Leila (Lee) Botts, a pioneering and globally recognized American environmentalist most strongly associated with efforts to protect and restore the Great Lakes, died of natural causes on October 5, 2019 in Oak Park, Illinois. She was 91.

UPDATE: Gatherings to celebrate her life will be held Saturday, November 16 at 2:00 at Cliff Dwellers Club in Chicago (sponsored by the Alliance for the Great Lakes), and on Saturday, May 16, 2020 at the Dunes Learning Center in Chesterton, Indiana. RSVPs for the first event, in Chicago on November 16, are welcome via this link:

https://www.evite.com/event/03B5L42MCUCIHY22SEPJ5LLTKB3GFA/rsvp

Lee's career led from volunteer work and journalism to environmental activism and work in nonprofits, government and academia. She founded two nonprofit organizations, decades apart, that continue to thrive today. She was a powerful influence and mentor to many environmentalists in the Chicago area, northwest Indiana and the Great Lakes region; a mother of four and grandmother; a lover of birds, snapping turtles, beavers, and Midwestern native plants; a quilter; and a baker. She is remembered not only for her force of character, vision, boundless energy and professional achievements, but for her warmth, generosity and hospitality.

Lee Botts, as she preferred to be known, was born Leila Carman on February 25, 1928 in Mooreland, Oklahoma, the grandchild of homesteaders. She grew up in the heart of the 1930s Dust Bowl, an environmental catastrophe that was a formative experience for her. She attended grade school in northwestern Oklahoma and southwestern Kansas, spending summers on her maternal grandparents’ farm in Woodward County, Oklahoma. Lee graduated from North High School in Wichita, Kansas, in 1946 and matriculated that fall at Oklahoma Territorial Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Oklahoma State University), where she joined a sorority, edited the school newspaper and majored in English.

At college she met Lambert (Bud) Botts (1928-2003); they were married in 1949 in Chicago, where he was pursuing a graduate degree at the University of Chicago.

While she raised her children in a vintage 1885 house in the city’s Hyde Park neighborhood, Lee was an active volunteer in independent Democratic politics and on local and public school issues. At the same time, she became involved through the Save the Dunes Council in the campaign to protect the Indiana Dunes in northwest Indiana, which were a favorite haunt of the family. In 1966, that campaign succeeded with the creation of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore (now the Indiana Dunes National Park).

Starting in the late 1950s, Lee wrote a garden column for the weekly Hyde Park Herald and in the early 1960s became the paper’s editor.

In 1968 she joined the staff of the Open Lands Project in Chicago (now Openlands), one of the city’s first environmental organizations. She helped organize the first Earth Day in 1970.

While at the Open Lands Project, she saw the need for action on Lake Michigan issues and founded the Lake Michigan Federation (now the Alliance for the Great Lakes). Under her leadership from 1971 to 1975, the new organization persuaded Mayor Richard J. Daley to have Chicago become the first Great Lakes city to ban phosphates in laundry detergents, led U.S. advocacy for the first binational Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (1972), was a key advocate for the landmark federal Clean Water Act of 1972, and played a key role in persuading Congress to ban PCBs through the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act. The organization has continued to grow in scope and influence and is now the Alliance for the Great Lakes.

After a short stint with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, in 1977 Lee was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to head to the Great Lakes Basin Commission, a federal agency based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. When the agency was eliminated from the federal budget under President Ronald Reagan, Lee moved to Evantion, Illinois, where she held a research faculty appointment at Northwestern University from 1981 to 1985.

Lee joined the senior staff of Mayor Harold Washington, Chicago’s first African-American mayor, in 1985. In that capacity she organized the city’s first-ever Department of the Environment. In 1986, with Mayor Washington’s endorsement and support, Lee became the first environmentalist to run for the board of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago (now the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District). She lost by just 2 percent.

In 1988 Lee retired from the city and moved to the Dunes full time. While living in Gary’s Miller Beach neighborhood, she became an adjunct professor at a local college and joined several local organizations and boards. She played a significant role in bringing environmental, business, industry and local government representatives together around their common interests in Northwest Indiana. She also served on Indiana’s state Water Pollution Control Board from 2007 to 2010.

Meanwhile, Lee began advocating for an idea she’d first written about a quarter-century earlier: an environmental education center in the national park. In 1997 she led the founding of the Indiana Dunes Environmental Learning Center (now the Dunes Learning Center). An independent nonprofit located within the park, the learning center offers year-round programs and overnight nature-camp experiences for grade-school students and teachers. Today nearly 10,000 students come to the center each year from school systems throughout Indiana, Michigan and Illinois.

Twice during the 1990s, Lee traveled to the former Soviet Union to coach fledgling citizen  groups and environmental officials. She participated in an environmental information exchange with Russian officials and citizens around Lake Baikal, Siberia; led a workshop on citizen participation in Kiev, Ukraine; and helped organize a conference in Tartu, Estonia, on watershed management for government officials, environmentalists and academic experts. Lee also served as an advisor to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation for North America, established under the environmental side agreement to the 1994 North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Lee also co-authored a book, “The Evolution of the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement,” (Michigan State University Press, 2005).

Meanwhile, she made colorful patchwork quilts in original designs and entertained many neighbors and visiting environmentalists with baked goods and gin-and-tonics at her Miller home, overlooking a pond with herons, beavers and snapping turtles.

For years, Lee had suggested that the complex and tumultuous modern history of the Indiana Dunes region could become an engaging documentary film. In 2010 she attended an advance screening of a film on a similar topic and was introduced to one of its producers, Patricia Wisniewski. Together they began working on making “Lee’s dunes film”, along with Tom Desch and Rana Segal. In her mid-80s, Lee wrote the film’s script, conducted many of the interviews, led the fundraising effort, and tirelessly traveled to promote the project even after she was no longer able to drive.

“Shifting Sands: On the Path to Sustainability” had its premiere on Earth Day, 2016. To date it has been broadcast on more than 70 U.S. public-television stations, was nominated for a regional Emmy Award, been included in several major film festivals, and been screened by scores of local citizens groups and public libraries throughout the Lake Michigan states.

Lee received many awards and honors. Among them, she was cited by the United Nations Environment Program for making a difference for the global environment (1987) and named in 2002 by the national Clean Water Network as one of the 30 persons who had made the most difference under the pioneering U.S. 1972 Clean Water Act. In 2007, she was named one of 60 fellows of the Purpose Prize Institute, a program to recognize persons who’ve made a difference in their communities after the age of 60. She received the 2008 Gerald I. Lamkin Award from the Society of Innovators at Purdue University Northwest; was inducted in 2009 into the Indiana Conservation Hall of Fame; was recognized in 2010 as a lifetime Calumet Region Environmental Hero; and was named a Distinguished Hoosier by former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels. In 2017, she was recognized by Freshwater Future, a Great Lakes regional organization based in Michigan, as a “Freshwater Hero”; and receiving honorary doctorates from Indiana University Northwest and Calumet College of St. Joseph in Whiting, Indiana.

Lee Botts is survived by her children Karl Botts of Chicago, Elizabeth (Beth) Botts of Oak Park, Paul Botts of Chicago and Alan Botts of San Francisco; her daughter-in-law, Heather McCowen of Chicago; and her grandsons Alex Botts and Theo Botts.

Gatherings to celebrate her life will be held Saturday, November 16 at 2:00 at Cliff Dwellers Club in Chicago (sponsored by the Alliance for the Great Lakes), and on Saturday, May 16, 2020 at the Dunes Learning Center in Chesterton, Indiana. RSVPs for the first event, in Chicago on November 16, are welcome via this link:

https://www.evite.com/event/03B5L42MCUCIHY22SEPJ5LLTKB3GFA/rsvp

In lieu of flowers, donations are much appreciated at the Alliance for the Great Lakes or the Dunes Learning Center.