Environmental Activist Fern Pirkle Dies

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Fern Pirkle
Fern Pirkle

Environmental leader and preservationist Fern Pirkle died at her Newport Beach home Friday, Nov. 11. She was 90.

Pirkle was the founder and president of Friends of the Newport Coast and led the fight against the Irvine Company to preserve as open space nearly 10,000 acres of the Irvine Ranch that bordered the sea between Corona del Mar and Laguna Beach.

From the outset, the Friends’ weighed in on a seemingly lopsided battle: a newly transplanted Newport Beach realtor audaciously challenged the master plan mapped out by Don Bren, one of the nation’s richest men and one of the county’s largest landowners.

“People told me I was crazy to think I could take on the Irvine Company,” Pirkle said in a 2011 interview. “We fooled them all.”

For many years, the organization established in 1976 pursued a lawsuit against the Irvine Company to limit their development along what is now known as the Newport Coast. Along the way, the advocates successfully challenged the density of development permissible, limiting home building to 2,600 units, eliminating high-rise office towers and preserving 79 percent of the area as open space and wildlife habitat. When initially approved in 1976 by the Board of Supervisors, the Irvine Company’s plans included multiple resort hotels and 12,000 homes for 38,000 people.

Among the Friends’ biggest successes was championing the 1981 purchase of 2,807 acres of what was then known as the Irvine Coast for $32.5 million to become Crystal Cove State Park, the most expensive in state history.

In 2003, Pirkle earned the ultimate accolade, the grudging respect of an opponent. At an awards ceremony where a tree was planted in her honor at the Bonita Canyon Sports Park, Carol Hoffman, a former Irvine Company executive, lauded Pirkle as a worthy adversary.

In 2011, with the opening of the El Moro campground at Crystal Cove State Park and the Friends’ final public-access goal realized, its board voted to dissolve.

Pirkle had a long history of fighting for the causes she believed in, according to her daughter Joan Pirkle Smith.

In the 1960s, she marched in the civil rights movement and against the war in Vietnam. She was a founding member of the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union and president of the Louisville League of Women Voters.

She is survived by her daughter, Joan Pirkle Smith, her son, David Pirkle, her husband Gary Booth, her brother Harold Hart, as well as two stepchildren, Steven Booth and Jenny Ellsworth, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.

A public memorial will be held in January. For details please email [email protected].

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Sierra Club.

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