TPL Founder Martin Rosen Receives Prestigous Pugsley Award

Martin J. Rosen, one of the founders of The Trust for Public Land, today received the prestigious Cornelius Armory Pugsley Medal from the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration(AAPRA).

Rosen was honored at the annual AAPRA dinner for a lifetime of outstanding work in conservation, including serving as one of the founders of TPL. He was TPL’s President from 1978 to 1997 and remains on TPL’s board.

Vern J.Hartenburg, AAPRA Pugsley Committee Chair, said, “The Pugsley Medal is recognized as America’s distinguished acknowledgement of significant leadership in parks and open spaceconservation. Martin Rosen’s legacy in positioning The Trust for Public Land as a preeminent organization working to preserve parkland and green spaces, both in urban areas as well as places of national importance, puts Rosen’s leadership with America’s great conservationists.”

Rosen joins a distinguished list of Pugsley Medal winners, including Stephen Mather, the founder and first director of the National Park Service; Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.; Gilbert Grosvenor, former chairman of the National Geographic Society; two former Secretaries of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt and Stuart Udall; philanthropist Laurence Rockefeller; First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, and Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

Page Knudsen Cowles, who is the new chair of TPL’s Board of Directors, said, “In the time I have been involved with TPL, I have come to know Marty and his work and I am in awe of what he has accomplished. Those of us on the board truly stand on the shoulders of a conservation visionary like Marty.”

During Rosen’s tenure, TPL grew from a small office in San Francisco to a national organization which has saved more than 2.7 million acres in 47 states, including thousands of acres of park land and wilderness from Seattle to Maine and Florida, hundreds of urban parks and playgrounds, the woods surrounding Walden Pond, the historic Atlanta neighborhood of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthplace, the view across the Potomac River from Mount Vernon, and the Topeka, Kan., schoolhouse which was the birthplace of the lawsuit that led to the 1954 Supreme Court “Brown v. Board of Education” decision which outlawed racial discrimination in education.