HOW TO SAVE COASTAL CALIFORNIA & MEXICO, TOO?

The Hot Globe Interview with Serge Dedina of WILDCOAST / COSTASALVAJE

With all the bitter back and forth between the US and Mexico, it is easy to forget we share a long and endangered coast.  Call it the WildCoast, exquisite with migrating whales, crystal lagoons, underwater waves of sea grass and vital yet strange mangrove plants reaching down with finger roots, even the most endangered dolphin in the world, the little vaquita. 

And yet raw sewage is being dumped in the Tijuana-San Diego estuary, along with millions of tires Californians think they have paid to recycle. Sea levels are rising due to oil companies burning millions of tons of carbon, and macho hombres are eating sea turtle eggs as an aphrodisiac thinking it will stiffen their woodies.  Or at least they were. Read on.

There’s a wildly successful organization addressing all this, and extolling the good and the solutions, too, called WildCoast, co-founded by Serge Dedina, a former lifeguard with a Ph.D in marine science (whale migration in Baja.)  Dedina was also the bi-lingual grass-roots mayor of the last real beach town in California, Imperial Beach, probably the only border town in the US with excellent surfing. 

Though following good marine science, Wildcoast manages to communicate to the broad masses (as we used to say) partnering with American and Mexican rock icons like Linkin Park and Mata, even Mexico’s most popular wrestlers, and in perhaps the most effective viral eco-campaign of all time, at least in Latin America, the vivid “MY MAN DOESN’T NEED TURTLE EGGS. (Mi hombre no necesita huevos de tortuga.)  The billboards which showed Argentine model Dorismar in a bikini huffed up a few early wokesters but it saved a few million baby turtles.

So watch the Zoom with Serge (a long time friend to Hot Globe,) listen to the Audio, or read the transcript. Here are a few take-aways:

• We were the first city in the world to sue the fossil fuel industry for causing sea level rise. These climate lawsuits have steamrolled, but we were the first, and to take on Chevron and Shell was a little scary but also important to show that there's real harm from sea level rise.

• The city of Imperial Beach, when I was mayor, spearheaded a lawsuit against the US government for allowing sewage to enter the United States and ruin our beach, with the state of California, the city of San Diego, the city of Chula Vista, the Port of San Diego, and the Surfrider Foundation. And we won. I think it's one of the largest sources of methane, probably in the West Coast, because you have you have billions of gallons of sewage being discharged into a river valley,

• Californians used to pay a $1.75 per tire recycling fee when they changed tires but the tires are simply sold south of the border to be used for a few last driving miles and then dumped in the Tijuana River. “Every time it rains, we find 3000 to 5000 tires in the Tijuana River Valley, which leads to the ocean, and is part of a whole protected area complex. So we embarked on a campaign to get the state of California to acknowledge that and start dealing with it. That's ongoing. It's still a huge problem. These tires can also accumulate in Tijuana, and then they catch fire, right? So it's a huge, huge problem.

• Our mission is to conserve coastal and marine ecosystems and address climate change through natural solutions . . . by restoring and conserving seagrass meadows, kelp forests, mangrove lagoons, salt marsh estuaries, ecosystems that actually help to store and sequester carbon.

• And the idea is to create a robust system where people have an incentive to do the right thing, and people can make a living from a sustainably managed ocean and coast, which is the best thing.