Going Against the Current

Early on an overcast Saturday, Rudolphe Streichenberger dons scuba gear to check on his private reef. In contrast to the day, his mood is bright: He is returning to the scene of a crime that may turn out not to be illegal after all.

Last year Streichenberger sued the California Coastal Commission, which had ordered him to remove the 2-acre reef he and colleagues built more than a decade ago off Newport Beach as an aquaculture venture. Last month, a Superior Court judge in Sacramento ruled that the underwater habitat may stay for now because the Coastal Commission as it is set up is unconstitutional.

“We’re going to start coming out here a lot more often,” said a jubilant Streichenberger, who uses a 16-foot inflatable boat to get to the reef, made of 1,500 used tires.

The Coastal Commission voted this month to file an appeal before its next meeting, set for July 9. The judge postponed enforcement of his ruling pending the outcome of that appeal.

Streichenberger, 72, seems an unlikely David to be taking on the Goliath state agency that for 30 years has been charged with protecting the California coast. Its actions have often outraged developers who say it has far too much power and are now applauding its legal setback.

Dennis Kelly, a marine biology professor at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, said he was stunned by the court’s decision but not surprised that Streichenberger was the driving force.

“He is one of the most tenacious people I’ve ever met,” said Kelly, who has known Streichenberger for more than 10 years. “He speaks beautifully, and a lot of people believe in him and back him up. Rudolphe is a survivor. This project has kept him going for 10 years now, and he is a person willing to fight to the death.”

Streichenberger said his motivation was not political--he just wanted to proceed with a modest experiment in growing mussels and kelp.

“This is tyranny,” he said of the commission’s ability to grant or deny permits for virtually anything built along the coast. “It’s gotten to where you can’t put an umbrella on your patio in the coastal zone unless the commission approves.”

A native of France, where he once served as an army paratrooper, Streichenberger discovered scuba diving during a 1959 vacation in Greece. Thus began a decades-long romance with the sea and a deep curiosity about its potential.

“I’d loved the ocean since childhood,” he says, speaking rapidly and intensely. “Later I discovered the bottom of the sea. I decided that I wanted to plant in the sand.”

While working in his family’s coal business, Streichenberger began research in his spare time on farming the ocean floor. He became a consultant on marine structures. In 1986, he met a Cal Tech scientist who encouraged him to come to California. Once here, he organized a nonprofit group, the Marine Forests Society, to experiment with artificial underwater habitats for growing food.

In 1988, under Streichenberger’s direction, the group built its first and only habitat: the reef 40 feet below the surface just off the Balboa Peninsula. The goal for the reef, made of tires strung together with nylon cord in 100-yard-long ribbons, was threefold: to recycle millions of tires; to create a profitable local industry in mussels for export; and to enhance the marine environment for sports and commercial fishing. Seed money was a $100,000 grant from a state program to encourage new ways of recycling tires.

“The plan is to make [reefs] that will produce 20 times more than ranches on land,” Streichenberger said. “Instead of land, . . . we will have ranches in the sea. We will feed the starving.”

Scientists have been skeptical all along.

“One of the problems I had from the beginning is that he said he was going to plant a marine desert to make it flourish,” marine biologist Kelly said. “Well, I’ve been studying that area for almost 30 years, and it’s not a marine desert. What he has created is an artificial community over the top of what once was a natural sandy-bottom community.”

Dennis Bedford, coordinator of the Department of Fish and Game’s artificial reef program, described the project as a “totally unscientific” repetition of earlier research proving that rubber tires make ineffective artificial reefs: “All he’s ever offered is anecdotal reviews of his success, and I’m not sure what he’s succeeding at. It seems to be a moving target.”

Over the years Streichenberger has experimented with other reef materials, including plastic jugs, PVC pipes and propylene rope. He also tried stringing tires with lines of coconut fiber, known to attract juvenile mussels. The focus now has shifted back to growing kelp and attracting fish.

He has also become an activist, lecturing to dive clubs and writing research papers on marine ecology. He has become a familiar figure in the environmental community of Newport Beach, where he lives in a modest townhouse with his wife.

“He’s the only one who could have done this,” Chuck Cooper, a longtime friend and dive partner, said of Streichenberger’s battle with the state bureaucracy. “He’s tenacious, he’s honorable and he isn’t corrupted.”

Though the original marine forest habitat was authorized by Newport Beach and the state Fish and Game Department, the project never had the blessing of the Coastal Commission because Streichenberger didn’t know he needed it. In 1993, when he applied for a permit to expand the reef, he learned that he must ask the state.

He sent the application, and it slowly wound its way through a system that handles hundreds of thousands of permits. Finally, the answer came: Request denied.

Reef Called Unscientific

After further review, the commission decided the project was unscientific and “inconsistent with the resource protection policies of the Coastal Act.” In December 1999 the state ordered the Marine Forests Society to remove its underwater reef. A month later, Streichenberger filed a lawsuit in Sacramento, where the commission is based, challenging the state’s right to issue such an order.

Streichenberger’s lawyer, Ronald A. Zumbrun of Sacramento, is a co-founder of the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which has been at odds with the Coastal Commission before.

His argument is that the commission, part of the executive branch, violates the state Constitution’s separation-of-powers doctrine because two-thirds of its members are appointed by the Legislature. Four of the agency’s 12 members are appointed by the governor, four by the Assembly speaker and four by the Senate Rules Committee.

Zumbrun had raised the separation-of-powers issues in earlier cases, but no court agreed with him. The court’s new ruling “takes them out of the world as they presently know it,” he says of the state agency.

In the three-page ruling in late April, Superior Court Judge Charles C. Kobayashi wrote that the Coastal Commission is largely a Legislature-controlled agency making decisions that should be left to the executive branch. “The commission is answerable to no one in the executive [branch],” he wrote. “. . . The Legislature has retained for itself the power of appointment and dismissal at its pleasure.”

If the ruling is upheld on appeal, it could be used to challenge similarly organized agencies as well as other Coastal Commission actions over the years, though legal scholars say they would expect previous decisions to stand.

Lisa Trankley, an attorney for the Coastal Commission, acknowledges the potential of the ruling. “If the decision is upheld,” she said, “the commission will have to be redesigned. Obviously this is extremely significant. What would be necessary is not exactly clear. Mr. Streichenberger has certainly made our lives a lot more interesting and busy lately.”

In the meantime, Streichenberger’s followers said they will continue their underwater farming and encourage others to do the same.

One disciple is Tony Pereslete, a Culver City engineer and Marine Forests diver since 1988. “If you want to construct a ship,” he said, “you don’t give people orders to cut and fit timber. You instill in them a passion for the sea. I think that’s what Rudolphe is doing, and it’s a very fundamental motivation.

“Rudolphe is a very passionate person deeply committed to enhancing life in the sea. I think he sincerely believes that the involvement of people is as important as technology.”

To that end, Pereslete wants to enlist local colleges and dive clubs in building an experimental underwater habitat in Santa Monica Bay that, like Streichenberger’s, would develop profitable methods of producing food.

For the indomitable Frenchman, however, the Newport Beach project remains the focus of his life. He hopes to enlist volunteers this summer to expand the reef by 1,000 tires and add more propylene rope to which kelp can anchor and grow.

“I just want to be free to plant the sea,” he said. “We have to reopen the door.”