Pat Veesart was a founding member of the Los Padres ForestWatch Board of Directors, where he served for eleven years. This tribute was written on behalf of the ForestWatch team by Executive Director Jeff Kuyper in remembrance of Pat’s conservation legacy.
Los Padres ForestWatch is joining community leaders, advocates, and friends across the Central Coast to honor and celebrate the life of Pat Veesart, our friend and conservation champion who passed away earlier this month.
A Life of Conservation
Pat wore many hats in his decades of work protecting the environment (besides his usual cowboy hat), taking on numerous roles with his six-foot stature: director and organizer for several nonprofit organizations, county planning commissioner, Coastal Commission enforcement supervisor, and a founding board member of Los Padres ForestWatch, where he served for eleven years and helped guide the early growth of our organization.
The places he held dear—Los Padres National Forest, Carrizo Plain National Monument, California’s coast, and the Tongass rainforest in Alaska—would be profoundly different today without Pat’s love for the land, skillful tenacity, and courageous leadership in protecting them.
In 2004, as ForestWatch leaped into the local conservation scene, we needed to find a handful of leaders to serve on our initial Board of Directors—people who knew the land as well as the political landscape, who were bold and strategic thinkers, and who had the deep calling to be trailblazers for a hard-hitting conservation organization. Pat checked every box, and he joined right away.
For the next eleven years he served as a ForestWatch board member, playing a key role in charting the organization’s mission to protect Los Padres National Forest and expanding our work into adjacent landscapes like Carrizo Plain National Monument. He inspired us to strengthen the Resource Management Plan, end livestock overgrazing on an adjacent ecological reserve, hold the line against new oil drilling in the monument, remove miles of abandoned barbed wire fencing, and stop a plan to open a bear hunting season in San Luis Obispo County. Coming as no surprise, these campaigns were all successful, as was often the case when Pat became involved with a cause and a landscape that struck at his core.
The Carrizo Plain
Amongst all the places Pat worked to protect, the Carrizo Plain was where he felt most at home. He was a familiar face at monument advisory committee meetings, wrote countless letters to decision-makers and elected officials, hiked its ridgelines, foothills, and grasslands, observed its changing seasons year after year, and devoted so much of himself to stewarding this vast and magnificent landscape.
A Legacy Across the Central Coast
The Carrizo isn’t the only landscape where Pat left his conservation legacy. He was one of the key leaders in a coalition that successfully defeated plans to build a golf course, luxury hotel, dude ranch, and marina at San Simeon along San Luis Obispo County’s north coast. The gateway to the famed Big Sur coastline would look dramatically different today without his leadership.
As Executive Director of the Sitka Conservation Society, he helped stop commercial timber sales in pristine roadless areas throughout Alaska’s Tongass rainforest. As a leader of the San Luis Obispo Bicycle Coalition, he pioneered an effort to persuade the City of SLO to dedicate annual funding for bicycle lanes. He served for several years on the San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission and was a key player in the campaign that convinced SLO voters to turn down state water imports that would have threatened further urban sprawl. Pat was also one of the early Executive Directors of ECOSLO and an organizer for the Sierra Club.
During his most recent role with the California Coastal Commission’s enforcement division, Pat served as caretaker of a privately-owned ranch house near Soda Lake in the Carrizo Plain National Monument. He held a deep personal connection to this landscape. He reveled in its stark beauty, embraced its rugged grittiness, and found refuge in its glorious solitude.
A grassroots community organizer at heart, Pat knew the power of people in shaping the future of wild places of California’s Central Coast. He also knew the power of good people serving in government, and the importance of enforcing environmental laws. As a Planning Commissioner for the County of San Luis Obispo, he guided sound land use decisions. Later, as one of the Coastal Commission’s chief enforcement officers, Pat worked to ensure the preservation of public access to our coast—from Malibu to the North Coast—and the protection of coastal habitats.
In recognition of his lifetime achievements, ForestWatch presented Pat with our annual Wilderness Legacy Award in Ojai, California in 2015. More than 300 people gathered to celebrate and honor Pat’s work.
Pat and the Carrizo
Perhaps the most profound threat to the Carrizo Plain came in 2017, when the Interior Department considered shrinking or eliminating several national monuments across the country. The Carrizo Plain was on the list, but Pat—and so many others—were determined to not let that happen. Speaking on stage at a public rally in downtown SLO, Pat shared why the Carrizo deserved protection:
“It’s a place for us to go, it’s a place for us to recreate, to enjoy beauty, to find peace and solitude. Those kinds of opportunities are increasingly rare in the crazy world that we live in. We have a national monument right here in San Luis Obispo, and we have to make sure that monument remains.”
The crowd burst into applause throughout his three-minute speech. It was one of many examples of how Pat could connect with people, help them understand what’s at stake, and inspire them to act.
Very few people are lucky enough to know a place as well as Pat knew the Carrizo. The first time he invited me out for a visit, I immediately understood how this landscape could pull and twist and tug at a person’s conservation compass. Pat’s work would frequently take him to far reaches of the state, but he would always come back to the Carrizo, his true home.
After that first visit, he had me hooked, and each time I returned to the Carrizo Plain I was drawn as much to the landscape as to Pat’s passion and vision for it. Sometimes, I would meet up with him to document ecological damage from livestock grazing or monitor oil drilling in one of the oil fields grandfathered into Carrizo Plain National Monument.
Other times, it was simply to explore the natural marvels of the valley floor or the Caliente and Temblor mountains that flanked it. Every visit to the Carrizo was just as much a visit with Pat. Even when I didn’t see him, his presence—and watchful eye—was felt everywhere. That won’t ever change.
For those of us who know Pat, and who know the Carrizo, that feeling will always be with us whenever we visit, gaze across the plain, explore its wildness, and watch pronghorn race across the landscape. Pat’s presence is woven into the Carrizo, and his legacy will forever guide us as we continue his good work.
