Revolt on the Beach : Surfers established as major environmental player

Surfers have a reputation for pursuing the Endless Summer, without much concern for the nagging questions of the day. Ironically, in their pursuit of leisure-time activity, surfers actually have turned out to be ahead of the curve--or as they might put it, on top of the wave--on a crucial quality-of-life issue.

In winning major concessions from two pulp mills that have been polluting waters in Humboldt County, the Huntington Beach-based Surfrider Foundation established itself as a major environmental player in the pursuit of cleaner water along the imperiled 1,100-mile California coastline. This environmental organization, claiming 15,000 members, is dedicated to protecting surf and shorelines. It already has functioned effectively as an early-warning system, monitoring water quality and tracking runoffs and oil and sewage spills in Southern California.

The Surfrider Foundation helped make a strong pollution case, and under an agreement it reached with the companies and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the companies agreed to pay nearly $5.8 million in fines for the dumping of dioxin and other contaminants. But therein lies a larger message for all who are, in effect, consumers of one of California’s precious natural resources, its coastal waters.

In recent years, the news from around the country of beach closures and medical waste washed ashore has begun to shape a portrait of a nation’s shoreline at risk. And that should be worrisome to all of us who spend our lives here by the coast, or within easy driving distance of the water’s edge, not by accident but by choice or by occupation.

In our own back yard this summer, an environmental group that monitors pollution in Santa Monica Bay kicked off the season by giving failing grades to the waters off eight Los Angeles County beaches for exceeding state standards for bacterial levels. The summer ended with a popular county beach in San Clemente closed for the three-day Labor Day weekend because a backup compressor pump failed, dumping 15,000 gallons of raw sewage into a storm drain.

These are troubling echoes along the Southern California coast of reports in recent years from the Atlantic coast.

Nationally, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, contamination led to 2,400 beach closures in 10 states in the last two years. At least 402 of the incidents were in California.

There’s nothing frivolous about working to save the ocean, the state’s great income-producing, pleasure-creating resource. Think of the implications for beach-goers, for example, in the provision of the Humboldt County agreement that requires the firms to build beach showers so surfers can wash off the toxins. If such a level of poisons in the ocean had resulted instead from a single act of water contamination, people no doubt would be duly outraged. But public concern should be no less because of the slow, insidious nature of the polluting in this case. If multiplied, such instances could turn the coastal waters into a health hazard or even make them off-limits.

The wave of the future may well be an increasing “consumer” movement on the beaches, begun with the help of these surfers who are so attuned to the disruptive effects on health, day in and day out, of waterborne pollutants.