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THE BOARD OF SUPERVISORS
CONTRA COSTA COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
January 24,2006 Adjournment
On this day the Board of Supervisors adjourned the meeting in memory of Pioneering environmental activist
Jean Siri who died Friday of natural causes near her San Pablo home. She was 85.
Siri was a persistent advocate of public access to East Bay parks and the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay,
but she was equally determined to fight industrial pollution in West Contra Costa County and to build programs tc
help the homeless. She was mayor of El Cerrito twice during the 1980s and a member of the East Bay Regional P
directors from 1992 until her death.
Born March 11, 1920,, in Lakota,N.D., Siri graduated from Jamestown College with a degree in biology in 1942.
She spent two years in the Navy and on Dec. 3, 1947,married William Siri, a nuclear physicist who became a
famed mountaineer and president of the Sierra Club.
Despite the towering figure her husband cut in the Bay Area during the formative years of modem environmentali
spent seven years as a staff biologist at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, did not sit on the sidelines.
She was part of an era when East Bay women played a particularly prominent role in fighting development aroun(
the Bay and on Mount Diablo. "Save the Bay was built by women and she was a good example of the kind of won
accomplish things that men said were impossible,,things like saving the Bay,," said David Lewis, executive directc
of Save the Bay. William Siri died in 2004.
As a couple,, the Siris were a powerhouse in the modem environmental movement as it was taking shape in the Ba
Area during the 1950s, 1960s,and 1970s. In the 1950s, Siri, Barbara Vincent and Lucretia Edwards formed a trio t
battles to stop development along the Richmond shoreline. They also organized early efforts to fight for cleaner
air around western Contra Costa's refinery and chemical plants.
"They lived history, and they lived it well," said Susan Prather,, an advocate of the homeless who in the 1980s,
teamed up with Siri and Fancheon Christner to form a group patterned after the earlier trio.
"We made it our business to tell people about homelessness," Prather said. "Jean never stopped raising hell."
Contra Costa Supervisor John Goia said even when he disagreed with her, Siri's blunt honesty was refreshing.
"I think she just cared about improving the place in which she lived," Goia said. "You knew how she felt,
and she meant it."
THIS IS A MATTER FOR RECORD PURPOSES ONLY
NO BOARD ACTION WAS TAKEN
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