Dear Friend of the Mountain,
This year, Save Mount Diablo celebrates forty-five years of caring collaborations and relationships that have produced important and lasting conservation successes for our beloved mountain, its natural surroundings and the larger Bay Area community. This thoughtful coming together, based on shared love and gratitude for these irreplaceable lands, is also the way forward and how we will achieve additional conservation successes for the benefit of current and future generations.
Ted Clement, SMD’s Executive Director and Robert Doyle, General Manager of the East Bay Regional Park District (EBRPD) with Las Trampas Regional Wilderness- EBRPD behind.
When Save Mount Diablo (SMD) was founded in 1971, the mountain was home to just one 6,788-acre park, Mount Diablo State Park. Today, as a result of SMD, our wonderful partners (individual supporters, governmental agencies, foundations, local businesses, etc.), and our collective appreciation of this place, there are more than 40 parks and preserves around the mountain, totaling over 110,000 conserved acres—one of the Bay Area’s most significant assemblages of natural lands and wildlife habitat.
This issue of Diablo Watch acknowledges and celebrates many of our partners—such as the East Bay Regional Park District, California State Parks and the East Contra Costa County Habitat Conservancy—and our collective accomplishments over the past forty-five years while also looking forward.
To further our success of protecting the Mount Diablo area, and the roughly 70,000 acres at risk, we must grow our partnerships and people’s connections to these wild lands as love is the basis for good stewardship. Several new programs and efforts, a number of which are written about here, will help us do that: our new Conservation Collaboration Agreement program with local schools; our new free public hiking series known as Discover Diablo; and our new membership program, known as Friends of the Mountain, which has a special new youth membership category.
We are grateful for you and all you have helped us accomplish over the past forty-five years. Together, combined with new partners, we will take our time sensitive land conservation mission for the Mount Diablo area even further—creating more public benefits that will last for the next forty-five years and well beyond! With Gratitude,
Edward Sortwell Clement, Jr.
Executive Director Save Mount Diablo
