Magnate Faulted Over Trash-Filled Canyon : Environment: Man’s Santa Clarita-based hair care firm touts planet-saving efforts, but critics say he won’t clean up despoiled land he owns.
John Paul Jones De Joria’s planet-saving endeavors include racing solar cars and fighting to save a rain forest in southern Oregon. His mega-successful line of Paul Mitchell hair-care products carry labels proclaiming their environmental friendliness.
But local environmentalists say that the multimillionaire has repeatedly ignored their requests for help in a cleanup of Malibu’s spectacular Tuna Canyon--much of which is owned outright by De Joria and a partner, Curt Hendricks, under the name Curt and J. P.’s Venture Malibu.
Tuna Canyon is the site of illegal dumping, abandoned automobiles, and small but well-entrenched homeless encampments. Entertainer Bette Midler earlier this year had planned to donate money to clean it up. But she retracted the offer when she learned that the land was owned by the co-founder of one of the world’s biggest hair-care products companies, the Santa Clarita-based John Paul Mitchell Systems, which De Joria has previously said does “way more than 100 million in sales” worldwide.
“Mr. De Joria’s rich,” said Karen Douglas, Midler’s assistant in Beverly Hills. “He’s much richer than she is. He doesn’t send his gardeners over to clean up her house, so why should we send ours over to clean up his?”
Repeated attempts to contact De Joria or a spokesperson at his Santa Clarita headquarters were unsuccessful. Hendricks, De Joria’s partner, answered a Beverly Hills exchange but hung up when asked about Tuna Canyon, saying only: “I don’t want to talk about that.”
Throughout the spring, California Environmental Project, a statewide nonprofit organization, has organized periodic volunteer-based cleanups at Tuna Canyon that have been marginally effective--at best. Co-founder Scott Mathes said that the efforts have hardly made a dent in a mess that includes an estimated 60,000 pounds of scrap metal, 30,000 pounds of scrap wood, 7,000 pounds of glass bottles, 50,000 pounds of trash, 15 or so abandoned vehicles, 300 gallons of oil and paint, and even a decayed sailboat.
“We’ve pulled out probably 100,000 pounds of debris, but there’s probably 800,000 pounds there, and people are still dumping,” Mathes said.
Mathes said he contacted De Joria’s office about contributing to the cleanup of his land last February and was initially encouraged to send information. But Mathes said his subsequent messages were never returned, leaving his organization little choice but to continue enlisting volunteers, including high school students, to help out where De Joria would not.
The irony of targeting donations and volunteer labor at land owned by an environmentally conscious millionaire has not escaped many in the Malibu area. “I appreciate Mr. De Joria’s efforts to improve the environment on a global scale,” Mathes said. “But it seems to me part of his responsibility is to clean up his own land.”
“Why would he let individuals pay for it and volunteers go out?” asked Douglas, Midler’s assistant. “That, to me, is insulting.”
California Environmental Project estimates that it would initially cost $52,000 to clean up Tuna Canyon and $500 a month thereafter. Not everyone, however, is convinced that De Joria should pay the price for unlawful dumping and other illegal activity that occurs on his property.
“Who desecrates it?” asked Don Goodrow of Aladdin Rubbish Service, an Agoura Hills trash-hauling firm that has donated dumpsters to the canyon cleanup. “It’s the neighborhood. So why shouldn’t the neighborhood clean it up?”
David Greenwalt, a Tuna Canyon resident, contended that the inability of authorities to stop illegal dumping or control the ever-growing numbers of homeless people who often foul the area isn’t De Joria’s fault.
“Did he get rich by having to pay for everyone else’s mess?” Greenwalt asked.
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Bob Martin, whose territory includes the canyon, said De Joria’s development company has given permission for law enforcement officials to take action on the premises to control potential fire and health hazards and illegal dumping.
But the practicalities of financially strapped agencies regulating activity on large parcels of untended private property make such enforcement all but impossible.
“It’s almost one of those things where you have to catch the person in the act,” Martin said of the dumping. “We want to keep it as pristine as possible, but it’s a battle.”
It’s a battle of apparently little interest to De Joria, whose wider-ranging environmental interests will be the subject of a special segment next month on cable television’s Discovery Channel.
In southern Oregon’s Siskiyou National Forest, where the Elk River watershed is endangered by clear-cutting, De Joria has purchased five acres of privately owned wilderness and is considering buying several substantially larger tracts for preservation purposes, said Jim Rogers of Friends of Elk River. The Port Orford, Ore.-based group is dedicated to saving one of North America’s last true rain forests.
Rogers said De Joria was instrumental in financing the group’s successful suit against the U.S. Forest Service over proposed timber sales. “If it hadn’t been for him, it would be entirely different,” Rogers said.
Elsewhere, De Joria has sponsored the development of solar-powered cars, has driven one of them across Australia and operates three “solar farms” in Hawaii where all equipment is solar powered.
But back in Malibu, Mathes and others say that De Joria’s cleanup efforts in Tuna Canyon have been limited to a small area at the top of the canyon, far from where most of the dumping occurs.
Madeleine Schwab, community service coordinator at Santa Monica’s Crossroads School, which has provided teen-age volunteers to the Tuna Canyon cleanup, called it a classic case of the “cobbler’s children not having any shoes.”
“If push came to shove, I’d vote for the rain forest,” she said. “But if he has the wherewithal to do both, he should do both.”
