Nature Conservancy exec quits the agency, but not the work

Elliot Marks was fresh out of law school when a daunting task landed on his desk: His boss, then-Gov. Dan Evans, wanted to preserve a huge swath of Pacific Ocean shoreline from logging.

Marks shopped the concept to timber companies, and "it scared the hell out of them," Evans said. But Marks' negotiations helped expand Olympic National Park to include the now-treasured Lake Ozette and Shishi Beach.

It was his first big conservation deal, but certainly not his last. Today, nearly three decades later, Marks is leaving The Nature Conservancy's Seattle office, where he was involved with more than a billion dollars of land preservation deals.

"It hooked me," Marks said of his first such deal, as Evans' natural-resources aide. "When you get it done, it will be there forever."

His Nature Conservancy work has built a fan club of powerful and wealthy benefactors. "He's a true believer and enthusiast," Evans said. "And he's a real fighter. Put those together and it's a potential combination."

"He's been a longtime mover and shaker of big-picture conservation issues in the Northwest," said Doug Walker, chairman and chief executive officer of the software firm WRQ, who also is Marks' kayaking partner and a member of the Washington state Nature Conservancy board.

Marks, 58, said that after 27 years he is leaving the organization but not the work.

"I feel a huge privilege to do anything that long, but I didn't want to spend my whole career there," he said over coffee near his Alki Beach home.

The Nature Conservancy, based in Arlington, Va., is being investigated by Congress and the Internal Revenue Service after a Washington Post newspaper series exposing too-cozy relationships and deals with donors. None of the newspaper's findings nor the congressional probe has questioned any Conservancy dealings in the Northwest.

In a subsequent staff reorganization, Marks' job as the Seattle regional director was eliminated, and he said he declined to move to San Francisco to take another job with the Conservancy.

The world's largest and wealthiest conservation organization, The Nature Conservancy is described as the environmental-activist group for political moderates. On its Northwest board of directors it has kept a seat for a representative of the timber companies. The organization rarely sues, but instead uses donations to set aside conservation land.

Since Marks joined the organization in 1977, The Nature Conservancy has put 400,000 acres in the Northwest under protective status.

One of his most significant legacies was in helping create the state's land-transfer program, which has saved more than 70,000 acres of state-owned land from logging, including areas surrounding Mount Si and Tiger Mountain.

"He's always had the personality of a Hubert Humphrey, the happy warrior," said Denis Hayes, president of Seattle's Bullitt Foundation. "He wants to make things work."

Marks said he is now job hunting. But there is no question about what line of work he will be in.

While in law school at University of California, Berkeley, he also got a master's in divinity.

He couches conservation in spiritual terms: "It is the sense of nature that brings us closer to godliness. It is immoral for a generation to leave the planet in worse shape."

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com