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Wild Sea: Eco-Wars and Surf Stories from the Coast of the Californias
Many people have lamented the pollution and outright loss of beaches along the coasts of California and Mexico, but very few people have fought on behalf of beaches as hard—or as successfully—as Serge Dedina. Whether taking on an international conglomerate or tackling a state transportation agency, Dedina is truly an eco-warrior. In this sparkling collection of articles, many written for popular magazines, Dedina tells the stories as only an insider could. He writes with a firm grasp of facts along with an advocate’s passion and outrage. Sprinkled with just the right mix of humor and surf lingo, Dedina’s writing is “weapons grade”—surfer speak for totally awesome.
Dedina grew up in Imperial Beach, California, just north of the Mexican border, and he feels equally at home in Mexico and the States. An expert on gray whales, he eloquently describes the fight he helped to lead against the Mitsubishi Corporation, whose plan to build a salt-processing plant in the San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California would have destroyed the world’s last undeveloped gray whale lagoon. With similar fervor, Dedina describes helping to construct the unlikely coalition that succeeded in defeating a proposed toll road that would have decimated a legendary California surf spot.
In between, he writes about the first surfers in Baja, the Great Baja Land Rush of the 1990s, Tijuana’s punk music scene, the pop-culture wrestling phenomenon lucha libre , the reasons why ocean pollution must be stopped, and the way HBO took over his hometown. Anyone interested in what’s happening to our natural places or just yearning to read about someone really making a difference in the world will find this a book worth sinking their teeth into.
Dedina grew up in Imperial Beach, California, just north of the Mexican border, and he feels equally at home in Mexico and the States. An expert on gray whales, he eloquently describes the fight he helped to lead against the Mitsubishi Corporation, whose plan to build a salt-processing plant in the San Ignacio Lagoon in Baja California would have destroyed the world’s last undeveloped gray whale lagoon. With similar fervor, Dedina describes helping to construct the unlikely coalition that succeeded in defeating a proposed toll road that would have decimated a legendary California surf spot.
In between, he writes about the first surfers in Baja, the Great Baja Land Rush of the 1990s, Tijuana’s punk music scene, the pop-culture wrestling phenomenon lucha libre , the reasons why ocean pollution must be stopped, and the way HBO took over his hometown. Anyone interested in what’s happening to our natural places or just yearning to read about someone really making a difference in the world will find this a book worth sinking their teeth into.
168 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2011
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February 7, 2014
“Wild Sea” is a valuable read surfers of the southwest's wave, but also offers ideas for those engaged in coastal conservation anywhere in the world.
Author Serge Dedina brings to this brief and very personal work a lifetime on the waters of both Southern California and Baja California Mexico. He has surfed Imperial Beach (IB) since his childhood, worked as a lifeguard and slowly evolved into a coastal conservationist, co-founding the group “Wildcoast.”
The book documents campaigns the writer has been involved with, “to preserve the last wild coastline and marine wildlife of the Californias and to provide a look at the roots of the binational coastal culture of the Californias.”
By his own admission, Dedina is not aiming for a “neutral academic monograph on coastal management," rather a “passionate, unapologetic defense of our coastal heritage.”
A curation of pieces written at different times, the book selection and chronology nonetheless binds them together, starting with a lyrical piece about the first surfers to hit the Baja California coastline, before getting into the innards of environmental battles such as that to save Trestles beach on the border between San Diego and Orange counties.
These donnybrooks are not just about saving waves, they are about saving whales and lagoons and the micro-economies that live off the ocean and surrounding environment.
There are also cultural cul-de -sacs where SoCal punk, Tijuana punk, old school IB surfers, lucha libre wrestling, and the filing of “John From Cincinnati” are all somehow tied together.
More than anything though, Dedina's book is a manifesto of surfers' engagement with The Big Enchilada (as opposed to willful ignorance) in an effort at saving coastal resources important to them.
This is new ground, and the author hopes that the use of pop culture will do some of the heavy lifting in converting the apolitical into an army of the committed.
He writes: “Imagine if government was relevant to our lives, reached out to our kids, and allowed us to solve problems by surfing Black's or skating Washington Street with elected officials, instead of having to bang on smoke-filled backroom doors to speak with them. That would be very cool indeed.”
Dedina, whom as of this posting is running for mayor of Imperial Beach, can now put his ideas to the test and a scale worthy of their aspirations.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review