Some of the 12,700 photographs of the California coast taken by Ken Adelman may look like visually stunning postcards, but their purpose is to serve as evidence in environmentalists' efforts to protect the coastline. Running north to south from the top, the scenes show the coastline along Humboldt County and Bodega Bay, near the Golden Gate Bridge, in front of an oil and gas processing plant in Gaviota, along Point Dume near Malibu, and at Venice beach, Newport Beach, and the Mexican border.

Air Adelman

A Caltech Couple Takes to the Skies to Help Preserve the California Coast

By Michael Rogers

If you crossed Amelia Earhart with Rachel Carson and Charles Lindbergh with John Muir you might come up with a duo like Gabrielle Adelman ’87 and Ken Adelman ’86. The two haven’t achieved legendary status yet, but their love of flying, coupled with their commitment to protecting the environment in California, has won them kudos from state conservationists and a brush with international notoriety—thanks to one very unhappy celebrity.

The fuss started earlier this year, after the Adelmans spent several months photographing the entire California coast from their Robinson helicopter, amassing about 12,700 pictures, and posting them on a website (http://www.californiacoastline.org). The point was to help environmental groups like the Sierra Club keep track of illegal development along the state’s 1,100-mile coastline.

Sounds innocuous and civic-minded enough except for one particular photo of a spread in Malibu. The bluff-top manse in question belongs to actress and singer Barbra Streisand, and although the Adelmans’ snapshot was taken from several hundred feet away, Streisand, who guards her privacy, was not pleased. Early this year, her lawyer wrote the Adelmans a letter, asking them to remove the photo from their website. When they refused, the chanteuse behind “People (who need people)” sued them in Los Angeles Superior Court, seeking $50 million in damages. In June, a month after Streisand filed suit, the Adelmans responded with their own legal motion, claiming that Streisand’s suit was without merit and filed primarily to intimidate them into removing the photo.

Before Streisand’s lawsuit put the Adelmans and their avocation on the map, they were living quietly in Corralitos, near Santa Cruz, enjoying the fruits of two Silicon Valley start-ups that Ken cofounded, and using their free time to fly their fleet of five aircraft and assist environmental causes. Flying into Santa Monica not too long ago, the Adelmans talked about how they parlayed Ken’s early involvement with the Internet into a new life as environmental aviators.

The couple, who met at Lloyd House, dated for most of the time that they were at Caltech—Gabrielle majoring in astronomy and Ken in engineering and applied science. They married a week after Gabrielle’s graduation and moved to Fremont, south of Oakland, where Ken took a job as a software programmer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. They soon moved closer to UC Santa Cruz so that Gabrielle could begin an astronomy graduate program there, but she dropped out after the first day (never having been that keen on graduate school in the first place), and Ken went to work at SRI International, a research institute based in Menlo Park. He helped develop MultiNet, early Internet software that enables different computer systems to communicate. In 1988, he and a colleague licensed the software from SRI and started a company called TGV Inc. With Ken working long hours, Gabrielle looked for a way to pitch in and joined the company as its comptroller.

In 1995, while attending an air show, Gabrielle won a free helicopter ride. “All we did was fly around the landing pad, but it was great,” says Gabrielle. “I immediately wanted to learn how to fly a helicopter.” After getting her pilot’s license in that specialty, she encouraged Ken to do the same, which he did in 1996. That same year, Cisco Systems bought TGV for about $115 million in stock and Ken left the company.

But it wasn’t long before he was drawn back to the ups and downs of starting a new company. In 1997, he cofounded Network Alchemy, a start-up that developed virtual private-network technology, allowing for security in e-commerce markets. Less than three years later, Nokia bought it for $335 million.

Although they were never die-hard environmental activists when they were younger, the Adelmans say that they were always interested in environmental causes. Freed from financial worries and swooping over the landscape one day in their helicopter, they realized that they had the tools to make an impact.

“In 1996, when we bought the helicopter, it became very obvious that it was a great camera platform,” says Gabrielle. “So we called the Sierra Club and asked if they were interested in having us take aerial pictures of specific projects affecting the environment.”

Eventually, their offer got to Mark Massara, a lawyer and the director of the Sierra Club’s coastal program. “He called us and said that Hearst Corporation was going to develop San Simeon Point and that we could pick up a photographer in Cambria and fly him out to take pictures,” Gabrielle says. “Ken was the pilot, and they flew up and down the coast taking a bunch of pictures. The Sierra Club made postcards of the images with the words ‘Endangered Species’ printed across them.”

Photographs of the unspoiled stretch of coastline south of the Monterey Peninsula became evidence in the deliberations of the California Coastal Commission, the state regulatory agency that oversees coastal development. After 1,500 protestors attended a hearing over the issue in 1998, the commission rejected the Hearst plan.

With the success of their first venture, the Adelmans started thinking about expanding their horizons. “We realized that it would be very valuable to have ‘before pictures’ to make sure that the things that shouldn’t happen were stopped, and that sanctions were brought when things that shouldn’t have happened did,” says Ken. He and Gabrielle consulted with environmentalists and decided that the most effective thing to do would be to compile a detailed photographic catalogue of the whole California coast. Plus, by early 2000, Ken had sold his second company and had time on his hands again.

In 2001, the Adelmans began prep work for the project. They bought a digital camera, linked it with a global positioning system so they’d know exactly when and where each picture was taken, and made test runs to work out the bugs. “Around the summer of 2002,” says Gabrielle, “we decided, okay, we’re gonna do this. We’re done procrastinating.”

They decided that Gabrielle would fly the helicopter while Ken would be the project’s official photographer, snapping pictures from the California–Oregon border all the way down to the U.S. border with Mexico. Since the pilot sits on the right side of the helicopter, a north-to-south trajectory was indicated, starting at the Oregon border, four hours from their home. Their early flights were often cut short by the fog that socks in large sections of Califor-nia’s north coast, but things got better as they buzzed farther south. “Every time we knocked off a little bit, we knew it would get a little easier because we wouldn’t have to go as far north the next time,” says Ken.

Flying a helicopter over airports like LAX and near the Mexican border required the Adelmans to get permission from authorities. For the most part, air traffic controllers were cooperative, timing the Adelmans’ arrival with the takeoffs and landings of commercial jets so that the couple could pass through while photographing. While they have never been able to get permission from the military to photograph around Vandenberg Air Force Base along California’s central coast, they’re still trying.

The Adelmans pose with their Robinson helicopter, one of five aircraft that they have bought over the years.

While their coastal excursions might sound like a scenic smorgasbord, the Adelmans say that they rarely had time to enjoy the view. Flying as low as 300 feet to get the best photographs can be an intense experience, notes Gabrielle. “I’m concentrating pretty hard on keeping the altitude and speed of the helicopter appropriate, looking for places to land in case of engine failure, and talking to air traffic controllers,” she says.

For Ken, the photographic trips weren’t much of a joy ride either. Snapping pictures with the helicopter’s door off and the cold wind rushing past, he often felt his left hand—the one bearing the weight of the camera—getting numb. “We’re flying at speeds of up to 100 mph,” says Gabrielle. “Imagine driving in a convertible by the ocean at that speed for hours at a time. You’re going to turn blue.” Says Ken, “I often thought, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I was taking a picture every three seconds. If I wanted to scratch my nose, I had to plan it.”

Although they had originally hoped to photograph the entire coast in no more than three trips, it took 11 runs to complete the project to their satisfaction. “The objective was to gather information with a scientific foundation so that it could be useful to people, so, for example, you’d know the place, the time frame, and so forth,” says Ken. “Although we’re not doing data analysis, we’re doing data gathering, so it came out to be something like a NASA sky survey.”

Massara of the Sierra Club says that before the Adelmans put together their catalogue, the state’s coastal commissioners would often evaluate proposed developments without independent photographic evidence, making it harder for them to make impartial judgments. Now, he says, the commission reviews the couple’s photographs for every case it considers. “The Adelmans’ website is the commission’s most useful enforcement tool,” he says.

Massara adds that the photographs have provided environmentalists with a wealth of evidence documenting illegal development, plus a baseline against which future development and proposals for development can be compared. “It’s impossible to overstate Ken’s and Gabrielle’s contribution to coastal protection in California. As it’s said, a picture is worth a thousand words. The Adelmans have changed land-use deliberation at every government level.”

This Sierra Club postcard, taken from the Adelmans’ helicopter in 1997, helped defeat a proposal by the Hearst Corporation to develop an area along the central coast of California.

The Adelmans have also performed another public service with their aircraft, using them to fly small, endangered animals around the country. When private conservation facilities need to transport animals for breeding and educational purposes, they occasionally call on the Adelmans, since commercial airlines won’t take wild animals. They’ve flown a pair of Canadian lynx and two monkeys, among other animals. “If they’re small and young enough, we get to hold them,” says Gabrielle. “That’s neat.” They’re now planning to shuttle elephant sperm for breeding purposes later this year. Post 9/11, commercial planes are no longer viable for that task, the Adelmans say. X-rays from baggage scanners would zap the sperm. In 1998, the Adelmans gave $430,000 to the Cheetah Conservation Fund to create a cheetah reserve in Namibia. “We went to a lecture and heard about a particular farmer who would shoot every cheetah on his property,” Gabrielle says. “We said to each other, ‘How expensive could land be in Namibia? Why don’t we just buy this guy’s farm?’ And the people with Cheetah Conservation said, ‘You’d do that for us?’ And we said, ‘Sure.’ So they went down there and bought the farm.” The reserve, known as Cheetah View, now serves as a scientific research station. Two years later, the Adelmans gave $1 million to the organization for cheetah population research and other initiatives.

Given their love of flying, it might seem surprising that the Adelmans haven’t bothered to make the trip to Africa to see what their money has wrought. Explains Ken, “One thing that does not work in Africa is Americans coming over and telling them what to do.” Which may explain why the Adelmans, similarly inclined, did not roll over submissively when the Streisand legal team growled.

On the subject of Streisand’s suit, the Adelmans say that they created a website for the photos last year simply to make it easy for Massara, the Sierra Club, and the Coastal Commission to access them. They estimate that buying the equipment to take the pictures, operating the helicopter, and setting up the website and buying computer servers cost approximately $50,000. So far, they say, the Streisand suit has cost them about $250,000 in legal fees.

“The reason we’re pursuing this so vigorously is because most people of normal means would have to sell their house to defend themselves if somebody brought a suit like this against them,” says Gabrielle. “We want to make her, and anyone else who might have a similar idea about suing over this kind of information dissemination, very wary of doing it. Because a very effective tool to shut people up is just to threaten them with a lawsuit.”

Asked whether it would materially compromise their project to take the Streisand photo off their website, the Adelmans bristle. “What’s the privacy invasion she’s talking about?” says Ken. “The fact that we flew down the coast and recorded what we saw? You’re allowed to record what you see. The fact that we put it on the Internet? There are plenty of pictures of her and her house on the Internet.” And it likely won’t be the last time the Adelmans photograph her home. To keep the photo survey current, they say that they plan to redo it over the next few years.

“We’re already taking new pictures in some areas where we weren’t entirely satisfied with the quality of my early work,” Ken says. “The most important thing is to repeat the survey on a five-year cycle” since there’s a five-year statute of limitations on suing over new construction. “There are areas undergoing rapid development—regions from the Golden Gate Bridge to Big Sur, Point Conception to Malibu, and places like south Orange County and north San Diego County. We’ll probably cover most of those again next year.”

With a coastline that’s hundreds of miles long, some might say that bringing down a few naughty property owners is an exercise in environmental micromanagement. The Adelmans disagree. “If you look at all the individual property owners along the California coast and if you can imagine every one of them putting up a horse barn or a sea wall, you realize the cumulative effect of all those individual actions,” says Gabrielle. “I’m sort of learning about biology and ecology in later life and realizing that we know so little how the natural world works. How stupid is that—to wipe it out before we have any clue about how it works?”