| MAKING WAVES, October 2003 issue: Table of Contents |
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The quintesssential coastal environmental victory, created by people who've never met... |
Surfing legend Randy Rarick has never met Jami Duggan-Fry of Iowa, who doesn't know San Luis Obispo's Matt Fleming, who although may be a fan of No Doubt, has never met guitarist Tom Dumont. None of them know Florida's Tom Warnke, who has never heard of professional snowboarder Tara Dakides, who in turn, does not have the first idea who Massachusetts activist Liz Fuller is. You'll see in this edition of Making Waves, interviews with geographically far-flung Surfrider Foundation members like these who work together every day, but aren't aware of it.
 Each is silently bonded with the next because their Surfrider Foundation membership places them all in the same body, at least metaphorically. And the body has the muscle of our activists who volunteer to attend countless meetings, from their local city council chambers to those of the U.S. Congress. They teach coastal sciences in hundreds of U.S. schools, clean scores of beaches, map miles of shore for environmental status and test our ocean waters thousands of times. They stand up in community after community, representing the rest of us in protecting our remaining coastal/ocean habitats and resources.
The body stands resolute with the skeletal system of our national Board and staff who collectively build and administer our chapter network, train our activists, maintain our environmental science resources, coordinate a half dozen national/regional environmental campaigns, maintain our legal status across America, create a myriad of regular publications including our State of the Beach Report for the U.S. Congress and every coastal zone manager in the nation, and create the policy and inner workings that allow us to be an effective, growing national and international force for ocean, wave and beach protection. And our body flows with the blood of donated dollars from ardent ocean and beach lovers who will possibly never attend a chapter meeting, but see the potential leverage of their contribution to the effort. These everyday donors comprise almost half of our national budget and have made themselves an invaluable part of the process, which leads to victory and the health of this gathering movement. As the campaigns, victories and occasional losses accrue, our work to recruit more and more people make this effort open-ended. Together, all three aspects of our demonstrative body depend on each other. One night last year I sat in the back of a local meeting hall. It was a Frank Capra kind of moment. I sat next to activist and world champion surfer Shaun Tomson while late in the evening a close roll call vote of politicians was taken. The vote would determine whether the decade-long effort of one of our chapters was going to bear fruit, or not. It really doesn't matter what the issue was, or where it happened, it was a quintessential coastal issue, like we face every year, everywhere. As we won, I thought that Shaun doesn't know all of the chapter folks hereÉ and the chapter members probably don't know any of our members from IowaÉ and the folks in Iowa probably have no idea who Randy Rarick or Tom Warnke or Liz Fuller areÉ But while many of them may not know how they helped produce this victory, they surely achieved it. As Surfrider Foundation members, we all did! Please enjoy this issue's voices from all over Surfrider Foundation, and know that thanks to the efforts of all of them, combined with whatever your own might be, we are growing a powerful force for change that will endure.  Christopher J. Evans, Esq. Executive Director * * *
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