Tuna Canyon Gets Sprucing Up : Ecology: Millionaire environmentalist hires young people from South Los Angeles to clear rugged area after complaints about the trash on his land.

He zipped into Tuna Canyon in his jet black, 200-horsepower Vector Twin Turbo, the one with the doors that open upward like the Batmobile.

Bare-chested and tanned, he plunged into a long-awaited cleanup of his trash-strewn property, working right alongside 20 young men and women he’d bused in from South Los Angeles.

Some of the workers acknowledged that they were members of the 107 Hoover Street Crips, but to millionaire hair-care titan and environmental activist John Paul Jones De Joria, co-founder of Paul Mitchell Systems, they were just people in need of a job.

“Gang members don’t want to be known as gang members anymore,” De Joria said. “They want to be members of the community.”

The cleanup came as an unexpected surprise to those who have watched with increasing alarm as the condition of Tuna Canyon, one of the last undeveloped coastal canyons in the region, deteriorated. Only two weeks ago, a Times article quoted the head of a statewide environmental group, California Environmental Project, who sharply criticized De Joria for ignoring repeated requests to clean up the canyon, much of which he purchased with a partner three years ago.

But on Thursday, the co-founder of the environmental group, Scott Mathes, had only good things to say about De Joria, who led the assault on a small patch of woods containing an estimated 3,000 pounds of scrap wood and metal. Within hours, most of the mess had been transferred to the roadside and was ready to be hauled away.

“The fact that he’s working out here impresses me,” Mathes said of De Joria, whose environmental causes include preservation of rain forests and sponsorship of an assortment of solar power projects. “It would be very easy for him to sit in his office and say, ‘Here’s the money--go do it.’ ”

De Joria said the cleanup was not so much a response to negative publicity as an element of a long-term cleanup of Tuna Canyon. Eventually, he said, he hopes to reroute Tuna Canyon Road to the north so it doesn’t run parallel to Tuna Canyon Creek along the canyon bottom. Once that is accomplished, he said, he hopes to donate a chunk of the land to the city or the state for a park.

“I’m not into the bureaucracy, so whether it’s going to be a city park or a state park, I couldn’t tell you,” he said.

Mathes, however, warned that, although moving Tuna Canyon Road might ultimately be desirable, it is risky.

“It sounds good, but the whole process of moving that road is going to entail a lot of construction and bulldozers--a lot of changes that may not all be beneficial.”

The game plan for removing the trash is somewhat simpler.

De Joria is paying his workers $50 a day to lug thousands of pounds of junk out of the canyon. The crew was expected to take the weekend off, then return Monday morning to finish the job. Initially, De Joria had predicted the cleanup would take five full days, but he was so impressed by the progress of Thursday’s effort that he predicted three days would suffice.

“These guys are doing seven days of work in three days and they should get paid for five,” he said.

Mathes was somewhat more cautious, noting that much of the remaining refuse, including several cars, lies in more demanding terrain and tends to be less concentrated than what workers encountered on Thursday.

“Removing it is going to take some ingenuity and thought,” he said.

It will also take some knowledge of the outdoors. Early Thursday, Mathes gave the workers basic instructions on avoiding snakes, poison ivy, wasps’ nests and other dangers not often confronted in South Los Angeles.

Dyasha Fontenot, 21, caught on quickly to the necessities of the canyon country.

“The sticks--you make sure they don’t move,” she said.

The rigors of the hill country were tempered somewhat by a touch of Westside elegance. Between helping out with the cleanup and confirming a dinner date with Clint Eastwood over his cellular phone, De Joria managed to provide a lunch of gourmet ham sandwiches and pasta salad with pesto, all catered by Bikini of Santa Monica, a hot new restaurant of which De Joria is a part owner.

The pace of the cleanup seemed to slow after that. “Everyone kind of pooped out,” Mathes said.

But crew member Darrell Robinson promised that the workers would not squander what they consider an important opportunity.

“It’s going to be clean--that’s what we were paid to do,” he said.