The Guardians of Malibu Creek

All shaved head and burly frame, Mark Abramson takes a defiant stand in the creek bottom. Arms akimbo, he’s Mr. Clean with a goatee and an attitude.

“I don’t know if I’m an eco-warrior, but I’m not afraid to mix it up,” Abramson said. “Just because you have a lot of money and live on Malibu Creek doesn’t mean you can pollute it for the rest of us. If you do, I’ll catch you.”

Nothing seems to intimidate this espresso-guzzling, Marlboro-smoking, Altoid-popping eco-cop in cargo shorts. Not the poison oak or stinging nettles that block his path to the creek. Not slogging through tainted water. Not accusations of trespassing when he follows the creek through someone’s property.

Abramson works for Heal the Bay, an environmental group determined to clean up Malibu’s Surfrider Beach. Surfrider is one of Southern California’s 10 most-polluted beaches. Creek-borne contaminants are one of the chief causes.

Abramson is Heal the Bay’s top “stream walker,” the leader of its Stream Team, a group of self-appointed cops who patrol Malibu Creek and its headwaters. These volunteers are mapping every sewage outfall, every storm drainpipe and other probable sources of pollutants carried downstream to Malibu Lagoon and out to Surfrider Beach.

Collecting water samples laden with bacteria and ingredients of fertilizer, they put the heat on homeowners and sewage treatment plant operators by phoning complaints in to the official water police: the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board.

“I’ve gotten calls in the evenings from these folks,” said Jon Bishop, a manager at the water quality board. “Not all of the information we get pans out as violations. But many times it does.”

Heal the Bay’s Stream Team members don’t pass out leaflets, spike trees, chain themselves to gates or lie down in front of bulldozers. Instead, they do the grunt work of environmental science, collecting water samples for lab analysis, measuring and jotting down notes on everything that seeps, gurgles or flows.

The Stream Team is one of hundreds of such citizen monitoring efforts now flourishing throughout California and across the nation.

A dozen such groups work with the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board. Their data have become interwoven with those collected by government, helping form the basis for ever-tightening rules on acceptable levels of trash and pollutants.

On Saturdays, Abramson meets up with a gaggle of volunteers at Malibu Lagoon, dispatching them to places upstream. Each carries a backpack loaded with $3,000 worth of high-tech gear to measure everything from water clarity to acidity. They gather water samples in sterile jars and pack them out in ice chests for the lab.

“By monitoring what’s going on, we can find out why Surfrider is such a polluted beach,” said Damon Wing, a television production assistant who volunteers with the team every weekend.

For Abramson, 33, his devotion to Malibu Creek and its tributaries comes naturally. Indeed, it’s not so different from what he did as a boy in Agoura, romping around in streams in a youthful hunt for snakes and frogs.

As he has grown up, so has the area. Houses, horse corrals and commercial developments encroach on all sides. They can undercut his efforts to restore Malibu Creek to the way it used to be, before high bacteria counts made it unsafe for swimming and fertilizer components caused algae blooms that starve fish of oxygen.

Over the last three years, Abramson has mapped much of the 110-square-mile watershed. The state has just provided another $350,000 to help his team complete the job. But he has suddenly run into trouble on one Malibu Creek tributary that courses through the Ahmanson Ranch.

“We rolled down the window and told him, ‘You are trespassing,’ ” said Lenora Kirby, executive director of the Las Virgenes Institute for Resource Management. “ ‘This is private land and you should leave.’ ”

Kirby works closely with Ahmanson’s owner, Washington Mutual, which finances her nonprofit environmental institute as part of a decade-old agreement to allow the construction of a proposed 3,050 houses on the ranch.

Kirby and Abramson have sparred before, including once on a TV appearance when he accused the institute of being “bought and paid for” by Washington Mutual.

Kirby said she has no interest in continuing the feud or feeding what she sees as Abramson’s appetite for notoriety.

“I think they would like to manufacture a legend, an eco-warrior kind of guy,” she said. “I would not say he’s a pain. I would say he’s doing good work. He’s a deeply committed individual. I’d love to work cooperatively with him.”

Abramson wants no part of it. That’s why he slogged up the creek in the first place, to map the area believed to be the last habitat of the endangered red-legged frog in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

“I’m not going to let someone paid for by Washington Mutual tell us how the frog habitat is doing,” he said.

Developers plan to build two golf courses along the creek. Abramson said his training--he has a master’s degree in landscaping and environmental design--leads him to believe that pesticides and fertilizer carried by runoff from the golf courses would devastate the frogs.

At one public hearing, he showed up in a T-shirt depicting a frog dressed as a duffer in red-legged knickers. It read: “Washington Mutual’s Theory of Evolution: How endangered species will adapt to Ahmanson Ranch.”

For the record, Abramson said, he doesn’t think he was trespassing. He didn’t see any “No Trespassing” signs and, besides, he believes the creek is accessible to the public as a navigable waterway.

State law permits public access through private property on navigable streams and rivers--but only those that can be floated on for most of the year. Abramson thinks he could manage that.

“There might be differences of opinion on that,” he said. “If they want to sue me to find that out, we’ll find that out.” Nothing, it seems, would make him happier.

Such talk makes his boss cringe, of course. But Heal the Bay Director Mark Gold appreciates Abramson’s passion, the rogue charm of his stream walker in his trademark shorts--which makes him a favorite among volunteers and interns.

“How many enviros do you know who don’t own a pair of [long] pants, chain-smoke, drink espressos and live on Altoids?” Gold asked. “Yet the quality of his work, even though he’s a cowboy, is high enough to be used by regulatory agencies and state parks.”

On his rounds, Abramson made a stop to check on a storm drainpipe that has scoured the bank of Las Virgenes Creek, one of Malibu Creek’s tributaries.

“This was spewing for months,” Abramson said. He collected samples and wrote complaint letters to state officials and the Tapia sewage treatment plant after bacteria and fertilizer-like nutrients from Tapia’s nearby sludge composting grounds were found in the water.

The pipe is now dry. Bacteria levels have fallen back to normal. But nutrients, common elements of fertilizer, continue to run high, robbing the creek of oxygen and its ability to sustain fish, such as the steelhead trout that used to spawn in these creeks.

“I want the fish to come back,” Abramson said. “I’m not a typical tree hugger. I hunt. I fish. I want to catch a steelhead in the creek before I die.”

‘Just because you have a lot of money and live on Malibu Creek doesn’t mean you can pollute it for the rest of us. If you do, I’ll catch you.’