Hazel Wolf: A Long Life of Organizing

Welcome to the debut of our Local Heroes column, profiling people in the Seattle area who have done much to fix up this ugly mess of a world we live in.

It wasn't hard deciding who I wanted to interview for my first Hero. Hazel Wolf, who turned 100 last March, has been tirelessly organizing people around environmental and social justice causes for seven decades, from organizing unemployed people with the Communist Party during the Depression to bringing environmentalists and Native Americans together in the '70s and organizing 21 of the 26 Audubon chapters in Washington state.

And she's still going strong. The day I interviewed her, she had just returned from a few days in Port Angeles that morning, and directly after the interview was going to the annual Audubon meeting to be reinstalled as Secretary, a position she's held more than 30 years. She also edits Outdoors West, the newsletter of the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs, attends lots of conferences, and has numerous speaking engagements, especially in the schools. In honor of her 100th birthday, Audubon has created a Hazel Wolf "Kids for the Environment" fund to foster environmental appreciation among young people.

I visited Wolf at her apartment on Capitol Hill, where she lives alone on an $800 per month Social Security check. "I'm into simple living," she explains, "so I don't spend it all. I give a lot of it away."

Wolf wasted little time (at 100, why waste time?) in giving me her opinion of Eat the State!, which she receives in the mail (among numerous other publications). "The one thing I don't like about your paper is the use of vulgar language. I find it offensive and unnecessary. I think that kind of language limits your audience."

Well, Hazel, we'll have to give that some thought ...

Wolf has made a practice of not limiting her audience. She shares her message with whoever will listen and brings people of diverse backgrounds together to find common cause. Once, after speaking to a conference organized by Weyerhaeuser and other timber companies, she was told, "You say the most offensive things in the most inoffensive way."

Her brother was a logger, and one of her granddaughters is married to a logger. "All the loggers I ever talked to don't like what they're doing. They like the job; they like being in the woods, they wouldn't know any other way to earn a living. But they don't like the fact that they're destroying the woods. They know better."

Wolf's proudest achievement was in 1979 when she organized a conference to explore common ground between environmentalists and Native Americans. "I had the idea that we probably had a lot in common. I didn't really know what it was, and I didn't know any Native Americans, but I knew someone who did."

Through her friend, Wolf got in touch with some Native American leaders, and went on to travel around the state in her "old jalopy" visiting 26 tribes, listening to their concerns, explaining environmentalist concerns, and urging attendance at the conference she was planning.

The conference was a great success, launching several alliances, including a legal battle the tribes and environmental groups fought against the proposed northern tier pipeline. "Indians and environmentalists have been working together ever since. Now it's just taken for granted, like it always existed. But it started at that 1979 conference.

About five years ago, Wolf organized another effort to forge multiracial alliances around environmental issues, this time around the Duwamish River, where low-income residences mix in with heavy industry. Out of this effort grew the Community Coalition for Environmental Justice.

From organizing a girls basketball team as a child to the environmental causes she has focused on during the last 35 years, Hazel Wolf has been a lifelong organizer. "I guess I just have that kind of streak in me. When I see something that needs to be done, I begin looking around to see who else is interested and get them together."

But she downplays her own role in many of these efforts, stressing that other people end up doing most of the work. "I think the best an organizer can do is get people together, inspire them to want to stay together, and share with them any particular knowledge you might have to help them do that. And then that's the end of it, as far as I can see. If you want to run the thing, then you're not an organizer--you're just on an ego trip."

The secret to her success? "A sense of humor! That's like the oil in squeaky machinery. I don't think I have any bitter enemies. Sooner or later I make them laugh."

Go, Hazel! Make 'em laugh while you give those bast--while you give the bad guys heck.