Tireless Crusader Credited for Restoring Los Cerritos Wetlands

His little black dog, Eva, wandered over first, sniffing with curiosity.

Then Lennie Arkinstall strode across a mound of pickle weed and sea lavender in the Los Cerritos Wetlands, drawn by the unnaturally bright blues and reds of something rustling in a clump of tall grass.

It was an empty potato chip bag, just like the tens of thousands of pieces of trash the self-proclaimed steward of the marsh has removed from the area over the last four years.

The custom-sign salesman gently raked up the wrapper, along with some straws, cigarette butts and lawn trimmings, and plopped the rubbish in a bucket, another small step for a man hoping to rid the sensitive coastal wetlands of debris.

Working out of a small boat with Eva at his side, he has personally hauled out several tons of tires, lumber, syringes, tennis balls, Styrofoam cups, beer cans and soda pop bottles. Even sofas and grocery carts.

“I come out here two, sometimes three times a day,” said Arkinstall, 47, as he prowled the marsh for trash on a recent weekday afternoon. “And as I clear away junk and debris I swear I can hear the plants underneath say, ‘Thank you!’ ”

“I spend so much time picking up trash along the shore that the shorebirds think I’m one of them now,” he said. “Sometimes I get so close to them, I can feel the wind off their wings on my face.”

Federal wildlife biologists and local officials credit Arkinstall for making the area in east Long Beach one of the cleanest coastal estuaries in Southern California.

“He’s done a great job; I want my marsh to be as clean as his,” said John Bradley, manager of the nearby Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge.

“I’m a professional refuge manager and yet, here’s a layman who’s shown me a thing or two. His style of stewardship is all about enormous amounts of work, persistence, enthusiasm--and actually setting down roots in a place. I like that.”

So do many others. Long Beach City Councilman Frank Colonna honored Arkinstall a year ago with a certificate of appreciation for “making it his personal project to remove debris from the Los Cerritos Wetlands.”

“We owe him a lot,” Colonna said. “He’s been a one-man restoration project--the heartbeat of the marsh.”

Arkinstall, who has a 26-year-old son from a short-lived marriage, moved from a Huntington Beach apartment into his boat at the Bahia Cerritos Marina in 1991. Despite living alone, everything was great except for the gobs of trash bobbing along the shores of the nearby marsh. He complained to local officials, but they urged him, he recalled, to “just let it all flush into the ocean.”

Instead, Arkinstall decided to do something on the private land, which is owned by the Bixby Ranch Co. and bordered by Pacific Coast Highway, Studebaker Road and the Los Cerritos Channel.

Armed with permission from the landowners and a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers, he set to work at the mouth of the estuary, which had been a regional dumping ground for half a century.

Initially, he recalled, “It seemed like an impossible task. Too much for one guy. As I was cleaning, storms came up and brought loads of junk back in. It took four months to clean up a patch 500 yards wide.”

Then he called it quits. For a while.

“Two weeks later, I went back with a plan to clean up one 20-foot-wide section each day,” he said. “Over the next two years, I was out there every day until the place was almost pristine.”

Arkinstall said his driving force is a childhood memory: “Growing up in a fatherless family in Great Falls, Mont., we had the prettiest garden in the whole neighborhood. My mother planned it, and I planted the flowers and trees.

“Neighbors would stroll by and say, ‘Oh, my, that’s beautiful!’ ” he recalled. “Now, I get the same rewards, only it’s a much bigger garden.”

He arranged to have Long Beach city trash trucks haul away the mounds of debris he left on the banks. He also installed a trash-catching boom that prevents debris from flowing into the wetlands.

He’s gained a few helping hands from some homeless men encamped in the area’s tall brush. In recent weeks, Arkinstall has persuaded them to repair holes in fences and fill several large garbage bags with trash. One of the men routinely rakes large swaths of sandy soil, which makes the ramblings of local coyotes easier to track.

“The men are proud of the work they do for me,” he said. “In return, I give them a few bucks, and whatever they do with it, God bless them.”

Arkinstall has even contacted snack food companies and asked them to help fund his effort, given that empty chip bags are the most common discard in the marsh.

“They said, ‘Call us back when you have nonprofit status. Maybe we can work something out,’ ” he recalled.

Arkinstall followed through. On July 31, his Los Cerritos Wetlands Steward Inc. was granted nonprofit status by state and federal tax authorities. He plans to call back the snack companies this month.

Two years ago, he attended an ecology and wetlands restoration course at San Diego State University. That course, plus what he has learned in the field, has made him an expert on the vital link in the state’s chain of coastal wetlands.

A recent tour of Arkinstall’s domain was a crash course in urban marsh biology.

The agile Arkinstall carefully stepped between tiny mounds of dirt left by burrowing tiger beetles on a salt flat, then stooped to admire a brackish pond rife with horn snails and clouds of excitable minnows. Perched atop a nearby telephone poll, an osprey feasted on a fish. Across the channel, six great blue herons stood like sentinels on a grass-covered spit of land he has dubbed “Eva Island.”

“I especially love these guys,” he said, kneeling down. Was he admiring another beetle, perhaps some colorful fish? Not quite. He was brushing the tops of a patch of saltwort and pickle weed. “I prune and hand-clear every plant in this marsh.”

Arkinstall has made enemies of trespassing duck hunters, who use the property to train their dogs, and of some local boaters and fishermen.

“I once pulled nine hooks and two sinkers off a pelican that was tangled in fishing line,” he grumbled. “The hunters are driving me crazy by running their 60-pound dogs through fragile natural fisheries.”

The Los Cerritos Wetlands have been contested for years.

In 1982, the state Coastal Commission approved a plan calling for development of houses, commercial buildings and some light industry on 112 acres in the area. In return for those development rights, 129 acres of wetlands would be reestablished in areas damaged by oil operations.

That plan was never developed. So far, no one has made a hard offer for the property, which has been priced around $14 million. The California Coastal Conservancy has expressed an interest in purchasing all of the land as a refuge.

“No matter what the future brings, my work has given some plants, birds and fish a nice clean place to live for at least a few years,” said Arkinstall as he admired an endangered least tern diving for fish in the winding channel at high tide. “I feel pretty good about that.”

So for now, Arkinstall intends to continue his work, liberating the marsh of offending Coke cans and Doritos bags, his Eva at his side.