Amy Trainer, the executive director of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, announced last week that she has tendered her resignation after five years on the job, though she plans to be available at least through February to help ease the leadership transition. The nonprofit is seeking a replacement director to join by Jan. 1, with a deadline for applications set for Nov. 30.
A Kansas native, Ms. Trainer said she will be moving to Seattle in mid-November and will work as a senior policy advisor for a Native American tribe. She described the job change as a personal choice.
“I have a great base of friends and a network there,” said Ms. Trainer, who was the first staff attorney for Friends of the San Juans in Friday Harbor, Wash., from 2005 to 2007. “Part of it is that for the past 10 years I have done environmental advocacy in very rural communities. I’m ready for a change.”
Solicitations for applicants to interview for the executive director position have been circulated on Facebook and Craigslist. According to Board Member Jerry Meral, the nonprofit is looking for a candidate with nonprofit management experience.
“We’re looking for a skill set instead of a knowledge set,” Mr. Meral said. “It’s a tough job to balance the organization as well as juggle the policy aspects.”
Founded in 1971, the environmental advocacy group has long aimed at preserving the sensitive habitats and landscapes of West Marin, where local, county, state and federal entities converge to divvy up jurisdictions over a unique terrain of waterways, hillsides and coastal communities. Under her leadership, Ms. Trainer said, the E.A.C. ramped up its efforts to influence land-use policies and has been operating “more effectively” than in the past.
“I’ve greatly enhanced our capacity and effectiveness and, I think, our respect in the environmental community,” she said. “We have a broader reach to protect our environment in a way that E.A.C. hasn’t in the past, and we needed that.”
She added the E.A.C. has a current membership of several hundred families, a number down from the peak 1,600-membership mark the E.A.C. enjoyed sometime in the 1990s, according to a former board president, Mark Dowie.
Ms. Trainer helmed the group from 2010 to now, during which time she has called for stricter development regulations to be included in an update of Marin County’s Local Coastal Plan, supported 20-year pastoral zone leases as part of the National Park Service’s Ranch Comprehensive Management Plan and lobbied a series of successful state bills tightening oil-spill prevention policies.
Most contentiously, Ms. Trainer and her group led a grassroots fight against Drakes Bay Oyster Company, which closed after the National Park Service declined to renew its lease. The episode sparked criticisms of Ms. Trainer and the E.A.C., who were accused of relying on questionable science to back claims that the company’s oyster fields were negatively impacting Drakes Estero.
“We were supporting peer-reviewed scientific research,” Ms. Trainer said. “Peer review is a rigorous process, and the people attacking us didn’t have their own peer-reviewed science. We had to maintain the high road and defer to the scientific experts and their research.”
The oyster-company controversy also highlighted tensions between the E.A.C. and West Marin’s agriculture industry, which in previous years had aligned with the nonprofit to secure favorable milk prices and to strengthen organic farming.
Last year, for instance, the board’s only member who worked in agriculture, Mimi Leubberman, resigned and has yet to be replaced with another individual from that sector.
“The E.A.C. and others have really been pushing the coastal agency to regulate agriculture as a form of development,” said Peter Martinelli, who owns Fresh Run Farm in Bolinas and served as an agricultural representative on the E.A.C.’s board from 1998 to 2007. “I think it’s really an effort to define agriculture as environmental impacts and make it a highly regulated activity, which will in a lot of ways continue killing it off in our region.”
Timing didn’t help, Ms. Trainer said, considering she joined the E.A.C. right before the oyster company lost its lease. But Ms. Trainer emphasized that she has taken strides to reconcile with ranchers over the past year and a half, mostly to collaborate on the park’s ranch management plan.
“We’ve been having periodic meetings, having a really productive, civil dialogue,” she said. “As part of our support for [20-year pastoral zone leases], I have proactively engaged the agricultural community.”
Despite criticisms, Ms. Trainer’s colleagues and supporters have praised her dedication to preserving West Marin’s sensitive environment and have defended her approach to conservation. The negative public portrayal of Ms. Trainer, many have said, was an unfortunate byproduct of a complicated, difficult time.
“Unfortunately, Amy has been painted as an ‘environmental extremist’ by those who don’t really know what an ‘environmental extremist’ actually looks like and who could do far worse than having Amy on the other side of the negotiating table,” said Gordon Bennett, an Inverness resident and president of Save Our Seashore, in an email to the Light. “Amy worked hard for this community [and] deserved better than she got. I hope she finds that better wherever she is headed.”