Francis, Sharon Fairley, 1937-

Sharon F Francis born on March 17, 1937.

Sharon F Francis resided in Charlestown, New Hampshire, United States on February 1, 2002.

A native of Seattle, Sharon Francis has worked professionally in the environmental field since graduating in political science from Mount Holyoke College in 1959. An avid mountain climber, Francis wrote her honors thesis on the wilderness bill. Her writings in national conservation publications gained attention from the incoming Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, who invited her to become his ghostwriter.

After Lyndon Johnson was elected president in 1964, Udall “loaned” Francis to the White House to work as environmental staff and to assist with the First Lady's beautification endeavors. In this role, Francis aided the President with the authorization of new national parks, wilderness protection, and matters such as keeping a proposed dam from being built in the Grand Canyon.

After moving to New England in the 1980's, Francis led the innovative New Hampshire-Ohio Acid Rain Partnership. During the Carter administration, she was called to Washington again to become director of public participation at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

In 1990, Francis was selected as executive director of the newly-formed Connecticut River Joint Commissions, the result of state legislation to foster cooperation between Vermont and New Hampshire. She held the position until mid-2010 when funding reductions forced the commissions to eliminate their staff.

In 1987, Francis received the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Association’s Sesquicentennial award. In 1990, she received the Teddy Roosevelt Conservation Award from President George H. W. Bush, and in 2004, was selected for EPA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

"I grew up in Seattle and spent a great deal of time in the out of doors which is so close by to that city."

"...I joined a citizen conservation group interested in the North Cascades."

"When I went east to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts, leaving Seattle in 1955, graduating from college in 1959, I had a sufficient personal commitment to conservation that I majored in political science. I did my honors work on the wilderness bill which was before Congress at that time. My reason for going into political science rather than the biological sciences was that I had noted that the weakness of the conservation movement at that time was lack of political savoir-faire."

"I worked for a year at the Wilderness Society on the legislation on which I had done my thesis. In the course of that, I made the acquaintance of Hubert Humphrey, of Clinton Anderson, of John Saylor, of Scoop Jackson--the leading proponents of the Wilderness Act, and also all the conservation hierarchy in the city. When I wasn't working in the office, I was spending my spare hours writing articles for the various conservation magazines."

"Little did I know that these would bring me to the next stop of my career, which was that a congressman by the name of Stewart Udall had read some of these articles, apparently liked the writing and liked that point of view that I had...So I did work on his personal staff, primarily on his book The Quiet Crisis, which was published in 1963, and thereafter on a number of research and writing projects of a cultural nature and of a 'What are the goals of this country vis-a-vis the land?' nature and I handled a number of fascinating projects within the department."