California Coast & Ocean

Q: What was the impact of the lawsuit that Barbra Streisand filed against you? [She claimed her privacy had been invaded because her blufftop home in Malibu was in a photograph.]

KA: What was she thinking? We were just blown away. When her lawyers first demanded we take the website off the Internet, we specifically told them this was a public beach survey and educational project protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution. We told them no one ever used our website to view her home in Malibu. We reminded them of all the other websites showing photos of the house. We even provided them a copy of the press release we would send out if they filed a lawsuit, saying “Streisand Sues Environmental Education Project.”

We were dumbfounded when they went ahead and filed the lawsuit. It led to hundreds of news stories and pictures of her house being shown worldwide. She really shot herself in the foot on that one.

We hired Richard Kendall, a great Constitutional lawyer out of Los Angeles. He eventually won the case and had Streisand declared a “vexacious” and “malicious” litigant for initiating a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) suit against us.

The court found that Streisand had no right to privacy for what in effect was the arrangement of her deck chairs, and required her to pay us hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and attorney fees.

It was important that we prevailed, not just because of Streisand, but for all the private property owners along the coast opposed to the project and for other people wanting to do public interest photographic work.

The legal papers are posted on our website, and any activist ever threatened with a SLAPP suit is welcome to visit and read those documents.

Q: What is the story behind the older photos of the coast on the website, from 1972, 1979, 1987, and 1989?

KA: That is an interesting story. The California Department of Boating and Waterways had been doing periodic photo surveys of the coast using overhead slide film from airplanes. Gary Griggs, director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at U.C. Santa Cruz, had been caretaking the photos, but many were deteriorating, as slide film does over the years. Gary had been using the pictures for his research projects and with his students but contacted us to see if they could be scanned and put on the website for the public to view.

The whole story is on the website, but suffice it to say the photos had gotten somewhat mixed up over the years, many were degraded, and they were not indexed or sorted by longitude and latitude. We literally had to go picture by picture, mile by mile. I bought a slide scanner and scanned them 25 at a time.

To be able to compare the older slides with the more recent pictures is amazing. We didn’t even know they existed. They were sitting in cardboard boxes in Gary’s office.

Q: What have you learned from the project?

GA: We’ve learned that the coast is eroding very quickly, and that despite the erosion and sea rise, people continue to want to build along the very edge of the coast. You can really see it from the air. Some places you think are protected, like Santa Cruz, are almost entirely fortified with seawalls.

Q: Do you plan to continue with the project?

KA: Forever. We can’t stop now, it is our life’s work. I didn’t plan on this, it found us.

GA: I’ve written a short children’s story about the project. We look forward to seeing all the ways in which the website can be used in the future, ways we haven’t even thought of yet. It exists for everyone, and everyone is encouraged to participate.

KA: It has been an interesting journey because of all the great people we’ve met along the way. We have really enjoyed assisting small environmental organizations improve their ability to do their work and be successful.

The Adelmans have agreed to donate all revenues from the project to the California Coastal Protection Network (www.coastaladvocates.com).

Mark Massara is a public interest environmental attorney specializing in California coastal zone land use, development, beach access, and resource protection legal issues, and has been director of Sierra Club’s coastal programs for 15 years.