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I grew up in Marin County. It was my home for more than 50 years. It is the place that shaped my life’s work.

Like many, I was priced out. Today, looking back at Marin from my home on the Costalegre coast in Mexico, distance provides  untainted clarity. Stepping away from Marin, I see evermore clearly that its spectacular landscape did not remain beautiful by accident. It was fiercely, brilliantly defended.

The geography reflects this history of gratitude. Walking through the ancient groves of Muir Woods,  looking across the bay to Angel Island’s Mount Livermore, driving through the Robin Williams Tunnel and navigating Peter Behr Drive is a reminder. These names anchor Marin’s civic soul, they are important heroes.

Yet, if you walk through the heart of Mill Valley today, there seemingly is a glaring, tragic omission in the landscape of gratitude. There is no public monument, memorial grove, nor a plaque honoring two of the most consequential environmental pioneers in American history — both of whom were longtime Mill Valley residents: Huey Johnson and Phyllis Faber.

As a lifelong environmental activist/journalist, I had the privilege of calling Johnson and Faber my close friends and mentors. I witnessed how their radical, strategic advocacy shaped Marin. To the casual passerby or recently arrived resident, their names mean nothing. But in the history of conservation, they were titans.

Faber, who died in 2023 at 95 years old, was a towering figure in coastal wetlands science and grassroots mobilization. Armed with degrees in zoology from Mount Holyoke College and microbiology from Yale University, she arrived in Marin in 1970 and immediately put her expertise to work. She championed Proposition 20,  creating the California Coastal Commission in 1972, and later served on it.

Her most enduring local triumph came in 1980, as co-founder of the Marin Agricultural Land Trust alongside rancher Ellen Straus. At a time when developers eyed West Marin’s rolling hills for massive subdivisions, Faber drew a line in the soil. By creating agricultural conservation easements, MALT didn’t just save open space; it saved the family farms that form the backbone of Marin’s rural economy. Today, more than 55,000 acres are permanently protected because of their genius.

Johnson, who died in 2020 at 87, was an equally unstoppable force of nature. In the late 1960s, developers planned Marincello — a massive development in the Marin Headlands that would’ve crammed 50 apartment towers, shopping centers and housing for 30,000 people into pristine wilderness. As the western director of the Nature Conservancy nonprofit organization, Johnson orchestrated the defensive battle that stopped Marincello, a legendary struggle immortalized in the documentary “Rebels with a Cause.”

That saved land became the genesis of the 82,000-acre Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Recognizing that the public needed a faster, more flexible vehicle to secure land from developers, Johnson created the Trust for Public Land in 1972. He later served as California’s secretary of resources under Gov. Jerry Brown, pioneered global “green plans” for long-term sustainability, and founded the Resource Renewal Institute.

These two individuals made Marin County the ecological sanctuary it is today. Yet, in the town they called home for decades, their monumental impact remains completely unheralded.

We have an opportunity to correct this historical amnesia. Across the street east of the Depot Plaza, in the middle of Miller Avenue by a parking zone and a crosswalk, is a tiny patch of green. Currently, it serves as little more than a municipal traffic island. It could be a transformative small, majestic redwood grove dedicated to the memory of Johnson and Faber.

Planting coast redwoods at this location would create a living, breathing monument. Redwoods embody the exact traits Johnson and Faber brought to the movement: deep, interconnected roots that hold the earth together, immense strength, an enduring canopy that shelters future generations.

Turning this underutilized slice of land into a micro-grove requires a simple act of shared political will between the municipality and the county. Please contact Mill Valley’s elected representatives at the city and county levels to express support in allocating this Miller Avenue green patch for a commemorative redwood grove. Let us honor the giants who protected our ridges, farmland and coastlines by planting literal giants where they lived.

Even from across the border,  Marin’s soul depends on remembering the people who saved it. It’s time to bring the spirit of Huey Johnson and Phyllis Faber home to the heart of Mill Valley.

David Kupfer, a former Marin resident now living in Boca de Iguanas, Mexico, is an environmental journalist, educator, consultant and organic farmer.