Peter M. Douglas

Born Peter Michael Ehlers in Berlin on Aug. 22, 1942, (he and his sister changed their last name upon becoming American citizens), Mr. Douglas and his mother, Maria, and sister, Christiane, left their house when it was destroyed by Allied planes in the Allied bombing of Berlin. After WWII he immigrated to the United States in 1950.[3][2]

Bombing of Berlin in July 1944

As a young man in Southern California Mr. Douglas enjoyed surfing off Redondo Beach and camping in the desert and mountains.[3][2]

He studied in California and Germany. He earned an undergraduate degree in psychology and a graduate degree in law at UCLA, where he plunged into antiwar and social justice movements and co-founded a law collective. He also studied abroad for one year in Germany. After completing his law degree in 1969, he and his German-born wife, Rotraut, then moved abroad for a few years. Environmentalism was not yet on his radar.[3][2]

He returned to the U.S. in 1971 and accepted a job in Sacramento on the staff of then-Assemblyman Alan Sieroty, a Democrat from Los Angeles, who put him in charge of writing laws protecting the state's coastline.[3][2]

He was the main author of California’s landmark coastal protection laws and for more than a quarter-century was executive director of the California Coastal Commission, the powerful regulatory agency he helped create.[3][2]

He fought the development of homes, industry, and infrastructure in California. He counted among the commission’s most significant achievements defeating a proposed toll road skirting San Onofre State Beach, a liquefied natural gas terminal off the Ventura County coast and the development of Hearst Ranch. He considered the decision to allow housing subdivisions along the Bolsa Chica wetlands one of its worst failures.[3][2]

Bearded and usually wearing Birkenstock sandals, a bolo tie and hiking pants, he was known to sometimes pull his biodiesel car to the side of a highway and stand in front of bulldozers operating without a permit his agency might have withheld.[3][2]

He was “the world’s best bureaucratic street fighter,” Steve Blank, a member of the commission, told The New York Times in 2010.[3][2]

Mr. Douglas died of lung and throat cancer in 2012. As his cancer progressed, he wrote of his beliefs about life and death in lengthy, highly philosophical emails to friends. He halted mainstream Western medical treatment in favor of Eastern therapies, abandoned his strict vegan diet and wound up outliving his doctors’ dismal prognoses by many months, applying the same drive and optimism to his personal fight as he had to his job as chief steward of California’s coast.[3][2]

He died at the home of his sister, Christiane, though Douglas enjoyed living in coastal Larkspur, CA, and had another home in rural Northern California by a river near the Oregon border.[3][2]