This past weekend, I attended the memorial service for Bill Davoren, an old friend and colleague.  Bill founded the Bay Institute and recently passed away at the age of 83.  He was an elder in our movement.  I was lucky to have the opportunity to work alongside Bill when Pacific Environment had its offices in Fort Cronkhite on the Pacific Ocean in the early 1990s.

He first retired from the federal government in 1981 and founded the Bay Institute.  Ten years later, he retired for the second time, this time from the Bay Institute.  But he couldn’t stop working – he founded the Aral Sea Information Committee to build connections with Central Asian environmentalists who were fighting the destruction of the Aral Sea – one of the Soviet Union’s worst environmental disasters.  That’s when I met Bill.

Bill was an old-west style cowboy who had moved to the Bay Area when working for the Department of Interior.  Originally from Colorado, he was always a committed environmentalist, trying to figure out how to stop crazy water diversion schemes and protect our water resources.  He tried working within the system, and eventually realized that the best way to keep the system honest was to watchdog the system from the outside.

At the memorial services, people remembered Bill as a “raging environmentalist.”  Yes, he was one of the good guys who would read endless amounts of water policy, go to all the public meetings, and pester government officials to keep them honest.  He knew how government worked and was always ready to help push them for better water policy.

I don’t think of Bill as “raging.”  I think of him as a jovial mentor who was always trying to do the right thing.  He was one of the people who taught me that we need constant vigilance to watchdog government and business – and that you can have a sense of humor at the same time!