Crusaders by Nature : A Passionate Few Lead Environmental Preservation Fights

They spend their waking hours poring over government documents and environmental reports, praying that somewhere deep in that mind-numbing mass they will spot a clue for saving Coal Canyon, or Newport Bay, or Bolsa Chica, or Laguna Canyon.

They prepare for weeks and sit for hours in dreary meeting chambers so they can spend five minutes addressing city councils and planning commissions. Their names aren’t immortalized in parks or on mountain trails, and most aren’t even familiar outside local environmental circles.

But without them, Orange County would certainly be a very different place.

Imagine Newport without its back bay. Laguna without its canyon. Huntington without its wetlands. All those resources might have been paved by now if it weren’t for a small network of hard-core environmentalists, some who began their crusades before the first Earth Day awakened the nation’s consciousness 22 years ago this week.

Inexplicably, something, somewhere, stirred a passion in each of them. For most, it happened when they saw bulldozers poised to flatten a piece of earth near their home. They took up the fight and years later are still battling.

“There’s no such thing as winning an environmental fight,” says Frank Robinson, 73, the granddaddy of the local movement who has spent 29 years fighting to protect Newport Beach’s back bay from one development proposal after another. “You can lose a fight, and you’ve lost it forever. But if you win it, you have to keep fighting for it all the time. It goes on forever.”

Of the dozen men and women who form the backbone of Orange County’s environmental movement, several are college instructors, some firmly grounded in the biological sciences. Their ranks also include retirees, engineers, homemakers and firefighters. Most have lived in the county at least 20 years; some a lifetime.

They are more likely to live in Huntington Beach or Fullerton than Laguna Beach, the city most commonly associated with environmentalism, and they are not idealistic youths. The area’s most prominent activists are mainly in their 40s and 50s, with graying hair but an enduring passion for the outdoors.

“Bolsa Chica is my first love. I know I’ll never tire of it, or feel overwhelmed by it,” said Shirley Dettloff, 56, a Huntington Beach homemaker who was a founding member of Amigos de Bolsa Chica, created to save the wetlands from a marina. “I started this when my son was an infant, and now my children are in their 30s and my grandchild comes out with me when we have cleanups at Bolsa Chica.”

These activists are rarely satisfied, and their efforts have left most of them deeply cynical and suspicious of government and developers. Some feel just as rabid about their cause as the most radical tree-spikers from up north, but coping with Orange County’s conservative climate has taught them to be realistic.

By necessity, they have become experts in biology, law, politics, land-use planning and fund raising. They are more likely to dwell on the complexities of tidelands law than on their desire to save a bird.

“There’s aggression without tying yourself to trees,” said Pete DeSimone, 38, manager of the National Audubon Society’s Starr Ranch, a wildlife preserve near Trabuco Canyon. “The most successful activists do not rely on emotional issues. Expertise and intelligence go a lot further. You’re dealing with multimillion-dollar projects and you have to deal on that level.”

In some circles, the names are synonymous with the cause. Elisabeth Brown and Laguna Canyon. The Robinsons and Newport Bay. Ray Chandos and Trabuco Canyon. Sherrie Meddick and Silverado Canyon. Victor Leipzig and Bolsa Chica. Connie Spenger and Coal Canyon.

“For years I wake up and say to myself what can I do today to save Coal Canyon or the Tecate cypress, or both,” said Spenger, 53, a Fullerton resident who heads a small group protecting groves of rare trees in a remote canyon. “I just do it because I have to. It’s just something inside me.”

Politicians in Orange County have cursed them as extremists, saying they are a vocal minority standing in the way of urban progress.

Developers, however, say Orange County’s environmentalists can be formidable opponents, and some admit a grudging respect.

“The quality of environmental opposition in Orange County is pretty good. They know the system and how it works and can use it to their advantage,” said Laer Pearce, spokesman for a coalition of builders, including the Irvine Co. and Santa Margarita Co. “The environmental movement has been very successful in driving the development industry. The projects today being proposed are better quality than they were a decade ago.”

In Orange County, environmentalism is really a series of movements within a movement. Activists here epitomize the axiom: Think globally, act locally.

Every activist in the county seems to tell a similar story of how their crusades began. At the root of each is a neighborhood cause, whether it’s Chandos’ effort to block a highway crossing Trabuco Canyon or Spenger’s fight to stop a shooting range in a Tecate cypress grove.

At first, many of those fighting the proposed road or housing tract can’t distinguish between wetlands and coastal sage scrub, but eventually, their concern blossoms into an expertise in larger issues, such as the Endangered Species Act or wetlands protection.

“There are so many (development) projects of such magnitude here that you don’t have to go further than your own back yard to find something that needs addressing,” said DeSimone, who studied wildlife management in Connecticut and moved to Orange County’s Audubon sanctuary seven years ago.

Some believe they would accomplish more if they formed one group and pooled their resources. But at least a dozen efforts to coalesce have failed. These people have little more than their passions to keep them going, so joining a larger cause could dilute their intensity.

“Down here in Orange County, it’s really been the small-group model. Very few groups are large enough to have a staff. It’s very grass-roots,” said Brown, president of Laguna Greenbelt.

Orange County’s environmental movement sprang up along the coast in the mid-1960s. The first activists were Frank and Frances Robinson of Newport Beach, Jim Dilley of Laguna Beach, and half a dozen Huntington Beach residents who created Amigos de Bolsa Chica. Their early successes made them mentors for a new generation of activists that followed.

Frank Robinson, who won an unprecedented court ruling in 1973 that stopped the county from trading Newport Bay tidelands to the Irvine Co., has been giving this advice to his successors for decades: “Don’t start something you’re not prepared to finish.”

The burnout rate can be high. Most are unpaid volunteers spending their own time and money battling high-paid developers and intimidating elected officials.

“You spend every waking hour. You give up your family. I mortgaged my house,” said Charlotte Clarke, 50, a Fullerton College biology instructor who founded the Orange County Fund for Environmental Defense, one of the few countywide groups.

Some get a taste of defeat and drop out, telling themselves they don’t have the inner fortitude to keep struggling. Those who stay, however, get stronger and wiser.

With her doctorate in biology, her unflappable calm and her knack for motivating people, Brown, 49, is perhaps the most respected environmental activist in Orange County.

It was mostly Brown’s tenacity that prompted the Irvine Co. last year to give up its plans to build a large subdivision in Laguna Canyon and instead sell 2,100 acres to the city for a regional park.

“Sitting in so many Orange County planning commission hearings and watching all the illogic and the decisions go the wrong way, I wonder why I didn’t just get disgusted and stomp off and never come back,” Brown said. “There has to be, someplace deep inside, a very deep optimism and conviction that what we are doing is correct. A lot of people want to do something but feel powerless. Those of us who are activists don’t feel powerless.”

Brown’s role literally began on the first Earth Day in 1970, when she heard Jim Dilley, now dead, speak about a housing development proposed for the lush land near her Laguna Canyon home. Her greatest victory came 20 years later, in 1990, when Laguna Beach residents voted to tax themselves to help buy the canyon from the Irvine Co.

More and more, Orange County’s environmentalists are turning to litigation as a battle strategy, alleging in court that a developer has inadequately assessed and reconciled the environmental impacts of a project.

Just about every group is involved in at least one lawsuit. Spenger is now shepherding three: against the Eastern toll road, a Hon Development project in Coal Canyon and an Irvine Co. development in adjacent Gypsum Canyon.

Developers, as well as some elected officials, county planners and city officials, say the lawsuits are frivolous delaying tactics that clog the courts and waste time and money.

Chandos, a 42-year-old electronic technology instructor at Irvine Valley College, is a self-taught paralegal, so he is the “aggressor with a pen” that his colleagues turn to when they need legal advice or lawsuits filed.

Chandos said “it’s guerrilla warfare,” a tactic he and others defend. They believe they do not have an ear among Orange County supervisors and city council members, so litigation is their last resort for ensuring that officials follow California’s environmental quality law.

“There’s no Armageddon where you will defeat the environmental destroyers, but you’ve got to fight,” Chandos said. “I’ve got other things to do that would be more productive and less confrontational, but it seems you keep getting sucked into it.”

Local activists don’t always agree on how far to go to save a resource, and they sometimes argue among themselves about specific projects. To some, compromise is a dirty word. To others, it is reality.

“The extreme people can be very suspicious of middle-of-the-roaders,” said Dick Kust, 59, past president of the Sea and Sage Chapter of the Audubon Society and a Cal State Fullerton management teacher.

“But Orange County is not a national park, so when we say we want to save a piece of land, we can’t just take things. You have to offer something too,” he said. “You can’t compromise in every case, but if you stop talking and take your hat and go home, then you get nothing done. They’ll just go ahead and build it without you.”

Environmental Crusades Protecting some of Orange County’s most valuable environmental treasures is the passion of its most committed crusaders. Here’s a sampling of the sites, the organizations and the individuals involved: 1. Coal Canyon

Friends of Tecate Cypress

Leaders: Connie Spenger, Gordon Ruser

2. Silverado Canyon

Friends of the Canyons

Leader: Sherry Meddick

3. Trabuco Canyon and nearby areas

Rural Canyons Conservation Fund

Leader: Ray Chandos

4. Starr Ranch wildlife sanctuary

National Audubon Society

Leader: Pete DeSimone

5. Laguna Canyon

Laguna Greenbelt, Laguna Canyon Conservancy, Laguna Canyon Foundation

Leaders: Elisabeth Brown, Michael Phillips, Mary Fegraus

6. Newport-Irvine Coast area

Friends of the Irvine Coast

Leader: Fern Pirkle

7. Upper Newport Bay

Friends of Newport Bay

Leaders: Frances and Frank Robinson

8. Huntington Beach wetlands

Huntington Beach Wetlands Conservancy

Leader: Gary Gorman

9. Bolsa Chica wetlands

Amigos de Bolsa Chica, Bolsa Chica Conservancy

Leaders: Terry Dolton, Shirley Dettloff, Lorraine Faber, Victor Leipzig

Countywide:

Orange County Fund for Environmental Defense

Leader: Charlotte Clark

Sea and Sage chapter of Audubon Society

Leaders: John Bradley, Dick Kust

* EARTH DAY

Orange County will celebrate next weekend with nature walks, fairs and canoe and kayak trips. Earth Day will be observed across the nation Wednesday. A13