Wave of Help : Surfers Coalition Seeks to Turn Tide Against Pollution

It was a historic meeting. Amid plates of tacos, enchiladas and rounds of Mexican beer, the roll was called. Among the assembled: a United Parcel Service truck driver who can hang 10, a T-shirt designer from Malibu who is great with “smackin’ the wave lips,” and Hawk, a self-described troublemaker from Ventura.

Hardly your run-of-the-mill environmentalists.

But between forkfuls of frijoles, 35 men and women who came here a year ago formed California’s first Coalition of Surfing--an umbrella for 17 surf clubs more intent on fighting for environmental causes than scouting the next party.

Watching the proceedings was a smiling Jake Grubb. As executive director of Surfrider Foundation, a San Clemente-based beach conservation group, Grubb played a key role in shaping the coalition.

Now, as the foundation prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary in August, the coalition has become the foundation’s chief ally in exercising a unique and powerful brand of environmental activism that includes beach conservation, lobbying on coastal issues and waging environmental legal battles.

“We can’t have six people in an office in San Clemente dictating what’s going to be done in California and the nation,” Grubb said. “Our future calls for us getting a network of environmental watchdogs. And the only way we can do that is by building coalitions.”

Surfing the new coalition wave is Eugene Eudaly, 47, a Laguna Beach cabinetmaker and Surfrider Foundation member, who was selected to head the coalition.

“We can now have our own lobby group. We think it could become a blueprint for beach activism that can take the Surfrider Foundation into the 21st Century,” he said.

Drawing representatives from Oceanside to as far north as Pacifica, Surfrider emerged 10 years ago to oppose plans to drain a nearby creek that would have ruined the famed Malibu surfing beach that shares its name with the foundation.

It began, said founder Glenn Hening, 43, to help improve what was then surfing’s outlaw image, which placed surfers “one step above bikers.”

“One of the things that struck me back then,” Hening said in a recent interview from his Oxnard home, “was that some biker organizations were doing Toys for Tots projects; something good for the community. And I told myself surfers never do anything like that. But we should.”

Now, Surfrider has 27,000 members in 21 chapters in seven coastal states including Hawaii, Grubb said. It has affiliates in Australia, Japan, France, England and Canada. It has an environmental issues team that sends experts on conservation, coastal law and biology to testify before Congress. It has waged successful court battles against major polluters. And it has begun Respect the Beach, a touted program that has recruited hundreds of high school students to test ocean waters for fecal bacteria.

“Surfers are so blessed because of what they’ve been able to enjoy in the ocean,” Hening said. “If they don’t do something to maintain the ocean for future generations, they won’t get through St. Peter’s gate because Peter will be saying, ‘You can’t come in because you didn’t leave anything for future generations.’ ”

This call to conscience has been heeded.

Eudaly, who is also president of the 200-member Doheny Longboard Assn., said Doheny surfers donated $2,500 from their dues to Surfrider. “We all share that sense of responsibility,” he said, “that if we don’t give something back, then who will?”

Can it be that a maturing process has mellowed these once, hellbent Californians whose main mission in life was to ride primo waves? What happened?

“We got old,” said Pierce Flynn, Surfrider’s 40-year-old communications director.

In fact, 37% of the members are in their 30s and 40s. The membership supports about 75% of Surfrider’s annual $500,000 budget; private grants and individual donors contribute the rest.

Many of its members were weaned on surfing during the Sixties, a time of rollicking good fun, long boards and Dick Dale music. The old VW vans with psychedelic paint jobs are long gone, replaced by mini-vans with cruise control.

Flynn describes the older, mature aficionados as a new vanguard of eco-surfers. A look at Surfrider’s membership finds many teachers, chemists, biologists, and lawyers--people with families and the economic means to make a change. That is not all that has changed.

In the past, many surfers would drive to the ocean and park their cars. If they saw an oil sheen or untreated sewage, they would surf nonetheless. Irritated skin and hacking coughs came with the turf.

Now, they are more likely to report the pollution. Not only has this approach been encouraged by many beach conservation groups, Surfrider has added environmental militancy to the mix. If polluters refuse to shape up, it could mean a legal battle.

“I am quite aware of the group,” said Port Hueneme City Council member Dorill B. Wright, a longtime member of the California Coastal Commission. “They have appeared before us on many occasions, generally with helpful and constructive things to consider.”

When Surfrider joined with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and won a major court battle two years ago, Flynn said, it prompted then-EPA Administrator William K. Reilly to remark: “The EPA likes surfers. We consider them the new indicator species.”

“I did say that. That’s true,” a laughing Reilly, now a fellow at Stanford University, said last week. “Surfers are in the elements every day. No one is as intensively exposed to the elements as surfers--air, water, pollutants and all the rest. They often tell us about pollution and things we don’t know about.”

Indeed, in amassing an impressive list of successes in its first 10 years, the foundation:

* Joined with the EPA in 1991 and won a $5.8-million settlement in fines--the second-largest settlement under the Clean Water Act in U.S. history--against two pulp mills in Humboldt County. The mills also were required to spend $50 million to reduce toxic discharges from their oceanfront pulp mills near Eureka.

* Helped block a proposed marina that the foundation believed would have destroyed historic natural wetlands as well as miles of sandy coast at Bolsa Chica State Beach in Huntington Beach.

* Campaigned to divert a major Los Angeles storm drain, which had been polluting beaches and forcing their closure for years, into a sewer system for proper treatment.

* Created a Blue Water Task Force program that includes Adopt-a-Beach, a storm drain stenciling program that warns the public against dumping toxics that spill to the ocean and recruiting students to test ocean water for pollution.

* Is developing a restoration proposal for San Juan Creek in Dana Point to prevent continued beach closures from sewage spills during heavy rains. The project could become a blueprint for restoring wetlands nationwide.

* Brought a complaint before a state regional water quality control board alleging that the city of San Diego underreported a massive pipeline leak that spilled untreated sewage between December, 1992, and June, 1993. The city was fined $830,000.

Barry Lacter, a spokesman for Portland-based, Louisiana-Pacific Corp.--one of the companies subject to the $5.8-million settlement in Humboldt County--said the corporation acquired a healthy respect for Surfrider. Louisiana-Pacific has stopped bleaching its pulp with chemicals laced with dioxins and has eliminated using any toxic chlorine, becoming the first pulp mill in North America to do so. The second mill involved, Simpson Paper, has since shut its plant.

“We were once an adversary,” Lacter said. “I hope not anymore.”