Jane Hurt Yarn : Conservation and the Environment

According to senator and former Governor of Georgia Zell Miller, “No other single individual has done as much for conservation in Georgia as Jane Yarn.”

She was featured in the Atlanta Journal Constitution Magazine and Harper’s Bazaar magazine. In 1970, Yarn was named Atlanta’s Women of the Year. She was a recipient of the American Motors Conservation Award in 1971. In April 1978, Yarn was the first person to receive the R.S. Howard natural resources conservation award. She received the Nature Conservancy Oak Leaf Award in 1989, and four years later, the Georgia Environmental Council made her a recipient of their Lifetime Achievement Award.^[1] Yarn was inducted into the Georgia Women of Achievement in 2009. FOR MORE

Yarn’s interest in the environment did not take hold until a family trip to Africa in 1967. Upon returning to Georgia, she served on the boards of both the Georgia Conservancy and the state chapter of the Nature Conservancy, and she organized coastal Georgia landowners against development. Her work played a key role in saving such barrier islands as Wassaw Island, Little Tybee Island, and Cumberland Island. Yarn’s most important contribution in these early years, however, may have been her successful organization of the state’s garden club members to stop a plan to strip-mine Georgia’s barrier islands for phosphate. Thanks to Yarn’s efforts, thousands of letters poured into Governor Lester Maddox’s office, and the Coastal Marshlands Protection Act, which preserves barrier islands and marshes as common land, was passed in 1970. It remains in effect to this day. FOR MORE  in New Georgia Encyclopedia