Jake Sigg, one of California’s best-known advocates for protecting native biodiversity, died on June 10, one week after his 99th birthday, in his longtime Sunset District home in San Francisco. He grew public appreciation of native plant communities and ecological restoration in California and inspired and mentored scores of professionals in the field. His legacy includes playing a vital role in forming San Francisco’s network of protected natural areas and supporting the work of the California Invasive Plant Council (Cal-IPC) and the California Native Plant Society (CNPS).
Jake grew up on a ranch in rural Montana without running water or electricity for much of his childhood. Visiting San Francisco as a Navy recruit after high school in 1945, he was enchanted by its many cultural offerings, including the theater, ballet, and symphony. Once he finished college in Montana, he moved to San Francisco in 1950. After having tried his hand at many different jobs, Jake found his true passion in 1959, as a gardener for the City.
Jake worked several park beats over his three decades with the City. His years as a lead gardener of the California Native Plant section of Strybing Arboretum (now called the San Francisco Botanical Garden) brought him satisfaction and influence. While working at Crocker Amazon Park and McLaren Park in the 1980s, Jake witnessed still extant native grasslands threatened by the spread of fennel and other invasive plants. He began to realize how special San Francisco’s remaining natural areas were, and how unique their biodiversity was. This laid the foundation for his life’s work: preserving and stewarding native plant and wildlife communities.
His conservation work involved many different activities. He founded and participated in regular weekly work parties to remove invasive plants. He shared his botanical knowledge with others. He spoke to decision-makers at City Hall, at the State Capitol in Sacramento, and in Washington, DC. He served in leadership roles for CNPS and helped form the organization that is now Cal-IPC.
“Jake’s restoration legacy spans the entire city, and there is not a natural area in San Francisco that he has not helped to improve in some meaningful way,” wrote Christopher Campbell, the chief natural resource specialist for the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department, and Jake’s friend, in a tribute. “I imagine being with Jake is, in many ways, like being with John Muir.”
After Jake retired in 1990, he devoted himself to ecological conservation. With his top partner, local environmental activist Greg Gaar, he served on the City’s Open Space Committee where he advocated for the City to acquire many of the natural areas that were still in private hands. Jake made plant lists for each of these native habitat remnants throughout the City, creating a foundation of knowledge for the CNPS Yerba Buena Chapter, as well as the City’s Recreation and Parks Department (RPD) and other agencies. Jake ultimately convinced the RPD to create the Natural Areas Program (now called the Natural Resources Division) to lead community volunteers in stewarding the coastal scrub, grassland, wetland, and oak woodland habitats throughout the park system.
Though Jake was a shy person, he was able to speak knowledgeably and passionately when testifying at public meetings or describing native plants in the field. By default, he became a lead advocate and a lead organizer—not his most comfortable role—in the local conservation movement.
“His voice mattered especially in places like the Presidio, where, even during the Army period and through the transition to National Park stewardship, he helped insist that the remnant dunes, grasslands, coastal scrub, and rare plant habitats were not vacant or ornamental landscapes, but irreplaceable fragments of San Francisco’s original ecological inheritance,” wrote Lewis Stringer, associate director of natural resources at Presidio Trust, in an email tribute.
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Being a leader put Jake in the line of fire when conservation of native plants ran into competing issues, like the desire of some dog owners and professional dog walkers to use natural areas in San Francisco to exercise pets.
Around the time the “dog wars” exploded, Jake started his popular email newsletter, Nature News. Over the next twenty years, it became a valued source of information on ecologically relevant topics (as well as a smorgasbord of poetry, politics, history, and astronomy) with alerts about issues that needed attention from conservationists. Jake enjoyed writing and the discussions that ensued when readers would write responses to his views in the newsletter.
In 1998, CNPS published a special issue of their journal Fremontia (now called Artemisia) on the topic of invasive plants. In it was an article by Jake titled, “The Role of Herbicides in Protecting Biodiversity,” expressing his view, based on years of experience, that herbicides are sometimes essential for controlling invasive plants and protecting native plants. Given that environmentalists often fight against pesticide use, the idea of incorporating them into the land steward’s integrated pest management (IPM) toolbox runs counter to common assumptions held by some of the general public about how to protect the environment. CNPS’s recently updated herbicide policy aligns well with the viewpoint Jake so cogently presented.
Though Jake never served on the board of directors for Cal-IPC, he was a key player in the organization’s formation in the early 1990s, and he attended board meetings for a decade. Together with Don Mayall of Palo Alto and Bob Case of Concord, he led the CNPS Invasive Exotics Committee. As CNPS local chapters initiated stewardship work parties to address invasive plants, these three represented CNPS in advocacy efforts to strengthen stewardship policy at the state and federal levels. They attended Cal-IPC’s annual Day at the Capitol events in Sacramento to educate legislators about the impacts of invasive plants and to gain their support for funding of the state’s local Weed Management Areas (WMAs).
Jake had a special interest in biological control agents as an effective landscape-level management strategy for widespread weed species. He was a regular advocate at the USDA Agricultural Research Service lab in Albany, California, encouraging development of biocontrol agents for various high-priority plants. (Agencies even flew Jake to Washington, DC, to testify on the need for biological control agents that protect native habitats.) He led fundraising efforts that supported USDA’s work in South Africa, finding potential biocontrol agents for Cape-ivy, a scourge of coastal watersheds in northern California that has spread rapidly over the last five decades. After years of host specificity research and regulatory permitting, one agent—the Cape-ivy shoot tip-galling fly—has been successfully released and become established in California, while a second potential agent, a leaf- and stem-mining moth, is still being researched.
Jake’s knowledge, passion, and eloquence made him a beloved conservation leader, though he had no aspiration to be revered. He had a talent for combining thoughtful, well-grounded arguments with passionate exhortations. He encouraged us not to be “indifferent to the rending of nature’s fabric…” but to dedicate ourselves to protecting “the miraculous diversity of life we have inherited.” The work of stewarding California’s native biodiversity will be carried on by the many people Jake has inspired, building on the foundation he and others have built.
Jake’s memoir, Notes on a Long Life, can be ordered here.
