John Seiberling, 89; advanced liberal causes in Congress
WASHINGTON - John F. Seiberling, 89, an eight-term congressman who represented Ohio's 14th District from 1971 to 1987 and a liberal Democrat who championed environmental concerns, died of respiratory failure Saturday at his home in Akron.
An environmentalist before becoming a member of Congress, Mr. Seiberling joined the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee in his second term and served as chairman of several committees with jurisdiction over public land, national parks, wilderness areas, and the US Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands.
He sponsored legislation to preserve 129 million acres of public land in Alaska and in national parks and wilderness areas throughout the United States.
The bill included the 30,000-acre Cuyahoga National Recreation Area - now Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio's only national park.
During the Reagan administration, he battled Interior Secretary James G. Watt, who proposed opening millions of acres in wilderness areas to private development. The proposal would "gut the nation's wilderness system," Mr. Seiberling maintained.
On a March day in 1985, Mr. Seiberling took the House floor to urge his colleagues to support the Olmsted Heritage Landscapes Act, a bill funding a study of the legacy of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of New York City's Central Park and the US Capitol grounds, among many other projects nationwide.
The bill also required the Interior Department to begin a long-overdue effort to restore many of the nation's "historically designed landscapes."
Mr. Seiberling served on the House Judiciary Committee, where he participated in the Watergate scandal investigation and helped write the articles of impeachment that led to President Nixon's resignation.
