Bermingham, John R.
11/07/1923 - 05/29/2020

Former Colorado State Senator John R. Bermingham died of natural causes on May 29, 2020. He was 96.
He was born November 7, 1923 in Chicago; after graduating from St. Paul's School, and from Yale in 1945, he served in the Navy in the Pacific in the closing months of WWII. He graduated from Columbia Law School in 1949, and worked as a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York. A love of the West, nurtured by time on the family ranch in Wyoming, prompted a move to Denver, where he practiced oil and gas law for Continental Oil. In 1954, he married Marcia Dines; they had three children before divorcing in 1966, but remained lifelong friends. He was elected to the Colorado State Senate in 1964, and re-elected twice, before resigning to become assistant to Governor Vanderhoof for environmental affairs. Governor Lamm appointed him Colorado Land Use Commissioner, and subsequently he served in the Interior Department in the Ford administration.
While he was a State Senator, he cosponsored the legislation for Colorado to become the first state to legalize abortion, six years before Roe v Wade. He had a decades-long interest in the adverse effects of expanding human populations, and worked tirelessly to increase awareness of the issue. Throughout his life he labored to preserve the environment, globally and locally, facing opposition with aplomb and courage.
He loved hiking, and taught his children the joys of climbing fourteeners. He also loved travel; while on a trip to the USSR in 1974, he visited the site of a Nazi massacre of Jews, the Babi Yar ravine near Kiev, and brought back soil that is buried at Babi Yar Park in Denver.
In the 1980's, he fought the Denver Water Board over the proposed Two Forks Dam on the Platte River. He demonstrated that Denver residents were subsidizing growth in the suburbs, and that if the suburbs paid a fair price for their water, the dam wasn't needed.
As part of his extensive involvement with population issues, he attended the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992, and the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt, in 1994. He served on the board of Zero Population Growth, now known as the Population Coalition, as founder and president of the Colorado Population Coalition. While he was in his eighties, he taught courses on population and sustainability at OLLI at the University of Denver. He tirelessly wrote and rewrote a book on global sustainability that was published privately.
He was an aficionado of history, particularly that of his family, and wrote biographies of his grandparents' families. He is survived by two children, John R. Bermingham, Jr. (Marnie), and Kate Bermingham, a daughter-in-law Wendy Bermingham and by eight grandchildren: Caroline and Nelson Tracey, Jack, William, Charlotte, Nicholas, Quinn and Brooks Bermingham; he was preceded in death by a son, Andrew W. Bermingham.
Memorial donations can be made to NARAL/Cobalt (https://cobaltadvocates.org/donate/), the Population Connection (https://www.populationconnection.org/), or the Environmental Defense Fund (www.edf.org). A memorial gathering will be held in the future.