Catching a New Wave of Activism

At 50, Glenn Hening is equal parts beach bum, surf scholar, teacher and entrepreneur.

A man with stark blue eyes and a muscle-packed, surf-honed body, Hening, the man behind the Surfrider Foundation, is starting a new group from the Oxnard Shores home he rents mostly because of its proximity to some decent waves.

His nascent organization, the Groundswell Society, aims to introduce civility and community into the increasingly me-first sport of surfing.

The group’s first big call to arms will draw surfers and scholars to the beaches of Ventura this month for a sort of forum to discuss the current surfing environment.

Hening’s Surfrider Foundation gained environmental influence as surfers learned to communicate with bureaucrats and politicians. Exasperated by its environmental focus outside the surf zone, he has moved on, and the group has moved on without him.

With his first view of the ocean, after his family moved from New York to Santa Monica, Hening knew what he wanted to do with his life, even if it conflicted with what was expected of him.

“Surfing was verboten in my house,” Hening said. “They were beach bums or fanatics. Mom’s worst nightmare was that I would be an educated drifter surfing around the world.”

Her big question in those days of Moondoggie and Gidget, Surfin’ Safaris and bushy blond hairdos: How can you be both a surfer and respectable?

Now, with Hening’s two-decade focus on changing the surfing world, he is answering that question.

He talks in the language of the intangible about his new group, which he believes will include scholars and elders focused on the psychological environment of the surf. He wants “to temper the adolescence of riding waves with a new perspective.” He hopes to create a “mature sense of selfless community.”

But this group is a fledgling, with nowhere near the influence of the one he dreamed up more than 15 years ago.

The type of guy who stops a conversation in midstream to race out to the ocean and slash across a particularly killer wave, he attended UCLA, but switched his major from dentistry to history because it gave him the best surfing schedule.

He spent five years teaching in El Salvador, staying mainly for the good waves.

In 1984, back in the U.S., he began getting serious about fixing the problems he saw with his sport. He had a baby girl, Helen. He was excited by the unity of the Olympics. He thought he could change things.

The surfing community was selfish, he believed, focused only on competitions, nice waves and easy living. He bristled, he said, when the owner of the Ocean Pacific surf wear company appeared on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

Hening envisioned a group that would take poor children on surfing excursions. He designed a logo, a view from the nirvana of a tube--the tunnel formed by a cresting wave.

Friends weren’t surprised by his zeal. He was always more passionate about things than most others.

“Everyone was laid back, and here was Glenn so intense with icicles in his eyes,” said Jericho Poppler-Bartlow, a friend, co-founder of Groundswell and a groundbreaking surfer herself. “He didn’t pull it all together until he’d founded Surfrider.”

He was just the man for the job.

A proselytizer, big thinker, inspiration and occasional pain in the neck to the surfing establishment, he has relentless energy, both at a lectern and while slipping across the waves.

He is renowned among acquaintances as a cataloger of the esoteric: He can tell you that the waves hitting Oxnard Shores right now traveled 8,000 miles from Antarctica. He will talk about the surfer as epic hero, citing references from Polynesia to pre-Columbian Peru.

But in 1984, when he was still envisioning something along the lines of Groundswell, the bigger environmental questions loomed. How could he take kids out to surf in waves that were brown, floating with detritus from the everyday runoff of storm drains, backyards, farms and industrial plants?

Riling up surfers about water pollution wasn’t as easy as it might have seemed. Surfers are deeply suspicious of rules, orders and associations. Surfrider, with its older membership, looked--heaven forbid--a little bit uncool. And some hard-core surfers even prefer their waves dirty: It keeps out the wimps and gives the hardy and fearless more room.

“All surfers care about is getting waves,” said Sam George, editor of Surfer magazine. “If their concern was clean water, nobody would surf Malibu.”

But Hening persisted. He enlisted friends, including Tom Pratte, who eventually led the group in its pro-environment direction. Little by little, the group started chalking up successes and fighting battles that continue today:

* It joined the federal Environmental Protection Agency to help win a $5.8-million settlement against two pulp mills in Humboldt County that had been dumping millions of gallons of untreated waste into the ocean each day.

* It helped persuade Chevron to extend an outfall emissions pipe two-thirds of a mile offshore in El Segundo, away from the surf zone, and forced it to pay to rebuild a surf spot it had destroyed.

* It created a Blue Water Task Force that was instrumental in getting ocean testing started in Ventura County and elsewhere.

But Hening was bothered by the direction the group was taking. He didn’t want a group of bureaucrats. He wanted the “surf” to come first in Surfrider.

The logo is a wave, Hening reminds friends: “No sea gulls, no sand castles.”

In 1998, Surfrider was invited to take part in a conference call among a number of environmental groups and then-Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. When the Surfrider representative had a chance to ask a question, he asked about Chesapeake Bay.

Hening is still indignant: “There’s no surf on Chesapeake Bay! You wouldn’t know a surfer had even asked the question.”

At one point, Surfrider’s board voted to muzzle him by rescinding his title of chief advisor, arguing that he was divisive and spoke his mind too much with the press.

After a change of board members and a new executive director, the scene has mellowed, and Hening is often called in to speak about the history of the group he created, and which he fears has become indistinguishable from Greenpeace or the Sierra Club.

When he does, he continues to be ardently surf-first, agitating for artificial reefs and surf breaks--better places to catch waves--from El Segundo to Ventura. Many of the group’s chapters oppose such things on environmental grounds. They don’t believe in adding anything man-made, a position that has made it tough for projects such as Oil Piers, an envisioned surf break in Ventura, to get off the ground.

Hening’s focus on surfing rubs some chapter leaders the wrong way.

“We’ve worked very hard to try and work within the system, to try and effect change on the local level, and we can’t be fringe-dwellers,” said Paul Jenkin, who heads the group’s Ventura chapter.

But even those who sometimes disagree with Hening seem to like him.

“He’s a classic,” said Chris Evans, executive director of Surfrider. “What can I say? I can see why people would be mad at him. I’m just not one of them--I’m glad he’s on our side.”

Part Big Kahuna and part college lecturer, Hening uses words like “hodads” and “kooks,” derogatory terms for surfing wannabes. He also self-publishes a periodical with articles like “Waves of Semiosis: Surfing’s Iconic Progression.”

He’s proud of his surfing ability, certain that Surfrider earned credibility early on because he could surf like a pro.

But there are new waves to ride.

He has a family: daughter Helen from his previous marriage, three stepchildren and a 7-year-old son.

He is as gung-ho about his teaching job as he is about his position as Surfrider’s big dreamer.

He has taught at an adult school for patients in need of acute psychological care for more than a decade. Sometimes, Hening thinks, it takes a man with his single-minded determination to reach his students.

And he is talking up the Groundswell Society, which will host its first convention in October, a kind of forum for people concerned about the psychological environment of the ocean.

He wants better waves. He expects his group to back the building of surfing parks in Santa Monica and Carpinteria. He wants wave-riders who are concerned about the environment but, perhaps more importantly, concerned for each other.

“Surfers get sick of each other more than they get sick of the ocean,” he said. “What are we going to do about it?’