‘Live on with you forever’

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.

In life, Vandersloot was involved in efforts to preserve native plants, trees and wetlands up and down the Orange County coast.

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 his 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 in Huntington Beach.

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 Coastal Commission meeting on the matter with photographs of workers illegally draining and filling the wetlands to build a parking lot on the site.

The commission ordered the developer to pay a $250,000 penalty and restore the wetlands.

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

Before his death, Vandersloot had donated money to Castaways Park so it could by hydro-seeded with spring flowers.

Environmentalists at the memorial service had already taken to calling the bluff top at Castaways “Jan’s Meadow.”

“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.