Polly Dyer: A Fighter By Nature -- Longtime Conservation Leader In The State Doesn't Plan To Slow Down In Retirement

If Polly Dyer hadn't moved to Washington in 1950, environmentalists say, the state map might look a lot different today.

No North Cascades National Park. No wilderness areas - for that matter, no Wilderness Act.

Olympic National Park might not include the rain forests. Backpackers who hike the park's wild coastal strip, longest roadless coastline in the lower 48 states, might share that shore with cars.

Dyer played a big role in all those fights. She has been a leader in the state's conservation movement for more than four decades, since long before the word "environmentalist" was coined.

"If you think that as one small individual you can't make a difference, you haven't met Polly Dyer," says Darlene Madenwald, past president of the Washington Environmental Council.

"Tireless" is the adjective other environmentalists use most often in describing Dyer, now 74. She still has no plans to slow down or drop out.

But she did retire this summer from the University of Washington's Institute for Environmental Studies, where she organized conferences for 20 years. Environmentalists figure that's reason enough to honor her for a lifetime's commitment to the cause.

More than 100 - many recruited to and schooled in the movement by Dyer - gave her a surprise party last month.

When Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, Gov. Mike Lowry and others dedicated the new Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary this summer, she was the only environmentalist on the podium.

The peninsula is Dyer's primary passion. She has served as president of Olympic Park Associates, a watchdog group, for 21 years, leading the fight in the 1970s to add spectacular Shi Shi Beach and Point of the Arches to the park.

Dyer was the first non-Californian on the national Sierra Club board. The North Cascades Conservation Council, which led the fight for that national park, was born in her living room.

She suggested some of the language now codified in the Wilderness Act. She has led the Puget Sound Alliance and the Mountaineers' conservation committee, among other groups.

Respect from industry

Conflict, especially with the timber industry, has been a constant. But one industry leader has nothing bad to say about Dyer, despite past and present differences.

She's an honorable and impressive opponent; articulate, straightforward, always civil, says Bill Jacobs, executive director of the Washington Forest Protection Association.

"Just because you disagree with her doesn't mean she considers you a disagreeable person," Jacobs said.

A lifetime of environmental activism was an unexpected turn for a woman who says she grew up an introvert in a family that had little to do with the outdoors. "Mother used to say she didn't know where I got it from," Dyer says.

Her father was a career Coast Guardsman whose family followed him from post to post. When he was transferred to Ketchikan, Alaska, in 1940, Dyer began exploring the mountains near town.

She says she first felt the call of the wild while hiking on Deer Mountain, above Ketchikan.

The view was inspiring, Dyer remembers, and she felt especially close to nature. "God's World," an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem she had memorized in high school, popped into her brain.

She still can recite it today:

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!

Thy winds, thy wide gray skies!

Thy mists that roll and rise!

Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag

And all but cry with colour . . .

Dyer met her husband in Ketchikan. Today they celebrate their 49th wedding anniversary. "I like to say I married into the Sierra Club," she says.

John Dyer, a chemical engineer, was a world-class rock-climber and an old friend of David Brower, who would become one of the nation's best-known environmental leaders.

Before moving to Alaska, John Dyer had been an officer in the Sierra Club's Bay Area chapter.

The young couple helped start a conservation group in Ketchikan and remained active in environmental causes after moving to Berkeley, Calif., in 1947. "John was the active one," Dyer remembers. "I was still a tag-along."

They moved to Auburn in 1950 when John's company opened a plant there, and promptly joined the Mountaineers.

The couple backpacked in the Cascades and Olympics. Polly led a Girl Scout troop. She wasn't much for crafts, she remembers, but the girls went on lots of hikes.

Moved up quickly

The first group to award Dyer an office was the Mountaineers' conservation committee.

"They said, `Polly, you've been to secretarial school. You can take shorthand. You be secretary,' " she remembers.

"But in the conservation community, the secretary is the one who knows everything that's going on."

She moved quickly from the back benches to the front row. President Truman's lame-duck executive order adding the coastal strip to Olympic National Park in 1953 had provoked a backlash.

Gov. Arthur Langlie appointed a committee, most of its members pro-logging, to look into whether up to one-quarter of the park should be transferred back to the Forest Service. Dyer won a seat on the panel. "She was the token environmentalist," David Brower remembers, "and she turned the thing around."

That was the first of many high-profile struggles. "I was a housewife," Dyer remembers. "Johnny supported me, and I worked as a conservationist."

She studied. She lobbied. She went to lots of meetings. And she discovered a talent for organizing.

When business interests were promoting a highway along Olympic National Park's coastal strip in 1958, Dyer put together a three-day, 22-mile protest hike from Lake Ozette to Rialto Beach.

Among the backpackers: U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, a Washington native; most of the country's conservation leaders; and representatives of five newspapers, three magazines, and three TV and radio stations.

The plan to pave fizzled.

Dyer has organized conferences on wilderness every other year since 1956. They served an important morale-boosting and network-building role for the nascent Northwest environmental movement.

"It was a real revelation in those days to find out other people were interested in protecting wilderness besides you," says Dale Jones, who headed the Seattle office of Friends of the Earth for more than 15 years.

Amid all the activism, Dyer somehow found time in her 40s to go back to college, earning a geography degree from the University of Washington in 1970.

She met Dan Evans, then a young legislator, in the early 1960s, when they worked together to pass a bill regulating billboards. They have remained close; as governor, he appointed her to the first state Forest Practices Board in 1974.

Seattle lawyer Joe Mentor, who worked environmental issues for Evans in the Senate, remembers listening to one Dyer pitch and giving an ambiguous response - only to find out later that she'd already met with his boss and won his support.

A home for meetings

Home for the Dyers for the past 30 years has been a house in Lake City with a commanding view of Magnuson Park, Lake Washington and Mount Rainier. It's nice, Dyer says - but what really sold her on the place in 1964 was a living room large enough to host big environmental meetings.

Dyer still keeps a box of toys around to entertain children whose parents drag them to strategy sessions.

The Dyer home is a monument to the Northwest environment. Pictures of mountains, beaches, beargrass, grizzlies and loons line the walls. Thick government environmental studies cover a lamp table.

The telephone looks like a duck. It doesn't ring, it chirps. The vanity plates on the cars outside read MARMOT and H2OUZEL (water ouzel, also known as the dipper bird).

Dyer plans to spend the next few months archiving her papers at the university and traveling.

A reunion of conservationists who helped pass the 1964 Wilderness Act is scheduled for early September in Missoula.

"Johnny wants to show me the desert," Dyer says, "and I've never seen Dinosaur National Monument."

Busy retirement

But she'll be back in Seattle in time to organize the next wilderness conference, slated for early October. Now that she's retired, Dyer can devote 200 percent to the movement, other environmentalists say only half-jokingly.

"John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1893," says Dick Fiddler, a club leader from Seattle, "and most of the rest of us can't figure how he did it without Polly."

She's even getting some strokes from old adversaries these days.

At a Weyerhaeuser Co. "town meeting" in Seattle this summer, Dyer reminded CEO Jack Creighton that another company executive had called her a "black hat" at a forum years ago.

A few days later Creighton sent Dyer a big white Stetson.