They don’t appear on the front page: a nerdy guy who sends endless e-mails, an ex-gangster, a pair of Seaside seniors, a veteran academic, an immigrant couple from Africa.

But these are our local heroes. You might also recognize them, respectively, as an accomplished grassroots organizer, an activist-teacher-artist, a pair of anti-hunger angels, a visionary university president and a couple that nurses an entire community.

Given the lightly nasally voice, he doesn’t sound the hero part. With a slight frame and bulgy eyeballs– which rarely find a resting place– he doesn’t much look the part, either.

But make no mistake. In traveling from a repeated-arrest-by-way-of-protest youth spent in the thump of the Civil Rights Movement and the Poor People’s Campaign– when he used tear-gas canisters as drums– to his position at the helm of the effort to protect Big Sur’s purity, Jack Ellwanger has made a habit of his heroism.

His causes have often been daunting– like challenging the U.S. Navy, which intended to send thousands of jets into a section of Fort Hunter Liggett to practice bombing on a sacred graveyard of the native Salinan Indians. Or budging the bureaucratic beast that the California Coastal Conservancy can be away from hiring an outside consultant to carve the glorious Big Sur section of the California Coastal trail without local comment. Or attacking the myriad problems facing the South Coast: the pollution of its rivers, the out-pricing of its work force, the attrition of its trails.

But his tools were powerful: a gift for building collaboration and a galvanizing passion for the environment. His collaborators know this well.

“The Big Sur community has a reputation for being fiercely independent thinkers,” says Lee Otter, a revered Coastal Commission vet and lifetime Big Sur steward. “He somehow got a wide spectrum of volunteers to come together and hammer out a community-based process for doing the trail plan.”

“There’s a lot of environmentalists,” says Betsy Carr Bryant, a nearly 30-year local activist. “Then there’s Jack. He’s given his life to it.”

Ultimately, the U.S. Navy backed off. The Coastal Conservancy has allowed the Big Sur community to steer the trail-blazing sessions. The Big Sur Chanterelle Cook-off he co-hatched has channeled thousands of dollars to local affordable housing and river conservation– while amping locals about the greatness of native forests. His ceaseless ambassador work through Big Sur Lodge and his nonprofit website www.pelicannetwork.com continues to cultivate a contagion of enthusiasm about Big Sur’s bounty (and as the South Coast fires continue to burn, he has sent out waves of updates to his neighbors). And all this was just the most recent of his work.

Ellwanger’s vigilance leads area individuals– many who are considered heroes themselves– to call him nothing less than moving.

“I was inspired by Jack when I was a young college student, and he was staff to a Santa Clara County supervisor,” says Fred Keeley, former speaker pro tempore of the Assembly. “He was then, and has never lost, the [drive of the] consummate community organizer– from the community, in the community, and for the community. Finding ways to give voice to those who did and do not have easy and frequent access to power is his genius.”

Those who know him also call him relentless. “He is tenacious,” says Fran Gibson, president of Coastwalk. “I call him the bulldog.”

“If you’re gonna bite into it,” Ellwanger says, “you can’t let loose.”

They also describe the guy who doesn’t look the role as the very essence of the archetype.

“If he doesn’t step up to do it, it doesn’t get done,” Gibson says. “Perhaps that’s the short definition of a hero.”

For more on the ongoing California Coastal Trail project and various Big Sur conservation efforts, visit http://www.pelicannetwork.net.