Mike Summers—a founding Board member of Los Padres ForestWatch—was an icon in the local wilderness conservation movement, working nearly two decades to protect wild landscapes across California’s central coast region. He passed away unexpectedly earlier this year, leaving behind a legacy that will always be remembered, cherished, and celebrated.
A passionate defender of the wild—and deeply wild at heart—Mike loved the outdoors and devoted a considerable part of his career to land and wildlife preservation. He was a strong proponent of keeping public lands in their wild, undeveloped state, and after graduating from UC Santa Barbara, Mike worked for three years with the California Wild Heritage Campaign, a statewide effort to document the last remaining wild places throughout the state and craft strategies to secure their permanent protection through Congressional action. As the campaign’s Central Coast Outreach Organizer, Mike advocated for the protection of lands in the Los Padres National Forest, serving as the spokesperson for preserving our region’s vast wilderness landscapes and wild rivers for the benefit of current and future generations.
“Michael was a powerhouse in so many respects, including his deep and enthusiastic passion for the wild places of the rugged Central Coast region,” said Pamela Flick, who worked alongside Mike in the California Wild Heritage Campaign and now serves as the California Program Director with Defenders of Wildlife. “I consider myself truly fortunate to have first met Mike through our mutual work to permanently protect the remaining wild lands and rivers of the Golden State back in the early 2000s. I immediately knew I’d met a kindred spirit, who worked hard and played harder, and had an unwavering commitment to safeguard our last untrammeled lands and free-flowing rivers so that future generations could enjoy them just as we do today. He will be sorely missed by all those who knew him, but his generous and loving spirit will live on indefinitely.
As a founding member of the Conception Coast Project, Mike worked for seven years to craft an innovative regional approach to land conservation. The project aimed to protect an extensive network of large, interconnected landscapes based on principles of conservation biology supported by computer-aided mapping. As the organization’s Outreach and Fundraising Director, Mike lent his talents to project planning and management, public education and outreach, grant research, and engagement with donors, members, the media, and the public.
“Mike was a fireball of passion,” remembers John Gallo, James Studarus, and Greg Helms, who all worked with Mike at CCP. “His enthusiasm for nature and the mission was infectious and propelled the vision to new heights. He also built great comradery and made the challenges or running a nonprofit organization fun. We’ll miss him dearly but his legacy lives on.”
Always fascinated by the intersection of science, law, and policy, Mike eventually set his sights on law school. During his legal studies and following graduation, he worked as a volunteer and law clerk for several years at the Santa Barbara-based Environmental Defense Center. There, he served alongside attorneys representing some of the region’s most prominent environmental groups, helping to conduct legal research on a variety of coastal and wildlife preservation initiatives.
Mike was a large presence in wilderness preservation, both as an advocate and campaigner as well as in his pursuit of legal enforcement of environmental protection laws,” said EDC’s Chief Counsel Linda Krop. “Mike worked as a law clerk at the Environmental Defense Center, during which time he brought his passion, enthusiasm, and big smile to our organization. In addition to his time as a law clerk, Mike worked closely with EDC on many efforts to permanently protect our unique and vulnerable lands and watersheds and regularly attended our events. He will be missed.
With this background, it came as no surprise when Mike became a founding Board member of Los Padres ForestWatch, a nonprofit organization that works to protect the Los Padres National Forest and the adjoining Carrizo Plain National Monument. He was one of three local wilderness advocates who sat around a picnic table in 2004 and decided that this landscape—with all its majesty and grandeur—deserved an organization that was devoted solely to its protection. As a new organization, the first order of business was to formally incorporate as a public benefit corporation. Mike’s signature is forever emblazoned on our Articles of Incorporation issued on August 13, 2004, on which he is listed as one of three initial directors of the organization.
“It was an honor to work alongside Mike during the formative years of ForestWatch as a fellow friend and board member,” recalls Phil Tseng, who was elected to the ForestWatch Board on the same day as Mike in 2005. “Mike was excited to sow the seeds of something new that will continue to grow even after our tenure. I will always have fond memories of collaborating and ideating with Mike.”
Fellow ForestWatch Board member Pat Veesart recalls fond memories of working with Mike. “I met Mike at the beginnings of ForestWatch and liked him instantly. His sense of humor, passion for wilderness protection, and love of music resonated with me from the start. It was a privilege to serve on the board with him and he was always fun to be out in the field with. He will be missed by many.
Mike served for two terms on our Board of Directors, eventually serving as Board President, where he helped oversee the hiring of our first employee, the leasing of our first office space, and the design of our first logo, along with several early conservation achievements. Most notably, he guided the Board in authorizing a lawsuit against a Forest Service plan to expand oil and gas drilling across 52,075 acres of the Los Padres National Forest—which, to this day, remains one of our organization’s most notable achievements. Mike worked hard to defend wilderness landscapes from development and industrialization, and he was committed to ensuring that the national forest in his own backyard remained wild and undeveloped.
This threat to Mike’s homeland was the catalyst for legislation in Washington DC to permanently protect large swaths of the Los Padres National Forest. ForestWatch led the charge on this effort, and Mike was a natural fit as our first-ever Wild Heritage Program Director from 2010-2013. In this position, he worked tirelessly to build public support for an early version of a bill to forever protect 200,000 acres of land and 124 miles of streams and rivers.
Securing the bill’s passage would require broad public support by a wide range of stakeholders, and to that end, Mike brought together a powerful coalition of businesses, rural landowners, outdoor recreationists, and local elected officials from all walks of life. He was comfortable meeting with die-hard environmentalists in the morning, corporate leaders in suits over lunch, and skeptical farmers and ranchers in the evening—and he would magically befriend each of them. It became an unlikely coalition of divergent interests that Mike strategically pulled together using his charm, his larger-than-life presence, and his thoughtful passion for land conservation, policy, and science.
During his time at ForestWatch, he built a list of hundreds of supporters for wilderness legislation, urging each of them to write their own personal letter asking our local Congressional representative to introduce wilderness legislation. He brought together winemakers from throughout the region to advocate for wilderness protection, dubbing the coalition “Wild Vintage” and designing a brochure that was distributed in wineries across the region. He orchestrated weekly telephone calls with a steering committee that included groups from Sacramento and Washington DC that worked together to push the wilderness legislation towards the finish line.
Mike’s early efforts culminated in what is now the Central Coast Heritage Protection Act. This legislation has been introduced several times over the years, each time getting closer and closer to passing both houses of Congress and signed into law by the President. This year, the bill has sailed through the House several times and is currently awaiting a hearing in the Senate, scheduled for later this month. The scope of the bill has grown considerably since Mike helped plant its seed a decade ago; it now envisions wilderness protection for more than 250,000 acres of land and 180 miles of streams and rivers, along with the designation of a 400-mile-long Condor National Recreation Trail that would stretch from the southern to the northern end of the Los Padres National Forest.
Some day—perhaps this year—the bill will be propelled across the finish line, protecting our region’s crown jewels and preserving places for our children to experience the joy and wonders of nature. And we’ll have Mike’s visionary groundwork to thank for it.
“Mike clearly had the ability to fight for what he loved,” said local environmentalist and Mike’s friend, Eric Cardenas. “But what was unique was that he celebrated that effort with community no matter the outcome of the fight. Mike put conservation, his friends, and revelry on the same plain, and he could not do the work without ensuring that there were elements of each always present. That was his nature. A big man with a big spirit and a huge heart. A lover of music and food and community. A beast of a dancer, a thinker of thinkers, and one of the best huggers you ever did hug. Rest In Peace and love, Mike.”
Mike’s enduring legacy is stamped into the bedrock of local, grassroots wilderness preservation. He reminded us every day to always be true to our passions, to fight with conviction, and to never give up. He showed us that it’s possible to bring together people from all walks of life to protect this corner of our planet. And he always made us smile big, laugh deeply, and truly appreciate the beauty of life all around us.
Mike’s enthusiasm for the outdoors and his love of life was always ready to be shared. Fellow ForestWatch board member Brad Monsma remembers Mike shuttling a car full of people to an event honoring the late backcountry explorer Dick Smith in the Santa Ynez Valley. “The stories kept coming—of climbing, animal encounters, backcountry adventures,” Monsma recalls, “and every so often he’d pause mid-sentence to point out a key musical moment in a bootleg recording of a Prince concert.”
Mike often quoted the early naturalist and writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said “To a dull mind all of nature is leaden. To the illuminated mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.” It was a fitting quote for Mike, who was known for wearing shirts adorned with silver, gold, or purple sequins at some of the legendary parties he hosted at his home atop the crest of the Santa Ynez Mountains. Those mountains were, are, and forever will be, his home. And to those of us who knew Mike and worked alongside him, his legacy of wilderness preservation—and his mighty spirit—will forever sparkle with light in our minds, in our hearts, and far across these wild lands.
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