer I’m drawn to any area that has this kind of leadership, where people understand that you’ve got to preserve the landscape but you’ve got to also grow,” he said. “. . . Lucy’s able to communicate with incredible enthusiasm, and you feel like you’re letting her down if you don’t do what she asks.”