‘Live on with you’

Friends and family remembered the late environmentalist Jan Vandersloot as a tireless figure camped out in a beach chair collecting signatures in front of the Sav-on Pharmacy, a champion of Orange County’s wetlands and wildlife.

“He leaves behind a legacy of leadership and inspiration, along with hundreds of square miles of wetlands he helped preserve,” Paul Arms, a member of the California League of Conservation Voters, said at a Sunday memorial service for Vandersloot.

About 150 fellow environmentalists, city and county officials, and family members gathered atop a scenic bluff in Castaways Park on an overcast afternoon to pay tribute to the 64-year-old environmentalist, who died in November of natural causes.

Arms remembered a party that he once threw in honor of a victory by Vandersloot over the Orange County Sanitation District. A founder of the Ocean Outfall group, Vandersloot pushed the sanitation district to clean up wastewater being pumped offshore. Arms and fellow environmentalists gave Vandersloot a toilet plunger, spray painted gold, in honor of the achievement.

“He held it up like a warrior,” Arms remembered Sunday. “It was a great visual of him — this big, tall Dutchman with a golden plunger.”

Vandersloot also was one of the founding members of the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, a group dedicated to preserving the Bolsa Chica wetlands.

On the day he died, Vandersloot won a significant victory over a land developer after fighting to preserve a 2-acre salt marsh called the Cabrillo Wetlands in Huntington Beach.

“He must have been smiling,” said California Coastal Commissioner Sara Wan.

Vandersloot showed up to a commission meeting on the matter with photographs of workers illegally draining and filling the wetlands to build a parking lot. The commission ordered the developer to pay $250,000 and restore the wetlands.

“He was the big gentleman who always stood in the way of developers and protected the fragile places,” Wan said.

“The signs of a good leader are that they are loud, clear, consistent, and they live on with you forever, and that was Jan,” said Jean Watt, a member of the group Stop Polluting Our Newport.