Better homes, safer gardens - environmental activities of Sierra Club member Doris Cellarius - includes information on contacting government officials - The Sierra Club Bulletin - Volunteer Spotlight

Sierra, Nov-Dec, 1995 by Amy Wilson

When Doris Cellarius was named Oregon's first recipient of the Betty Crocker Homemaker of Tomorrow Award in 1955, a career was launched--but not the one that was intended. The sponsors made one small miscalculation: along with a free trip to Washington, D.C., and lunch with Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, they gave Cellarius a scholarship to study biology at Oregon's Reed College.

After receiving her bachelor's degree from Reed, Cellarius won a National Science Foundation fellowship to study at Columbia University. She earned a master's degree in zoology, but gave up plans to go on with laboratory research when Columbia faculty spurned her plan to investigate the then uncharted connections between nutrition, chemicals, and birth defects. The scientific world's loss soon became the Sierra Club's gain.

Cellarius is a rare combination of community activist and national leader. As likely to be knocking on doors in a trailer park as she is convening a meeting of Sierra Club leaders and scientists, Cellarius is "equally comfortable and in demand at all levels of the Club," says Jennie Alvernaz, a colleague on the Community Health Committee.

"The best place to start is within your community," says Cellarius. When Cellarius, her husband, Richard (a former Sierra Club president), and their two daughters moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the early 1960s, she became an organizer of the city's Ecology Center and its community gardens. After relocating to Olympia, Washington, in 1972, she helped establish more gardens, a farmers' market, and the Sasquatch Group of the Club's Cascade Chapter.

"I worry about workers and other people who are involuntarily exposed to toxic chemicals," says Cellarius. "When I'm fighting for cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation"--one of the nation's biggest stockpilers of nuclear waste--"I'm driven by concerns for those who live downwind and for a friend who died after working there."

Cellarius' appreciation of the power of teamwork and the down-to-earth example she sets make her a natural leader. As a consultant for the Washington Environmental Council, she organized a network of citizen groups to monitor cleanup of the state's toxic-waste sites and assisted communities in applying for grants. She helped start the Club's Issue Caucus, a national networking group that raised the visibility of members with expertise on specialized topics. She was an early leader of the Club's State Program, which links state-level activists across the nation, and edited a Club newsletter on hazardous materials and water resources for more than a decade.

Cellarius believes that what she contributes to the Sierra Club is returned in kind. "Being part of an organization this big and having access to its skilled leaders has helped me enormously," she says. Equally important is her grassroots work to help clean up towns such as Chehalis, Washington, which abuts a dioxin-contaminated Superfund site that floods several times a year. "For years, people there reported rashes and respiratory problems," says Cellarius, went door-to-door urging residents to form a community group and tell their story publicly. "Places like Chehalis hold the key to convincing even our most skeptical political leaders that the Superfund program should not be cut.

"People have the power to act to push our government on behalf of their children's health," she says. "If I can get them to use that power, then I've done my job."

Amy Wilson is senior editor of the Sierra Club's activist newsletter, The Planet.