How To Create A Marine Reserve Part 2

Chris Dixon: What was the feedback from the community?

Leon Richter: I think initially we were met with a lot of skepticism, yeah, ok, a bunch of surfers, whatever, we’ve heard this all before. And so we started to hold outreach activities -- beach cleanups and meetings. And then the politicians told us, you have to demonstrate that the community actually wants this — that it isn’t just a few people who want to preserve their surf break.

So we started a signature campaign and collected 5300 signatures locally out of 12,000 people in the community.

CD: That’s huge!

LR: And that was done all by hand. Everything there is done really old school and grass roots. No one has computers. The internet access was so bad that when I was working with the designer on our maps, I had to stay up or wait til 3 AM to download them. We were definitely working on a shoestring with no budget. If we had a meeting, we had to put up 150 flyers around town -- no postcards and no email. There was a lot of just one on one talking and through the petition campaign, which was all done by hand, you start to learn how people actually feel about the issue and their objections.

Then, you ask someone to sign the petition who happens to be a developer and he freaks out about it. Then you find out why. It was actually a really good way to find out how the community felt about the whole issue and why. It gave us visibility and credibility.

LR: I think our relationship with the mayor is pretty symbolic of how the whole campaign has gone.

Originally, he just kind of glad handed us, but the more we went to see him the more he would include us. So when the president of the planning board came out, we were invited to the meeting, and I was actually able to give the president and his delegation a tour of this area. So rather than it just being photos or someplace on a map, we actually walked a stretch of this beach, and the whole issue really became tangible to them.

We had brought him a bound copy of the first 5000 signatures, and we had conducted beach cleanups and he helped us arrange for the trash to be collected — it had been really collaborative. By the end of the first six months, the mayor made a comment to us that I think sums it all up. He said, "most people come to us asking me for something. Everyt ime you come, you bring me help."

We even held our meetings in Spanish to make sure we were addressing everybody. There’s a real significant expat community, and a pretty strong local surfing community.

LR: Any storm front coming off the east coast, so you get northwesters and then wrap on big northeast swells. The North shore of Puerto Rico is definitely more consistent, but the thing is, when this area is working, the tradewinds are out of the northeast, so it almost never blows out.

LR. I would constantly tell people, look I don’t want to tell you what to do, I’m just here to help facilitate what you as a group wants to do. So once the community said, look, we want to preserve things kind of the way they are, we came up with a strategy to accomplish that and they’re the ones making it happen. We were really just there for guidance.

LR: Well, they’re pretty much dead. One of them was denied by the planning board, another one Manihiki, was pretty much approved, but the corporation that was building it pretty much went bankrupt. The Via Icaria is the one that we lobbied heavily on. The man who owns the land is the developer.

On the Surfrider website we actually have a lot of the reasons the planning board denied this. And they incorporated a lot of our reasons as to why they denied it — the natural resources that are there, the value of those resources. Which was pretty amazing. The developers appealed the decision, and the appeal was denied. Which means that basically short of going to court, which is highly unlikely, that project is dead.

LR: I met the developer in February. The mayor invited him and us to a planning meeting.

But there are turtles there. We have lots of photos of them.

LR. No, Surfers Environmental Alliance was involved as was Environmental Defense. And at the grassroots level, we also weren’t the only group warning about this project. There was another flyer that circulated that dealt with other problems the community already had. Lack of water, electricity -- the power supply is very unreliable. Then there were points that I can’t verify about developers getting tax breaks. Traffic, the fact that it would increase traffic, and then effects on beach access. Environmental harm, quality of life and then small businesses getting hurt. And this was locally generated -- not a Surfrider product. It was the kind of thing that made me say, wow, the community really feels this way.

On the website, we tried to make it like a library so people can see what we did, how we proceeded and the process. So the whole thing has been pretty cool. It’s been a town and its people who knew what they wanted to do but didn’t really know how to go about doing it, and each step of the way there would be kind of challenges thrown up —hey, we need you to demonstrate local support. Well, how do you do that, well, We need to go out and get signatures and that would help us to recruit other people.

LR: Well, I go to the black eagle, a pub, and one of the guys there said, hey, did you see what they’re doing at Maria’s? There’s some guy there with a bulldozer.

So the next morning, I got up there with my little point and shoot camera and I was looking around. Sure enough, they were bulldozing the brush in front of the beach. So I called a woman I knew and said, so what do I do? And she said, ask the guy for permits 11 and 27. They have to be on the equipment before they can do any disturbing of natural resources. So I went and said, "excuse me," in my nicest Spanish. "Sorry to bother you, but can I see your permits?" The guy went crazy and ended up chasing after me with a machete. I ran to the car.

The municipality actually was bulldozing the area for a surf contest. And so, I, like an idiot drove down toward Domes which is a dead end. And so I had to go back, I went back and said, look I’m really sorry, but if you don’t have permits, you have to wait for the DNR to come and sort this out. I was totally nervous for the next week.

But it was things like that that actually gave us some credibility. Instead of everyone just sitting around the bar complaining and not doing anything. A lot of little things like that add up.

LR. Definitely.

So this guy who’s a forestry expert, he and one of the local surfers, Vito, decided after the bulldozing, that they wanted to do a complete reforestation. And last month, the mayor signed a letter saying the municipality would help.

So we start with one incident, and the more become involved, and the more success we have, the more people participate. We had a big beach cleanup at a contest and the pros were actually picking up trash between heats. That gave us credibility in the surfing community.

LR: Yeah, most of the early coverage came from Terry Gibson. And he wrote a huge piece in the Surfer’s Path. And we launched a huge media campaign.

And one of the things that came from that was that we were able to get an audience with Alexis Massol, who was one of the Goldman Prize winners — people call it the Nobel for environmentalism.

Another person who got involved is Edwin Santos. He’s kind of the king of Puerto Rican pro surfing -- everywhere you go with him, people start acting like ten year olds. He saw the flyer and showed up at a Surfrider meeting and his help has been unbelievable.

So, I would say that beginning this spring or summer. We had a dozen pieces in the PR News — including their top newspaper, El Nueva Dia.

LR: Where we literally are now is, we’ve got a draft of legislation to create the marine reserve. That’s going to be introduced at the capitol in the next week or two.

CN: There’s only one other big marine reserve, it’s on Culebra, the island offshore. There are a number of coastal nature preserves that sort of de facto protect the water by protecting the coast.

I think there are 25 nature preserves.

CN. Yeah, it’s been sort of a rape and pillage thing, and I think there’s an urgency for economic development because people feel it will get them out of poverty. The irony is that often it gets a handful of people wealthy with the promise of jobs that never really materialize.

CN: Plus the mom and pop outfits there are doing alright. They’re all be gone in the Wal-Mart phenomenon.

LR: There’s also the perception which is probably real that if they end up developing these things, then they’re going to get most of the water and we the locals are going to have water no days of the year rather than half the days of the year.

One of the things I think we’ve been able to accomplish in Rincon is to empower the community to make them feel like they really have a voice. The current mayor won his job on an anti-corruption platform. The previous mayor was incredibly corrupt. I think he has federal charges against him. The town bulldozers were on his son’s ranch. He built a tower hotel right on the beach in a community of single and two story homes.

CN: Exactly like that. So one of the other things we ran into besides, ‘hey we need jobs,’ was yeah, whatever, they’ll just pay off the politicians and build it anyway.

LR. Well, there’s no local newspaper in that area. People don’t have Internet access. So local issues don’t get a lot of coverage. It’s all word of mouth. And the other is that there’s a lot of defeatism there. You know, we’re not really a state, we don’t have any power. The government’s always corrupt and it never does what it says it’s going to.

So it was getting local surfers together -- local key figures When Edwin Santos showed up, and Juan Ashton, the godfather of the young surfers, showed up, it gave us a lot of credibilty. Renee, the guy who owns the local surf shops, got involved. All these guys gave us the street credibility, all the way up to Alexis Massol.

Massol’s group fought a 20 year battle to stop mining operations in their community that destroyed forests, and they created the People’s Forest — it’s co-managed between the community and the department of natural resources. They have a cooperative coffee plantation in the jungle and it’s the best coffee in Puerto Rico.

The first think Massol said was, ‘how long has this been going on?’ And we said, ‘well, the work you’re looking at here has been done in the last six months.’ He said, ‘you’ve done 10 years of work here, how can I help?’

We said, we really need media attention to recruit additional people and to put pressure on the politicians. So he agreed. And he really helped, he came and spoke at chapter meetings. He’d never been snorkeling, so we held a press conference right on the beach and Steve Fitzpatrick took these sick photos of him in among the Elkhorn. We’ve probably done over a dozen radio shows this summer. We got every newspaper and all the major networks.

When this guy says, ‘hey, I’m going to bat for you,’ he really means it.

CN: We’ve been working with Vizcarrondo, the Speaker of the House to get this thing on the floor.

LR. Vizcarrondo’s office along with the DNR in a meeting, said we want to recommend to you, the marine reserve, the special planning area and the terrestrial reserve. We’re working closely with Vizcarrondo’s office and the DNR and the planning board.

CN: Some aspects are hard to speculate. But we do know that getting 5300 signatures is a pretty powerful statement. When we first came to them, they said, you need local support.

LR: Yeah, we met with the local congressman and he said, I vote with the mayor. So we got the mayor to sign the petition.

CN: I think it was a sequence of events that led to his support. It took us some time, almost a year, but we started collecting these signatures and he saw that local support was being generated. We also did these beach cleanups -- that sounds so trivial in some ways, but I think they really impressed him. He said, ‘not only are these people fighting for a vision of preservation, but today they’re cleaning up the beaches.’

LR. I think that the other thing is that even if this goes through, and we get a park management plan and everything goes well, one of the greater challenges that lies in front of us is the terrestrial aspect. Private land rights and getting to the table with this guy who owns the land. There’s a new conservation easement law that went into effect last January that provides tax incentives for creating easements — that’s one possibility. Or partnering with another non governmental or conservation organization to buy the land. I think we’re actually to the point where we can get him to the table and work through a solution like that down the road.

Or maybe we put a grassroots education center on the land and other people can come for information as well.

CN: You know, one of our sort of longer, far reaching goals was totally accomplished too. We set up a sort of template, so we can say, 'Hey you can do this for other communities. Here’s a model, we’ve done some of the homework and here are the laws that apply. It can be done. Collect the signatures, do the work and maybe your community can get the same results.