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Judith Colt Johnson
If you enjoy Assateague’s windswept beaches and unspoiled wildness, you can thank “human dynamo” Judith Johnson.
Like the winds and tides of her favorite place, Assateague Island, Judith Colt Johnson was a force of nature. For nearly a quarter of a century, until her death at the age of ninety-one, the environmental advocate from Towson led the fight to preserve Assateague’s wild, solitary seashore from development.
Johnson began her activism at the behest of her young son, Reid, after they took a trip to Assateague together in the 1960s. He remembers her reaction on learning of plans to “improve” the pristine barrier island with a thirty-mile highway, a 14,000-car parking lot, motels, and fast-food restaurants. “This is horrible. This is wrong,” he recalls his mother declaring. “Someone has to stop this.” She did.
As the founding chairperson of the Committee to Preserve Assateague Island, Inc. — an organization that grew to more than a thousand members, now known as Assateague Coastal Trust — Johnson began her campaign with little direct experience in politics or science. In fact, her most recent position had been managing the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where she was the first woman in the country to serve in such a role. But she soon proved remarkably effective at directing fellow conservationists.
Throughout the early ‘70s, Johnson collected allies by the hundreds, organizing an onslaught of letters to government officials. The U.S. Department of the Interior’s official account of the Assateague controversy tersely described her as “a woman of exceptional persuasiveness and persistence.” Ajax Eastman, a close associate and former president of the Maryland Conservation Council, remembers her as “a human dynamo. I was continually amazed by her ability to organize, inspire, and motivate people.”
In 1976, Congress voted to rescind plans for the highway and further commercial development on Assateague. With that long-sought victory in hand, Johnson and her colleagues pressed on. They defeated a proposed sewage pipeline that would have endangered the piping plover, and won restrictions on the all-terrain vehicles that threatened the birds’ habitat.
CEOs, attorneys, and refuge managers — Johnson lobbied them all. “She was adept at working with politicos at every level — everyone from the mayor of Ocean City to the Army Corps of Engineers,” recalls author and former Sun columnist Tom Horton. “She really held the Corps’ feet to the fire on issues like jetties and beach management.”
Yet her personal charm informed every encounter. “She had tremendous energy, but she was easy to be around,” says Horton. “Judy always had a good time — and you did, too, if you were with her. She was a textbook example of how to be an effective advocate.”
— Excerpt from Chesapeake Life, by Carol Denny
Copyright 2012, Assateague Coastal Trust
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