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An unassuming office sits perched above the green-and-black awnings of the 26 Beach Caf’ on Washington Boulevard in Marina del Rey. Though only several rooms large, the office houses one of Southern California’s most prominent environmental advocacy groups: the Santa Monica Baykeeper. ‘We’re a very lean organization with a very small staff, our budget is not huge, and yet we’ve taken on some pretty big characters and prevailed,’ says Tracy Egoscue, Baykeeper executive director, referring to the group’s legal efforts. ‘We have a really great impact for the amount of resources that it’s taken us to do it.’ Indeed, the group has won a number of large and significant settlements, including a $2-billion ruling against the City of Los Angeles in 2004 for illegal sewage spills. As part of the settlement, the City has started a 10-year program that seeks to repair the dilapidated sewer system. While a settlement of such magnitude may seem grand for an organization with only seven full-time employees, court battles are not Baykeeper’s only business. In addition to legal wrangling, there is also the flagship Kelp Restoration Project, a hands-on program to regrow kelp forests off the Southern California coast, and the storm-drain pollution-monitoring program, Beachkeeper. Founded in 1993, the Santa Monica Baykeeper is one of more than 120 members of the Waterkeeper Alliance, a coalition of local Waterkeeper and Baykeeper programs throughout the world. Each Waterkeeper organization champions local water-quality issues within the framework of the Clean Water Act of 1977, as well as local environmental legislation. Egoscue ‘ known informally as the ‘Baykeeper’ ‘ is a San Diego native and former Deputy Attorney General with the California Department of Justice. Though she is a natural choice to lead an advocacy organization such as Baykeeper, the group has surprisingly eclectic roots. Started by Terry Tamminen, author of ‘The Ultimate Pool Maintenance Manual,’ and a former aspiring Shakespearean actor, sheep rancher and now Special Advisor to the Governor for Energy and Environmental Policy, Baykeeper began as a one-man operation with Tamminen patrolling the Santa Monica harbor on his boat. ‘Terry literally used to write tickets to polluters,’ Egoscue says. ‘Not a legal thing, but he would have a date and would write the violation, and he’d hand it to the violator from his boat when he saw someone dumping sewage or trash. ‘He did a lot of outreach and trying to educate the public by himself,’ she added. I boarded Baykeeper’s boat this past Tuesday with Tom Ford, director of the Kelp Restoration Project. As we rode the waves from the Baykeeper’s home base in the Marina del Rey harbor up the coast to Pacific Palisades, Ford spoke about his own interest in marine biology. ‘Growing up in Pennsylvania I was hundreds of miles from the ocean, but I was always fascinated with Jacques Cousteau on TV,’ he says. ‘I always loved the water, I was always swimming. Once I saw the ocean in high school, I was hooked.’ Passing through the Marina’s entrance channel, Ford motions to a group of men fishing off the rocks lining the Ballona Creek. ‘These guys here, hanging out and fishing in the Marina is part of their culture: go down there, catch some fish, bring some home, feed the family. But man, what kind of toxic burden do those guys have? Swimmable, fishable waters ‘ that’s what the Clean Water Act directs us to.’ Enforcement of the federal Clean Water Act is central to the group’s mission. While Congress originally passed the statute as the Federal Water Pollution Control Act in 1972, it became known as the Clean Water Act as amended in 1977 and sets numerous standards for regulating the discharge of pollutants.. Back at the office, staff attorney Dana Palmer, who along with Egoscue constitutes Baykeeper’s legal wing, spoke to me about issues facing the group in its legal endeavors. ‘Water-quality legislation is particularly confusing. In California, the clean-water laws predate the federal laws, and a lot of what we’ve seen in our lifetime is trying to make sense of both state and federal clean-water law. Whenever there’s a legal conflict, one side can take advantage of that to create confusion.’ Despite these conflicts, the group has been generally successful in court and, in fact, their legal muscle is a point of pride. ‘A lot of environmental groups are soft and cuddly like the animals on their Web sites,’ Ford says. ‘The Baykeeper, though, is not afraid to say, ‘We asked nicely several times and we’re not asking nicely anymore. Straighten out or we’ll bring a lawsuit against you.” As we rode up the coast, Ford also explained the Kelp project itself: among other things, how the Santa Monica Bay has lost between 70 and 80 percent of its kelp beds due to pollution and overfishing. Sea urchins are central to the problem. Allowed to procreate unchecked due to overhunting of their natural predators, the urchins consume kelp forest at an alarming rate. ‘We’ve lost the California sea otter, which used to live all the way down through Baja and ate sea urchin by the bushel,’ Ford says. ‘Those guys were hunted out in the 1850s. Lobster is another sea urchin predator, but they are now both recreationally and commercially sought after, and their numbers and sizes are dramatically limited due to those fishing pressures.’ ‘We’re trying to reset the ecological balance by thinning the density of urchins. What has been 13 to 15 [urchins] per square meter is now down to one or two per square meter, which is the index of how many would normally be there.’ Ford added that the group has thus far relocated between 70 and 80 thousand urchins over the rocky coastline of the Santa Monica Bay. While Ford says moving them to a location where they could not eat kelp at all would be ideal, the Department of Fish and Game, ‘mandates that we distribute them that way in the interest of the sea urchin harvesters.’ Though the project is almost overwhelming in scale, Ford speaks optimistically about progress. ‘We’ve had a kelp canopy form from just an inch tall all the way to 40 feet within about eight months,’ he says. ‘The kelp beds are a biogenic media, a living structure that provides lots of nooks and crannies to live in, and we see the fish respond very rapidly.’ In the water, much as in the courtroom, Baykeeper is a force to be reckoned with. ‘All of our divers are volunteers. We spend about 350 hours underwater every year ‘ two or three dive trips per week when conditions allow. A lot of environmental issues seem very imposing, but then we get people out there and they realize they can make a difference.’ This same mentality of volunteerism and public involvement also appears in Baykeeper’s other major program, Beachkeeper. Headed by Carlos Carreon, a three-year Baykeeper employee, Beachkeeper was started in 1995. ‘Our main program is monitoring the storm drains that empty into Santa Monica Bay,’ Carreon explains. ‘At the foundation of this program are our volunteers. We’ve sectioned Santa Monica Bay ‘ 44 miles of coastline ‘ into partitions, which our volunteers then walk once a month to observe water flow and collect samples, which they then send to us. ‘We try to limit pollution that deters kelp from regrowing,’ he added. When asked about the relationship among the Baykeeper’s three-pronged operations ‘ legal efforts, monitoring, and restoration ‘ Palmer characterized the organization ‘more as a circle: it’s a continuum.’ ‘The Kelp project, that’s restoring the environment. And here, what we’re doing is helping clean the water [through legal efforts]. Then Carlos’ program, the Beachkeeper, is this intermediate step, a watchdog check on the government and the legislation.’ Ford, for one, seemed pleased with the uniqueness of his job. ‘Most of the time, we’re out there and there’s nobody else. In the midst of Los Angeles and all of these socio-issues, I get to go out there and be like, wow, there are seven million people right over there and here I am in my little space.’
