Marshall Saunders, climate advocate, passes at 80

Marshall Saunders, founder and president of the grassroots advocacy organizations Citizens’ Climate Lobby and Citizens’ Climate Education, has passed away at the age of 80.

Born on Feb. 27, 1939, Saunders grew up in Waco, Texas, where he played high school football and other sports. After high school graduation he would catch the Grey Hound bus for Boise, Idaho, where he would spend his college summers working for the US Forest Service; cutting trails, cleaning camp grounds and helping to prevent forest fires. He attended Baylor University and the University of Texas, earning a bachelor's degree in Economics at UT in 1961. After college, he joined the Navy, trained at the OCS, graduating as an Ensign. He was first stationed in Virginia & served on the USS Boxer. He was on active duty during the Cuban missile crisis, 1962, and later transferred to Coronado where he met and married the love of his life, Pamela Spence, in 1965. They made their home here in Coronado and raised two beloved children.

After a career in commercial property development, Saunders moved on to a lifetime of active philanthropy as he wanted to search for ways to make the world a better place. A leader in the Coronado community, Saunders was named Rotarian of the year in 1991 by the Coronado Rotary chapter and received the Rotarian Governor's trophy for Service Above Self in 1992-93. He also received the Rotary Foundation citation for Meritorious Service, and he spearheaded the formation of the first Rotary Club in St. Petersburg, Russia.

In the 1990s, following a successful career in real estate development, Saunders decided to use his wealth to improve the lives of impoverished people. Inspired by the work of Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, he started a micro-lending program in Mexico, Grameen de la Frontera, to provide small loans to poor women for the purpose of initiating and expanding small businesses to lift their families out of poverty.

After watching “An Inconvenient Truth” in 2006, Saunders concluded that his efforts to help the poor would come to no avail if climate change made people’s homes unlivable. Seeing that a lack of political will was the key obstacle in addressing climate change, he started Citizens’ Climate Lobby in 2007, based on the methodology of RESULTS, an advocacy organization working to end hunger and poverty. CCL has since grown to include 561 chapters worldwide — 465 in the U.S. — with 177,000 supporters. CCL was the leading advocacy group supporting the introduction this year of a bipartisan carbon-pricing bill, which now has 75 cosponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“To say that he made the most of his time on this earth would be an understatement,” said CCL Executive Director Mark Reynolds. “In addition to being the most kind and generous person I've ever known, he was also a visionary, someone who saw the things that are broken in our world and then set out to fix them. As Buckminster Fuller once said, ‘The things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.’ That was Marshall, doing the things that needed to be done that nobody else was doing.”

Sam Daley-Harris, founder of RESULTS, reflected on Saunders’ life: "Marshall leaves the kind of legacy we all dream of leaving. Not a building with our name on it, but thousands of people turned on to their power as citizens, enlivened about the difference they make on climate solutions and, in turn, lighting up others. Marshall considered me his mentor, but took what I taught him to an entirely new level and ended up teaching and inspiring me beyond words. His gifts live on in each person touched by his vision."

Saunders is survived by his wife Pam, and two adult children.

Services will be held on January 25, 2019, at 1:00 p.m. at St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Coronado. In lieu of flowers, the family suggests donations to Citizens' Climate Education (www.citizensclimatelobby.org/donate) or to the new Scripps MD Anderson Cancer Center building on the Mercy Hospital campus in San Diego, CA (giving.scripps.org).