Marjorie Sill 1923-2016

“It’s a work of joy,” said Marjorie Sill of Reno. “There’s so much negative going on in the world right now. I love the positive.”

It was 2014, and Sill was talking about wilderness areas in the state. But she might well have been talking about a myriad of other things. She loved the upbeat, once writing this newspaper to thank us for the Aug. 5, 2010 edition: “Thank you for including several positive articles. … So much of the news now is so negative and discouraging that one almost hates to read a paper or watch a news broadcast.”

A resident of Nevada for more than half a century, Sill worked against coal-fired power plants and military land withdrawals. She and her scientist husband, Richard, worked on preservation of Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe. As a wilderness advocate, she watched Nevada’s wilderness areas go from 700,000 acres to more than two million.

“We in Nevada are fortunate to have so much public land that is open to everyone,” she wrote earlier this year in the Reno Gazette-Journal. “Some of this land is in special categories—national parks, national monuments, national wildlife refuges, designated wilderness—but most of it is just for people who want to visit and enjoy our beautiful far-flung lands in whatever way they choose.”

Her life will be marked by a gathering at 1 p.m. on Dec. 2 at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship.