Read more about the 2025 Local Heroes:
Annie Burke, Conservation Action
Mirella Ramos, Environmental Educator
It’s a normal Tuesday morning for Susan Schwartz and her group of “weed warriors”—eight volunteers tucked away in a corner of the Lake Anza parking lot in Tilden Regional Park. And warriors they are. Armed with bright orange weed wrenches and soil knives with pink handles, they barrel through sticks of poison oak to eliminate the green thicket of French broom, a 10-foot-tall fire hazard they have been working to remove from Tilden since 2011.
But dormant in the soil are likely thousands of seeds that can live for decades. “It keeps coming back,” says a volunteer of seven years. Still, Schwartz hasn’t stopped. Now at 81 years old, she gets on the ground and pulls smaller weeds with gloved hands. As the president of the volunteer organization Friends of Five Creeks for more than 27 years, Schwartz has organized weed removal events for thousands of volunteers in the East Bay.
Before leading Friends of Five Creeks, Schwartz was an economics student from Texas who graduated from UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, a time when the idea of changing the world seeped into her skin. She embarked on a journalism career, working for daily papers from Seattle to Alaska, covering local and environmental issues. Forty-two years ago, she arrived again in Berkeley to live in a house alongside Codornices Creek, where her children liked to play. As soon as they were old enough to volunteer, Schwartz and her children joined Friends of Five Creeks to restore not just Codornices Creek but also Middle, Schoolhouse, Cerrito, and Marin creeks—five creeks that run from the Albany and Berkeley hills to the Bay.
Two years after she joined, Schwartz became the organization’s president, and she has since extended its reach across watersheds from Berkeley to Richmond. “We’ve been the janitors for the East Bay Park District” and multiple city governments, she says. Where the government falls short, Schwartz and her volunteers pick up the pieces. Their efforts to control weeds in watersheds have reduced fire hazard at Tilden, preserve biodiversity at Codornices Creek, and lessened flash flooding at Cerrito Creek. And they’ve done more than pull weeds. They install signs, build trails, and plant natives. From intertidal creatures at the Albany Bulb to the woodrat nests in the El Cerrito Hillside Natural Area, interns are documenting how wildlife is changing.
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Still, “nothing’s ever finished,” Schwartz says. Weeds grow back. Replantings can be destroyed. But the goal of Friends of Five Creeks isn’t perfection. “Even if everything we had done had been a failure, it would have been worthwhile, because people came and did something,” Schwartz says. As she has demonstrated, life is about seeing a problem and fixing what you can. “You can get control of the French broom,” Schwartz says. “I hope that leads people to try to do more.”
