Saving the Coast
Warner Chabot says as long as there’s oil off our coastline, the skirmishes will continue.

BY JILL KRAMER

A funny thing happened back in 1988 while Warner Chabot was principal planner for the county of Marin, fighting to keep the coast free of offshore oil drilling. The U.S. Department of the Interior was holding public hearings up in Fort Bragg on a lease sale that would have covered the Northern California coast. The feds expected the usual: a dull, staid, poorly attended event. They hadn’t counted on the campaign genius of Warner Chabot. Chabot, who had lived in Mendocino for about 10 years, helped transform the hearings into a wild party, a major media event and a resounding defeat for drilling proponents. Thousands of angry citizens swarmed the street outside the hearings while Bonnie Raitt’s band played on a flatbed truck and a cadre of local women dressed as witches threatened the federal officials with a curse: if oil rigs go up, their penises would fall off. The revolution was televised. The oil rigs never went up. We assume the officials retained their genitals.

For a guy with the ordinarily thankless job of trying to save the environment, Warner Chabot has way too much fun. Whether he wins his battles or loses them, Chabot, now vice president of the Ocean Conservancy, always finds plenty to laugh about. Winning, however, is infinitely preferable.

At 54, Chabot looks like a cross between Paul Newman and John Cleese. What’s left of his hair is gray; he has hooded blue eyes and a neatly trimmed mustache. His manner is garrulous and expansive and frequently zany. It’s easy to imagine him bouncing on a trampoline with his two grandchildren, 10 and 8, as he did on a recent weekend. He’s a lover of the outdoors who doesn’t hike or fish. He does like to eat fish, he tells me. “I always say we should change our stationery to say, ‘We eat our clients.’ “

For all his humor, Chabot’s beginnings were grim. His father died before he was born and his mother was forced to give him and his older sister up for adoption. He grew up in the Santa Cruz mountains in the home of an older couple who provided temporary guardianship for a steady stream of youngsters. He doesn’t refer to them as his parents.

Chabot won a scholarship to California Polytechnic State University, where he studied architecture and was introduced to environmental activism. He was enchanted with the idea of local citizens taking control of the political process and found he was a whiz at running campaigns. He dropped out of school for a while to work on the 1972 state initiative that created the Coastal Act and the California Coastal Commission. He then enrolled at UC Santa Cruz and earned his degree in environmental planning.

He moved to Kentfield for the job at the Marin County planning department, then helped a coalition of six counties, from Sonoma to Monterey, analyze the impacts of a potential oil spill and create response plans if one were to occur. In 1994 he became head of the Pacific Region office of the Center for Marine Conservation, later renamed the Ocean Conservancy.

I met him at his suite of offices in the San Francisco financial district. He wore a pink plaid shirt, dark slacks and a pair of elaborately embroidered brown cowboy boots. We sat at a conference table, I turned on my tape recorder and Chabot began to hold forth. I had come prepared with a set of questions that I quickly abandoned.

Is the California coast safe for the foreseeable future? Or do you think we’re threatened by federal legislation of the sort that Richard Pombo proposed recently?
Unfortunately, we are always on the knife’s edge of being under threat. As long as there is oil out there, the oil industry and pro-oil drilling legislators will want to open up the California coast. As we’re speaking right now, they are renegotiating deals that will make another run at some variation of the Pombo legislation. By the time you go to press, probably another ugly deal will be coming up for a vote. And it’s very close. This whole thing is being decided by 10 or 20 legislators. It’s a classic story of the environmental movement: we win one battle only to fight yet another day. There are no permanent victories, only permanent losses. So the pressure will continue to be on. People get lulled into complacency, thinking, We won that war—isn’t it over? And it’s not. It’s never over. It requires eternal vigilance.

It seems like it would be political suicide in California, though, to even talk about oil drilling.
I always say that, yes. In public opinion it is still political suicide. But that doesn’t mean they won’t work to change that dynamic. If energy prices stay high, as local and state governments continue to be bankrupt, and [legislators] continue to offer millions and billions more in sharing revenues to increase the level of the bribe factor—that increases the pressure tremendously. They’re also doing things in this legislation that would eliminate the requirement that the oil platforms be removed once they’re done drilling oil. That’s a billion-dollar Christmas present to the oil industry, saving them the cost of removing the oil platforms. They’ll claim that it’s a gift to the nation, that those platforms can be used for offshore aquaculture or offshore wind farms or “ecological wonderland reefs,” which is the latest hype—that the platforms make great artificial reefs and therefore great fish habitat. That’s in Pombo’s legislation and that’s gotten almost no publicity.

What about the idea that leaving the oil platforms there would increase the fish population?
There was a study that the state commissioned about five years ago that concluded that there’s no proof that leaving these rigs in place increase the number of fish in the ocean. They might attract a lot of fish, but that doesn’t mean they’re producing more fish. They don’t have the nooks and crannies that a natural reef have, where mother fish and baby fish are able to hide from predators. So they might be an attraction device, and if there’s no longer oil production there, that allows the fishermen to go and fish there. And they might be a greater extraction device to deplete the ocean of fish, rather than producing more fish. Not only that, they violate the promise that the oil industry made when they put the oil platforms in. They’re ugly in the eyes of most people. You go to look at a long, unbroken horizon. You don’t go to look at an industrial junkyard out in the middle of the ocean. Does the public want the oil industry to keep their promise to take them out? Yes! And they expect their elected leaders to be responsible managers and restore and protect the ocean for future generations. Selling it to the oil industry doesn’t fit that formula.

I understand that there’s also a problem with the proposal to use the platforms for fish farms.
One of the biggest problems with many of these fish farms is that you’ve got to find small fish to feed the fish you’re farming. Where do they go to find the small fish? They go down off the coast of Central America and catch the fish that the poor people in the villages of Third World countries need for feeding their own people. They scoop up those fish and feed them to the larger fish that we’re going to try to sell at Trader Joe’s and Safeway. You might also have some pollution problems related to the concentration of fish in a small area. Any time you raise large quantities of animals in a confined space, you have to use large amounts of antibiotics to prevent disease. And if you fail to contain those fish—and it’s easy for structures off the coast to break in a storm surge or have holes in their nets—and these genetically inferior fish are released into the wild and mix with the wild stocks, they can do more damage to the wild stocks. We can do a far more efficient job of having productive, sustainable fisheries if we just do a better job of managing the natural environment by restoring the health and productivity of the natural reefs than we can by trying to play God and duplicate what happens naturally on three-quarters of the planet. Three-quarters of the planet is oceans.

Tell me about the Ocean Conservancy’s project to establish marine reserves.
The idea is very simple: you want to find habitats and nursery grounds where mother fish release large amounts of eggs and put them off-limits to fishing so that fish can get bigger and healthier. So the ecosystem that’s been hammered by too much activity can recover and you can replenish the fish supply. What a lot of people don’t realize is that a lot of fish off of California can live to be 70, 80, 90 years old. They don’t start having babies until they’re in their teens. But what’s interesting is that, the older they get, the more babies they have! So a big, old woman in the fish world who’s in her 40s or 50s will have 17 times or more the number of babies that a 15-year-old fish would have.

So instead of becoming less fertile as they age, they get more fertile!
It grows exponentially. Not only do the number of eggs they release grow exponentially, the size of those eggs is bigger, they have more fat in them, they’re healthier, they’re more genetically strong and they have a greater survival rate.

Amazing.
But we catch those fish when they’re 5 and 6 years old, even before they have a chance to breed. A hundred years ago a Republican president, Teddy Roosevelt, did something that was very radical and controversial at the time: take portions of the natural landscape and put them off-limits to development. Today, our national park systems and our wilderness areas are seen around the world as one of the greatest ideas to come out of America, outside of democracy. That concept of what we did on land is what we’re trying to do now on the ocean. We’re looking for some Teddy Roosevelts of the ocean. We want to protect some key areas of the ocean while still leaving 80-90 percent of the ocean open for fishing and other activities.

How far along are you on this project?
We passed the law in ’99 and we’ve had trouble implementing it partly because of the financial crisis the state has faced. We’ve come up with a seven-year plan to implement a network of marine reserves along the coast of California. We’re halfway through Phase I, which is to designate a network of reserves basically from Half Moon Bay down to Point Conception, off of northern Santa Barbara County—about the middle third of the state. We hope to have that network in place by fall of 2006.

So you’re talking about reserving 10-20 percent of the coast out to three miles on the ocean.
Right, because that’s the only portion that the state has jurisdiction over.

Are fish smart enough to figure out where the safe places are to hang out and not venture into the places where they can get caught?
Some fish migrate long distances. But many of the ground fish never go more than 15 miles beyond where they were born. They live their entire life around a particular reef. And where there are marine reserves, the fishermen line up right on the edge. Because they know those fish are bigger, so they’re going to try to catch them when they go outside that area.

So this plan will save enough fish, but will also leave enough for the fishermen.
Yes. The whole goal is to maximize the protection of the environment and minimize the adverse economic impact on any one type of fishing activity. It’s still controversial, because it’s very difficult for fishermen to give up any site. But our argument is that the ocean does belong to everyone. And it belongs to future generations. So it is our responsibility to pass it on to the next generation hopefully healthier than we got it. And this generation has done an astounding job of diminishing the quantity and diversity of marine life. Ninety percent of the big fish in the ocean are gone! Ninety percent! Many people don’t realize that the fish that they’ve seen during their lifetime are a lot smaller than the ones that their parents or their grandparents fished. We have a network that’s been put in place in the Channel Islands off of Santa Barbara County. The proponents of creating that network were not the Ocean Conservancy or a group of wide-eyed, Birkenstock-wearing, ponytailed environmentalists. They were a group of elderly recreational fishermen who had seen the number and the size of fish decline over their lifetime and who felt it was their moral responsibility to make sure that they changed that course of history for their grandkids.

They remembered the big fish.
Yeah! And one of them was dying of cancer and it was his crusade to do this before he died. We now have set aside 25 percent of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary in a network of marine reserves in state and federal waters. We’re still completing that process. The trouble with fisheries and many of the problems in the oceans is that change is occurring slowly and it’s occurring underwater, so you don’t see it. So we don’t respond to it until it’s reached a crisis stage.

Same as global warming. How did you get started in this work?
The Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969. I was an architecture student at San Luis Obispo. I thought I was going to be the next Frank Lloyd Wright. My two environmental heroes were David Brower and a young biologist friend of mine named John Mason. John was this soft-spoken John Muir type who started an ecology action club to deal with environmental issues in the town of San Luis Obispo. Over the period of a year, we ran a student for city council and another student for the board of supervisors and I ran their campaigns and got them elected on environmental tickets. I dropped out of college and worked on a statewide initiative drafted by Marin County’s Peter Douglas [legislative assistant who later became executive director of the Coastal Commission] that created in 1972 Proposition 20, the Coastal Act.

That’s what established the Coastal Commission?
Right. The battle to save the coast was won by the citizens of the state through an initiative when we couldn’t get the law passed by the state Legislature. That was a fun campaign. There was one point when I was working on the campaign in Los Angeles and the opposition stole our slogan and put 500 billboards all across Los Angles saying, “The Coast Belongs to You—Don’t Lock it Up! Vote NO on Proposition 20.” And the word NO was about 2-feet-by-2-feet high. And I had hundreds of high school volunteers working with me on the campaign and what do high school kids in L.A. do? They cruise the streets. So within a week we had a map of where every one of those billboards were. And, miraculously [feigning amazement], one night, all those billboards changed! Someone went to a silk-screener and printed some YESes that were the exact size of the NOes, and, miraculously, overnight about 90 percent of the billboards were transformed to Vote YES. And it happened in the last two weeks of the campaign, and because the billboard companies were so busy, they didn’t have time to change them back. And a story about this change ran in the Los Angeles Times on page two—it was advertising we couldn’t buy! We won the campaign.

Did you orchestrate the billboard changes?
I’ve been accused of that and I deny it to this day. But it happened. There are some very prominent people in government and policy who to this day take great pride in knowing who they were. So—I worked for a political campaign manager for a year, went back to school in Santa Cruz and got a degree in environmental planning. Then my buddy, John Mason, was a caretaker for a nature preserve in Mendocino. And I went to Mendocino in 1975 to replace him for what I thought was going to be my Thoreau summer. He’s been a middle school teacher in Humboldt County now for 20 years and he was my inspiration for what a citizen can do to influence public policy. So in Mendocino I got involved in issues around logging and timber practices. The Coastal Commission at that time was writing coastal plans for each county and I worked on that. I got involved in legislation to try to reform forest practices in Mendocino County. And money came from amazingly strange places. I had a starring role in an Old Milwaukee beer commercial that was filmed in Mendocino. I played a logger.

How did that happen?
Well, this film crew came up from Los Angeles and they needed about 30 or 40 extras for what was supposed to be a logger’s festival picnic scene. And first they go to Fort Bragg, the logger town, and they hold auditions and the loggers were not great actors. They then come down to Mendocino, the hippie town with a population of 500 that has two full-time theater companies and a bunch of us went down and auditioned and they hired about 35 of us. I was an activist trying to stop logging along the Big River estuary.

With no acting experience?
None. And I ended up getting a talking role in the commercial. In my flannel shirt, with my long hair, clinking a beer, going, “It doesn’t get any better than this!” So for a year afterwards, four of us that had talking roles each got residuals for anywhere from $50-$500 a week! We would go to the post office and a check would arrive! That funded me for a year that I spent lobbying Sacramento to try to reform forestry laws.

Pretty ironic.
Probably the most fun thing I’ve ever done in my entire life had to do with the offshore oil issue. The Interior Department had to do a public hearing on an offshore lease sale that covered the Northern California coast in the late ’80s. We took the Environmental Impact Report and we analyzed it, we condensed it down to an eight-page newspaper tabloid explaining the EIR in plain English with clear graphics. We gave it to schoolteachers in the Mendocino school system and they taught their eighth- and ninth-grade students about how to analyze the oil industry’s EIR. And we put the eight-page insert in all the newspapers on the north coast. We then printed up postcards saying, “I want to testify at the public hearing” and we inserted those in the newspapers. When the Interior Department showed up in the town of Fort Bragg—that had a population of 3,000 in the greater area—we had 3,000 people that had signed up to testify at the hearing!

Fantastic!
And it was held in this 100-year-old Elks Lodge that could hold about 150 people. So the entire street, as far as you could see, was filled with people waiting to testify.

And is the Interior Department obligated to hear everybody who signs up?
Good question. They started taking testimony. Eighth-grade school kids were grilling Interior Department officials and asking them tough questions that they couldn’t answer, because they’d been studying energy policy and offshore oil drilling. The Mendocino Presbyterian choir comes in and they sing a couple of beautiful hymns as part of their testimony. They’re followed by the Albion Women’s Bakery Collective, dressed as witches with cauldrons and hats, promising to put a curse on these people that if oil rigs come in, their penises are going to fall off! Out on the street, Bonnie Raitt’s on a flatbed truck with her band, playing music to keep the folks happily occupied while they’re waiting to testify. The local high school was broadcasting the testimony on local cable TV. People were watching it on TV and thinking, “Well, hell, if Harry and Ethel can give ’em a piece of their mind, I’m coming down, too!” So not only did they have the first 3,000 people, more people were signing up at two times the rate that they were testifying. So the first day they went from 10 in the morning to midnight. And the second day they went from 10 in the morning to midnight. There were sound trucks and Dianne Feinstein was there and every celebrity and elected official in California was there. It kept on growing. It was in the Chronicle. People were driving to Mendocino to testify.

Party time!
This was the Woodstock of environmental hearings. By day three, we felt like we had delivered our message and we were concerned that it might start to get ugly. That someone would do something stupid and we would lose the public relations value of the work. Now, someone had written a song, “The Battle Hymn of Mendocino,” about the loggers and the fishermen and the potters and the shopkeepers all agreeing to protect the coast. We had T-shirts made up saying, “I Survived the Hearings in Fort Bragg.” And we gave them to the Interior Department officials and told them, “We want you to come out to the coast and have a picnic with us, have a good time, see why there’s so much passion here, you go home, but we’re going to want you to come back and hear the rest of the testimony.” The doors of the old, dark Elks Lodge open up and sunlight beams in and the Interior Department officials are escorted out while the crowd outside is singing “The Battle Hymn of Mendocino.”

How did you come to work for the Marin County planning department?
I started working as a consultant for the county on offshore oil issues and policies. So I got hired by the planning department to work on things like energy policy and agriculture policy because I was basically a land-use planner—my degree was in environmental planning. I worked on a wind energy ordinance and conservation policies. I was on the MALT [Marin Agricultural Land Trust] board and ran a campaign—a failed campaign—for a countywide bond measure for open space. I ran [former Supervisor] Gary Giacomini’s re-election campaign one year. During the time I worked in Marin County, I was honored to get to know a group of unsung heroes—I always call them the Women’s Political Enviro Mafia. Karin Urquhart and Jana Haehl and Sally Ann Wilson, Margie Goodman, Pam Lloyd. These women were like the iron fist in the velvet glove. They could talk you out of every penny in your pocket, fund-raise a campaign and run it in their sleep while telling the best dirty jokes you ever heard. The candidate’s elected, the guy stands up and says, “I did it!” and the public never knows that these women ran the show, hook, line and sinker. I just learned so much from just watching how they operated.

Tell me about your adoptive parents. What was it like for you, growing up in that household?
The folks who raised me had kind of a halfway house. There were a lot of kids who came through for short periods. During the time I was with them there were probably 10 kids who passed through the household for anywhere from six months to a year. I bounced around households from like age 3 to 5, then I landed there with my sister. She stayed for about two years and then she was placed somewhere else. The dad was sort of an Archie Bunker type. He was an 18-wheel truck driver. Conservative, ex-drill instructor. It was kind of a strict household. He would not get Father of the Year. He was an angry, kind of racist guy, angry at the world. She was more nurturing.

So how was it that you turned into an environmental activist in college?
It was the beginning of the environmental movement, 1969, right after the Santa Barbara oil spill. They were building Diablo Canyon, so the issue of nuclear power was big and controversial. There was a lot of development in and around San Luis Obispo. There were these big, open agricultural fields where the fraternities would throw the Friday afternoon beer blasts, there’d be a band and you would dance. And my first political campaign was running a student on a platform to clean up the creek and protect these fields from development. And probably 50 percent of my motivation was ideological and 50 percent was because this was the place where we partied. I got three people elected in the first three campaigns that I ran, then dropped out of college to work on the statewide campaign that created the Coastal Act, then worked for a professional campaign manager who ran campaigns on a shoestring budget and won most of them. So I developed a great sense of optimism that you could enter an underdog campaign and win. And the campaigns were always fun. We laughed and we stole billboards and had a good time. So I got hooked. And I was meeting people who were smart, fun to be with, had a purpose in their life, were doing something meaningful, making a better world—what more could you ask for? You get to do good and hang out with great people and have fun and, if you’re successful, you change the course of history.

For more on the Ocean Conservancy, go to www.oceanconservancy.org.

PHOTO OF WARNER CHABOT BY RORY MCNAMARA

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