WiLDCOAST COSTASALVAjE

As the Co-founder and Executive Director of WiLDCOAST, Serge is the driving force behind the organizations numerous accomplishments which earned him the 2009 San Diego Zoological Society’s Conservation Medal as well as the California Coastal Commission’s “Coastal Hero” Award. In 2003, he received the Surf Industry's Environmental Award in recognition of his role in helping defeat the Mexican government's Nautical Ladder mega-marina plan.

Before Co-founding WiLDCOAST, Serge was the former founding director of The Nature Conservancy’s Baja California as well as the Sea of Cortez Program.  
He grew up in Imperial Beach, California, and spent his childhood helping to preserve the Tijuana Estuary as a National Wildlife Refuge. He worked on water quality issues in the San Diego-Tijuana region since 1980 and helped discover plans by the Mitsubishi Corporation to build a 500,000-acre industrial salt facility on the shore of San Ignacio Lagoon, and helped to defeat the project. 

Serge received a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Texas at Austin, a M.S. in Geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego.

 A classic waterman, Serge is an avid surfer, swimmer, and former State of California Ocean Lifeguard. He spends most of his leisure time surfing, camping with his family, and writing entertaining narratives of his conservational activism and travels. Serge is the author of two books: Saving the Gray Whale, a book based on the three years he lived in the gray whale lagoons of Baja California, and Wild Sea: Eco-Wars and Surf Stories from the Coast of the Californias, published in early 2011, which took him on a book tour of the North America’s coastal cities stretching from Canada to Mexico.