A leading Bay Area environmental group that has worked to limit Silicon Valley sprawl and preserve open space for more than 60 years in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties has chosen a new leader.
Julie Hutcheson will become the new executive director of Green Foothills, the group announced Tuesday. Based in Palo Alto, Green Foothills was founded in 1962 by novelist Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner and 26 other community leaders at a time when explosive post-War II growth was were turning orchards and country roads into freeways and office parks.
In more recent decades, the group, previously known as Committee for Green Foothills, has won drawn-out battles to preserve thousands of acres farmland and open space in Coyote Valley on San Jose’s southern edges, an area Cisco and Apple once eyed as world headquarters in the 1980s and 1990s. It also helped convince Caltrans to abandon plans to reroute Highway 1 over the hills at Devil’s Slide near Pacifica and build a tunnel through the Coast Range instead.
The group has pushed for tech billionaire Vinod Khosla to open Martins Beach near Half Moon Bay to the public. And it has advocated for the preservation and restoration of former Cargill industrial salt evaporation ponds around San Francisco Bay’s southern edges back to wetlands for fish, wildlife and public recreation.
Hutcheson has worked for the group since 2013 in a variety of roles, including legislative advocate. She succeeds Megan Fluke, who served as executive director for 10 years before stepping down to work as a non-profit consultant and leadership coach.
Hutcheson said some of her main priorities in the coming years will be for the organization to continue to oppose plans to build a gravel quarry on Sargent Ranch south of Gilroy, to expand wildlife corridors between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range, to support efforts to protect and restore bay wetlands, and to train a new generation of environmental advocates from varying backgrounds.
“In the face of the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis, our work is more vital than ever,” she said.
The group also is pushing to convert a major limestone quarry in the Cupertino Hills, which is owned by Lehigh cement, to be restored as a 3,500-acre open space or wildlife preserve. The company, which has had hundreds of violations for air pollution, water pollution and other issues, closed the cement plant at the quarry earlier this year.
Hutcheson is the co-author of two publications on agriculture in the Santa Clara Valley: “Small Farms, Big Potential: Growing a resilient local food system” (2020) and “Santa Clara County Food System Assessment” (2013). She holds an M.A. in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Virginia.