Marc McGinnes: In Love with Earth
Some of our readers may have seen the man on stilts, hovering above the crowds at over eight feet tall, at many of Santa Barbara's past Earth Day celebrations at Alameda Park. That's Marc McGinnes, a leader in the local and national environmental movements that emerged after the 1969 oil platform blowout and oil spill, and a co–founder of the Community Environmental Council. While today, you may find him on stilts, Marc started his life as an “atomic city kid,” raised next to the barbed–wire perimeter of Richland, Washington's Hanford Project Site, where hastily-built nuclear reactors produced plutonium for atomic weapons.
Sadly, both his mother and step–father died of cancer at ages 59 and 65 – but Marc has kept his sense of humor, often joking that he glows in the dark.
At age 17, Marc began studying at Stanford University, where he met Professor Paul Ehrlich (then working on early drafts of his famous bestseller The Population Bomb) and soon-to-be Congressman Pete McCloskey, a pioneering public interest environmental lawyer. Both men became mentors to Marc, and McCloskey – a decorated Marine combat veteran who saw and opposed a coming war in Vietnam – helped him to decide to defer military service and enroll in the UC Berkeley School of Law.
After graduating from law school, Marc passed the bar exam, and after a “break” pursuing postdoctoral work in France and traveling throughout Europe and parts of the Soviet Union, he joined one of San Francisco's most prominent law firms and was well underway to establishing a successful and lucrative career. It was only a short time later, in January of 1969, that the Santa Barbara Oil Spill began, and he received a call from McCloskey urging him to go to Santa Barbara and “get involved.”
Marc went, joined a Santa Barbara law firm, and soon became a leading figure in the community's response to the event. With local civic leader Pearl Chase's blessing, he served as chair of the “January 28 Committee,” the coalition of civic groups that planned and carried out a conference on the first anniversary of the oil spill. Conference leaders presented The Santa Barbara Declaration of Rights, endorsed by prominent environmental and political leaders including both Ehrlich and McCloskey (who had by then served as a co-author of the National Environmental Policy Act and became co–chair of Earth Day). The January 28 Committee was reformed and incorporated as the Community Environmental Council, and Marc served as its founding president, while Paul Relis, Hal Conklin and others took up the work of creating its first projects.Over a long, eventful, and impactful career, Marc established his own independent practice in environmental law, helped create several environmental nonprofits, including Santa Barbara's Environmental Defense Center, a unique public interest environmental law firm for which he was chief counsel, and was a central actor in fighting several unsustainable real estate developments in the region. He was involved in creating the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara and taught in the program for many years.
Marc has published his experiences in the autobiographical book In Love With Earth. Having early on forsaken a potentially lucrative legal career in order to devote himself to earth stewardship, he has remained a man of modest means and lifestyle. Nevertheless, he has generously designated a gift to the Community Environmental Council in his will. We are deeply grateful to Marc for his big heart and for all he has done for the health of the Earth and all of us who depend on it.