Debbie Sease worked from 1981 to 2020 as a Sierra Club lobbyist in its Washington, DC, office, where she became Legislative Director as well as National Campaign Director. Sease was born in November 1948 in Oklahoma, where she contracted polio at age three. Each year throughout her childhood, Sease spent several months in a Texas hospital receiving surgeries to repair damaged leg tissue. At age 10, Sease's family moved to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where her mother died six years later from cancer. Upon graduating high school in 1967, Sease took architecture and photography courses at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Sease soon became active in the New Mexico Wilderness Committee, where she met her first husband Dave Foreman. Conservationist Celia Hunter offered Sease and Foreman jobs as lobbyists for the Wilderness Society in Washington, DC, where they moved in 1978. Upon arriving, Sease dedicated her career to preserving public lands, initially on Bureau of Land Management wilderness reviews, and to advocating for environmental policies. In 1981, Sease began working for the Sierra Club, from which she retired in 2020. Her career in Washington, DC, spanned from the end of the environmental decade in the 1970s, through seven US Presidential administrations and numerous shifts in Congress, up through the end of the Trump administration in 2020. Upon her retirement, Sease and her husband Russ Shay split their time between their home on Capitol Hill and their cabin on twelve acres in the Shenandoah Valley. In this oral history, Sease recounts all the above with a focus on her nearly four decades as a Sierra Club lobbyist in Washington, DC, including details on particular campaigns and specific wilderness lands she helped protect, as well as her reflections and hard-earned wisdom on successful legislative campaigning. Throughout, Sease discusses ways the Sierra Club has evolved throughout her career, as well as the ways environmental politics have changed over time, especially in the nation's capital.