Originally published in Malibu magazine

El Porto is the perfect Santa Monica Bay surf break, though not because a coincidence of underwater geography makes thewaves there a little bit bigger and more consistent than most local breaks. That helps, but to me it’s so perfect because its inherent contradictions incorporate our strange, dichotomous relationship to the ocean. El Porto’s beach and waves, source of personal pleasure and sometimes even transcendence, are located in the shadow of so many ripe metaphors for our local ecology — the City of Los Angeles’ Hyperion Sewage Treatment, the El Segundo Power Plant, Chevron’s oil refinery. You can sit out there in the lineup and look out into a vast open ocean framed by the headlands of Point Dume to the north and Palos Verdes to the south and be taken by the strange beauty of this place — the way our urban landscape is constantly colliding with nature. Then, look up into the sky and watch jets taking off from LAX for points around the world burning horrific amounts of fossil fuel as they go, passing over the refineries where oil is turned into gasoline, over the towers of the power plants, over the endless spider web of freeways, over the tankers anchored in the bay. Where else do the seemingly conflicting needs of modern man and eternal nature come into such stark contrast?

Try this for another metaphor: Paddling out there a couple winters back my right hand snagged something plastic. I assumed it would be one of the many grocery bags the surf churns up for days after a rainstorm. No such luck. To my horror, when I looked at my hand, a used condom was tangled in my fingers. Yikes. In light of the magnitude of problems plaguing our oceans, where entire fish species are heading toward extinction and ecosystems are being devastated around the world and polar ice shelves the size of Manhattan are breaking apart and melting into the sea, one used condom isn’t exactly a canary in the coal mine, but it did make an impression.

Our oceans are the next frontier in environmentalism. Only now that the ocean is being taxed to the point of collapse by inland and coastal development, pollution, over-fishing and global warming, is coastal and ocean conservation catching up to its land-based counterpart. This might seem surprising when you consider that 70 percent of our planet is covered by ocean water, but not so when you consider that the vast majority of humankind has little interaction with the ocean beyond eating what comes from it. To put it another way, not many people know the privilege of digging for a wave on a surfboard, even if that digging occasionally pulls up a condom or a plastic bag. But the health of the oceans isn’t a privilege; it’s a necessity every bit as important as the health of our air and our land. In fact, they can’t be separated from each other.

The challenges to our oceans are so enormous, just thinking about them can be daunting, even paralyzing. The good news is there are bold and passionate people who are thinking globally and acting locally, and leading the fight against both this sort of complacency and against the harmful practices that have gotten us into these dire straits. For these guys — call them the Blue Brothers, if you will — blue is the new green.

Jim Moriarty, CEO Surfrider Foundation 

Surfrider Foundation’s world headquarters in San Clemente is situated in an innocuous office park a bit further uphill from San Clemente’s beach than you might expect. Inside the bland industrial park façade, though, bright-eyed, attractive young people sit at open-air workstations in a redone warehouse space that looks like a cross between an MTV studio and Internet startup, only with surfboards and wetsuits stashed away just in case.

Everybody seems pretty stoked to be there, including the organization’s leader for the past four years, Jim Moriarty. If Moriarty wasn’t a surfer, he could certainly play one on TV. When I meet him at Surfrider’s headquarters, he’s dressed casually hip in jeans, sandals and a comfortable short-sleeved button up. The only sign of his middle age on his athletic frame is his salt and pepper hair. He appears every bit the blue-eyed, handsome Socal beach boy of legend. Not bad considering he grew up in the ominously named town of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, near Cleveland. But Moriarty was a bit of a rebel right from the start, calling himself a first-generation skateboarder and punk rocker.

“Skateboarding, kind of during the Dogtown era, was completely breakout,” he says, sitting across from me at a large oval table in a modish conference room. “In some ways, one of the quote-unquote ‘extreme sports,’ in pools and half-pipes and everything else, which is what we were doing.”

Moriarty, who lives in Solano Beach, came out here in 1989.

“I’ll never forget that first wave I took at Cardiff Reef on a Herbie Fletcher, you know, [with the] red board with the skull and crossbones and white flames I picked up, and it’s just this amazing ride,” says Moriarty. “Skateboarding is all about urban decay and the playground and self-expression. On the surf side, when you take a step into the ocean, you’re in a foreign environment that’s changing dynamically.”

It’s no coincidence the offices have the vibe they do. Moriarty was plucked out of the high-tech arena to run Surfrider four years ago. He is still the chairman of a biotech search engine. He was recruited in the hopes that he would integrate the executive styles of Surfrider’s two previous leaders.

Pierce Flynn, who ran Surfrider in the ’90s was in many ways the guy who made Surfrider part of pop culture. He got the group on Baywatch and MTV, and released a series of awareness-raising albums featuring artists such as The Beastie Boys, Pearl Jam, the Ramones, Paul McCartney and others.

“He was kind of a dealmaker, an outside guy,” says Moriarty, “and he really put Surfrider on the map.”

Next came Chris Evans, of whom Moriarty says, “I would oversimplify as an inside dog.” With Surfrider’s name already seeping into the popular consciousness, Evans worked on building out the organization’s programs and operations.

When Moriarty came onboard, “it was essentially a merge [of] those two as well as someone who could kind of take advantage of social networks and communication changes that are happening in real time. To some degree that’s why they came after me. That’s why I’m here.”

But from skateboarding and punk rock to the brave new world of high tech and the Internet to his work at Surfrider, Moriarty sees a common thread.

“As I look back on my entire life, one of the things that characterizes me is big ideas and big, kind of world-changing things,” he says.

As a kid on the ground floor of punk rock and skateboarding, Moriarty says, “You were a maverick because there was nobody behind you.

“If you transition that to the Internet and software, software is about creating new worlds and it’s about this big idea: changing things. [And so are] environmentalism and the Surfrider Foundation. So, from my standpoint, the threads are completely logical and they connect. And they are all about, you know, you go through life once and you better tap into some big things and throw yourself into them with your heart and soul, otherwise your life is not as valuable as it could be.”

Formed in 1984 by three surfers who wanted to protect their local break at First Point in Malibu, Surfrider is now an international organization. It has 69 chapters in the United States — 20 in California alone. The organization’s stated mission is the protection and enjoyment of the world’s oceans, waves and beaches for all people, through conservation, activism, research and education.

What that means on a practical level is much more complex and nuanced, but in the cosmology of groups dedicated to preserving the integrity of beaches and coasts, they are kind of the grassroots, do-it-yourself guys. Surfrider has 50,000 members throughout its many chapters, and the issues they deal with are often local. At the core of it all, though, are citizens who are alarmed by various threats — developmental, pollution-based — to their enjoyment of beaches and waves. Surfrider provides education and beach health reports, it holds beach cleanups and fights developments that threaten beaches or access to beaches. They believe everyone has a right to the beach. A case in point was their successful fight against music mogul and Malibu resident David Geffen’s attempts to keep the public from public access to the beach that was adjacent to his property.

“We believe Malibu is not just for the rich,” says Moriarty. “David Geffen had public access roped off and we fought that. We’ll fight those all over the world because we believe in that.”

The fight to stave off a toll road that would severely impose upon both the access to and the integrity of beloved Trestles surf break perhaps best illustrates what Surfrider does well.

“Trestles is interesting. We actually took a real punk-rock approach. Literally,” says Moriarty. “The first graphics we put out there were, instead of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, it was Never Mind the Toll Road, Save Trestles. We riffed on the Ramones. We riffed on Black Flag and Black Sabbath, etc. It was very intentional. We were reaching out to the Orange County community and the specifically the surf community, trying to give them an on-ramp to plug into this campaign.”

So, while Surfrider might not be as focused on lobbying or litigation as some of their blue counterparts, they do something the others aren’t quite as good at. “We’re the organization that puts butts in the seats at city council meetings,” says Moriarty.

Heal The Bay’s president, Mark Gold, says the Trestles campaign has shown that Surfrider’s grassroots ability to arouse public interest has moved advocacy “to a different level.”

“They have the ability to generate thousands and thousands of letters,” he says. “Not only letters, because we can do that, but as we’ve seen on the Trestles situation, which has really captured everybody’s imagination, they can get thousands of people to show up, and that’s pretty incredible.”

With a budget of more than $7.5 million and a name that has a certain glamorous mystique to it, Moriarty is steering the organization toward its next phase. He speaks in terms of networking, movements and on-ramps — which if you take away the techie jargon is saying that he wants to apply modern communications habits to not only invite, but also attract individuals caught up in their individual interests to participate in Surfrider’s mission. Another way of looking at it is that Surfrider is positioning itself to become the portal through which everyday folks can enter into the world of ocean activism. In a way, Surfrider is helping to wire together a blue army across the country and around the world, person by person.

To frame this in a practical sense, Moriarty uses an example of someone who is really into digital photography. “Find a way to plug me into your mission. I just don’t want to do this other work because I’m into digital photography. We as an organization need to continuously find ways to plug people in, in ways that they love and feel good about. And then they’ll take that extra step. ‘Hey, here’s my digital photograph of trash on the beach. Then, yeah, I’ll hang out with you. I’ll come to a beach cleanup. That sounds cool. I’ll bring some of my friends, maybe take some pictures.’ ”

Then, once they enter into Surfrider’s web, they are connected to 69 other chapters here and 11 more around the world with a unifying interest.

I ask Moriarty what he sees as the top priorities for his and other blue organizations. “They’re changing,” he says, “and they’re very dynamic.” Indeed, every day seems to sprout a new host of threats to our shorelines. Moriarty quickly rattles off a host of them, such as the recent push toward desalinization of seawater as a source of drinking water, a concept that is almost too absurd to contemplate as a reality when looked at closely, yet it exists. Other ominous trends include the increasing political viability of offshore drilling and the current administration’s attempts to scale back the protections of the Endangered Species Act.

If the challenges seem daunting, Moriarty takes hope in both the grassroots growth of Surfrider and also in the partnerships his organization can form with other ocean environmentalists.

“It doesn’t have to be under Surfrider’s banner,” he says. “We don’t exist to grow our brand. Organizations like Heal The Bay, I hope they succeed tenfold past their wildest aspirations. More and more, I want us to help other organizations partner and accelerate. … We don’t exist for brand recognition like Intel or Coca Cola does. We exist for the protection and enjoyment of ocean waves and beaches, and if that can be done by, you know, say, Surfers Against Sewage in Great Britain, great! How can we help them in that process?”

Mark Gold, president of Heal The Bay

I didn’t ask to see any family photo albums to bear out my theory, but I’d guess Mark Gold doesn’t look much different today than when he was teenager going to Santa Monica High School and running around Point Dume in his spare time. When I meet the president of Heal The Bay at its headquarters in a nondescript, two-story building on a residential street in an otherwise commercial strip of Santa Monica, he’s dressed in shorts, a T-shirt and tennis shoes that wouldn’t have looked out of step in the ’70s.

Tall and still a bit gangly despite the thickening middle, Gold appears like an overgrown kid. The impression stops when he speaks. His boyish looks belie a daunting intellect and deep passion for the issue that has been his life’s work for more than 20 years: the health of Santa Monica Bay. His concern for our bay is an innate part of who he is.

“The ocean has always been a big part of our family’s life,” says Gold, a lifelong Los Angeles resident. “It’s where we spent our summers.”

Gold stayed local when it came time for college, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biology from UCLA.

While he was working inside the halls of academia, a plucky new environmental group called Heal the Bay was just starting to form in 1985 when founder Dorothy Green and a small group of citizens got pissed off about the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant’s disastrous dumping of barely treated sewage into the bay. The pollution was wiping out indigenous fish populations, rendering the sea floor a barren desert (by the ’70s only worms and clams could survive on the bay’s bottom), and introducing reproductive problems and tumors in marine mammals. The dumping was also making swimmers and surfers sick.

“That was the groundswell for the movement that became Heal the Bay,” says Gold, who started volunteering with the organization in 1988.

“That was the year the logo came out,” says Gold. “Everybody had to have the black Heal the Bay T-shirt with the fishbone logo. Heal the Bay just sort of caught fire.”

I ask him why?

“It was basically that in L.A., people became ready to get involved in an environmental issue surrounding the ocean. The bay meant so much to people.”

Gold, however, wasn’t being trendy; he was following a calling.

“I really wanted to work for an environmental group. At the time, there really weren’t a lot of environmental groups in L.A.,” he recalls as we sit in a conference room while the late-summer evening sun pours through the large, west-facing windows. “Things have changed so much since then.”

Before long, Gold was successfully pursuing his doctorate at UCLA in environmental science and engineering through field research with Heal the Bay that proved what everybody knew anecdotally – human shit was getting in the bay. Prior to his work, it was presumed that because the sewage lines and storm drains were separate, human pathogens didn’t flow into the bay.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” he recalls. “I thought there would be some human sewage in the storm drain system, but not the frequency that we found.”

Meanwhile, Heal the Bay joined the Environmental Protection Agency in a lawsuit to force the City of Los Angeles to comply with the Clean Water Act. The result is a stunning example of what can happen when public pressure is brought to bear on a public entity. Untreated sludge stopped flowing into the bay by 1987. By 1998, the facility was rebuilt to provide full secondary sewage treatment (primary treatment removes debris such as plastics and litter; secondary treatment cleans out toxins, oil, grease, pathogens, etc.). Marine life began returning to formerly dead areas in the bay and the new Hyperion Sewage Treatment (along with the ’84 Olympics) is one of the prime examples showing how Los Angeles can get things really right when it tries. In 2001, the facility was named as one of the top 10 public work projects of the 20th Century.

“The mission has pretty much remained unchanged for some time, which is to make Southern California coastal waters and watersheds, including the Santa Monica Bay, safe and healthy for people and marine life. Think of any pollution source to local waters, and we’re working on it.”

Gold became the first person hired by Heal the Bay and has been there ever since, bringing a scientist’s bearing to the cause.

“What Heal the Bay is known for is credibility,” he says. “We’ve been around for a long time. We have a lot of scientists on staff. We have a lot of people in the field. We generate a lot of data on everything from our beach cleanups to water-quality collection and all this other sort of work. By having the longevity and credibility we have, the elected officials and the city-manager types and the directors of public works know that it makes sense to work with us because of our credibility. If we show up to oppose something, we’re generally going to have the facts on our side.”

And while we’re no longer pumping massive amounts of untreated sewage into our local waters — thanks in no small part to Heal the Bay — there’s still a long way to go until the bay is healed.

“You know, a lot of times people ask me, ‘So, where are we? You’ve been working on this issue for over a generation and, you know, where are we in cleaning up the bay?’ ” Gold says to me, leaning into the question, “And, I often say we’re half way to cleaning up the bay because we’ve done a decent job on reducing sewage pollution, and we’re now even starting to have some progress on cleaning up the beaches in the summer months, but we’ve done a miserable job — not even a poor job (laughs) — a miserable job on reducing storm-water pollution.

“All of those pollutants, which are in our storm-drain system, because, again, our storm-drain system is separate from our sewer system, go into the ocean without any treatment at all when we have rain. And the volumes are enormous. To give you an idea, Malibu Creek on an average day might flow in the 5-million-gallons-per-day range, but in a huge rain, that can go up to hundreds of millions of gallons.”

In some ways, grappling with this issue is even more daunting than the sewage problem. With the sewage lines, there was at least some infrastructure to deal with it and the source points of the problem were relatively readily identifiable. Storm-drain pollutants are reflective of our entire pollution problem in general. Every bit of plastic, trash or debris — from shopping bags to shopping carts — has a chance of making it into the our storm-drain system.

“A really big focus the past few years, which has moved from being just education to advocacy in a really big way is marine debris,” says Gold. “The amount of plastics in the ocean is beyond everybody’s worst nightmares. What that did is focus our organization on advocacy on marine debris that we weren’t doing before.”

To that end, Heal the Bay has been working with municipalities, state agencies and city agencies to try to stem the flood of debris at its source. Gold is adamant that something has to be done to break people of their addiction to one-time-use plastics. His group worked with Malibu to ban plastic bags and Styrofoam. They have a bill pending with the state to make sure the building blocks of all plastic materials — little fish egg-like pellets called “nurdles” — never leave the place of manufacture. They are working to get a fee levied on the use of plastic bags at grocery stores and retail establishments. They’ve also been working with the National Resources Defense Council and Santa Monica Baykeeper on codes that will eliminate trash from the Los Angeles River and Ballona Creek, two huge drainages into our local waters.

“There’s supposed to be zero trash in the LA. River and Ballona Creek by 2013,” says Gold.

Responding to pressure from Heal the Bay and other blue groups, city agencies have been slowly installing storm grates throughout the city’s drain system, but even this isn’t enough to fully heal the bay.

“Again, the grates are only going to deal with trash,” says Gold. “They’re not going to deal with pathogens; [they’re] not going to deal with toxic metals or any of that stuff. That being said, we’re probably, at this point, at around a third [of the system having grates installed]. Five years ago, we were at zero, so there’s been some improvement in that regard.”

While Gold gives the city and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s administration high marks for its work on the storm-drain and sewage system, and in making the Port of Los Angeles greener, he says that in order to get to a fully clean and healthy bay, nothing less than a cultural change is needed, one in which Los Angeles views every aspect of its civil life — from transportation to consumption and pollution — in terms of a healthy approach to the environment.

“What hasn’t happened, and what I had hoped would happen, is working on overall sustainability for Los Angeles,” says Gold. “Maybe it will happen in the next year or so. There’s been a lot of discussion on it, but that’s one thing that hasn’t happened.”

I ask Gold if he believes the public has the will to change.

“I have to believe that, otherwise I couldn’t be doing what I do. I get asked that question a lot — how do you beat your head against the all for 20 years — and the reality is that there are enough victories that do occur and you see how public will can change, and that gives you hope.

Tom Ford, executive director, Santa Monica Baykeeper 

Jacques Yves-Cousteau is the father of modern marine exploration and conservation. His late-’60s to mid-’70s TV show, The Undersea World of Jacques Yves-Cousteau, is a pop-culture touchstone for many baby boomers, and has inspired singer/songwriter John Denver (Calypso) and director Wes Anderson (The Life Aquatic With Steve Bissou, Rushmore) among others. Add Tom Ford to that list. The executive director of Santa Monica Baykeeper, whose picture on the group’s Web site features him in full scuba gear, thanks Cousteau for making the ocean a part of his boyhood life among “the cows and corn” near Allentown, Penn.

“I have to credit Jacques Cousteau with bringing the ocean into my living room,” says Ford. “It was really one of the few ways my parents were able to discipline a rowdy young man. If I didn’t behave and didn’t get my stuff done, I didn’t get to watch Jacques.”

Thanks to his zeal for Cousteau’s exotic adventures, Ford found himself “always soaking wet. I was always in the creeks and ponds, fishing, etc.”

He laughingly adds that he didn’t see the ocean until he was in high school. When he finally reached the beach along the Jersey Shore, he looked down from the pier and saw crabs mating, and was quickly hooked on the life aquatic.

Like his counterparts, there’s something preternaturally youthful about Ford, a wide-shouldered bear of guy with an easy smile. There must be something about their connection to the ocean that keeps a lot of play alive in these middle-aged men.

Ford got in the ocean in earnest when he went off to study marine biology at the University of Rhode Island, during which time he dug clams and worked as a scuba diver to help pay the bills. “I pretty much took every opportunity I could to get out there on the water,” he says.

After graduating, Ford went to work for the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, Conn., as an educator and aquarist. He came out to Los Angeles in 1998 to work as curator of the UCLA Ocean Discovery Center while also earning his master’s degree in marine ecology at UCLA.

Ecology, the study of the relationships and interactions between living organisms and their natural or developed environment, best describes Ford and Santa Monica Baykeeper’s approach to ocean environmentalism.

“I was really intrigued by biology, but more so by ecology,” he explains. “The ecology is the story that’s going on. Biology is a snapshot of what the stage looks like. Ecology is the script and the interaction.”

One of Baykeeper’s and Ford’s first missions, and one that is still a primary focus of the group, has been the restoration of the kelp forests off our coasts. Ford found Baykeeper when they needed divers to help relocate the sea urchins off Malibu and Palos Verdes that were decimating the kelp forests. In 2002, he became the director of Baykeeper’s Kelp Restoration and Monitoring Project, which led to his current role as executive director.

“We’ve done that in Malibu now going on six years. We work off Palos Verdes as well, which are the two places in our bay that have historically had kelp forests,” says Ford.

“I still direct that project,” he says, adding with a laugh, “but now I’m the keyboard commando.”

I meet Ford at Baykeeper’s headquarters on Washington Boulevard in Marina Del Rey on a brilliant afternoon, the type of day one would like to be out on the water. The modest office, above a restaurant in a two-story commercial strip, is as old-school as Surfrider’s is mod. Staffed with a handful of casually dressed employees, it has the feel of a cool, aquatic-themed frat house.

For the sake of gross oversimplification, because their missions often overlap and these groups work side by side on many issues, it can be said that while Surfrider is about inspiring the masses to get involved with blue issues, and Heal the Bay is about educating the public and policy makers, Santa Monica Baykeeper has the hands-on people.

“It’s the mission that’s driving us. We’re trying to protect and restore Santa Monica and San Pedro bays and their adjacent waters,” says Ford, whose gregarious disposition adds a charming complement to his swashbuckling nature. “So, we’re trying to clean up existing sources of pollution. We’re restoring kelp forests. We’re restoring riparian quarters, not just the stream itself, but the native plants and trees surrounding them to undo some of the damage that’s been done and put back some of the habitat that’s been lost.

“I think the Santa Monica Baykeeper is making more physical changes on our landscape for the better than anybody else in town,” he continues, “and that’s something I’m very proud of here, and one of the things I want to continue to pursue as I get a chance to run this organization.”

But, with eight people on staff and a modest budget of a little more than a million dollars to work with, Ford admits that “regardless of how good we are, there’s a lot of work to be done.”

Despite operating with less budget, staff and volunteers than its blue brothers-in-arms, Santa Monica Baykeeper is like that tenacious little dog with a bone. Once it latches on, it won’t let go.

A prime example is the recently reached agreement with Caltrans on an unprecedented effort to reduce pollution and debris from the 1,000 miles of highways across Los Angeles and Ventura counties. Approved by federal court, the agreement settles a lawsuit by Baykeeper and the Natural Resources Defense Council that will employ innovative approaches such as sand traps, catch basins and porous pavement to catch contaminants and runoff before it gets into our drainage systems. When fully implemented, the program is expected to keep more than 6 million pounds of debris — 300 dump trucks worth of garbage and toxins — from reaching local waters. The settlement was 14 years in the making.

“You know, some of these things can take a long time,” jokes Ford.

Baykeeper was also instrumental in settling a case with the City of Los Angeles for massive improvements to repair faulty sewer lines. It amounts to a $5 billion investment in sewer infrastructure on the part of the city, and three years into the ongoing project, according to Ford, they’ve seen a 71 percent reduction of sewage spills in Los Angeles.

“Now, it’s one of the jewels of the city of L.A., that they’ve been able to succeed at this aggressive project,” says Ford.

Ford says these kinds of lawsuits tax his organization dearly, and they don’t engage in them lightly, preferring diplomacy first. “The litigation we use also involves a great deal of education. It’s not a casual thing we do. It’s a tremendous commitment for this organization to take on a lawsuit.”

But, he adds, “Oftentimes, without either the threat or the proven history of being able to bring targeted, effective lawsuits that bring these wins together, I don’t know how effective we’d be.”

Like his counterparts at Heal the Bay, Ford says the next big target is storm-water pollution. “Taken as a whole, it’s arguably the single largest source of pollution in Southern California.”

He also agrees with Gold that nothing less than a new way of thinking will be needed to ultimately protect and restore our local waters.

“We need to regain the balance in our watersheds and in our bay if we’re going to have any [kind] of a sustainable, healthy future and what I feel is an appropriate quality of life for the inhabitants of Los Angeles,” he says, his energy visibly rising to both the task and the prospect of creating a bluer future. “So, we’ve got to protect our streams and our rivers. We’ve got to figure out how to put in the infrastructure and deal with our human communities in a way that we’re reducing the impact on our lives in the way of those pollutants, toxins and bacteria getting in the water.

“We’re not looking to figure out how to get to the moon,” he adds. “Everything we’ve talked about is something that I think comfortably has an engineering or a known solution. It’s really coming up with the will to make it happen.”