Vandersloot died Nov. 4 at his home in Newport Beach, said his son, Jon, who found his father in his home office. 'He gave everything he had till his last breath,' Jon Vandersloot said. The cause of death has not been determined. Vandersloot, a dermatologist with a practice in Huntington Beach, was one of the founders of the Bolsa Chica Land Trust, formed in 1992 to preserve the Bolsa Chica wetlands by acquiring and restoring the area. He also was a board member and a founder of the Ocean Outfall Group, which has pushed the Orange County Sanitation District to clean up waste water pumped offshore in Huntington Beach and has expanded its efforts to other California counties. Vandersloot had attended a meeting of the state Coastal Commission last week. 'He was the heart and soul of the environmental movement in Orange County,' said Larry Porter, a board member of the Ocean Outfall Group. 'He was one of those magnificent fellows who was so much bigger than life. It's a huge loss, incalculable.' Vandersloot said his environmental efforts in Orange County started after one of his patients told him about the fight to preserve Bolsa Chica. 'I drove by the wetlands, went to a meeting and I was hooked,' he told the Orange County Register in 2003. 'There is no such thing as protected land. People are very aggressive about developing. If they go unchecked, there will not be any nature left.' Vandersloot was born Feb. 14, 1945, in San Diego, but the family soon moved to New Jersey. He graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor's degree in biological science, went to medical school at the University of Texas, Southwestern and did his residency at Stanford University. Vandersloot also served in the Navy. He moved to Orange County in the 1980s. 'He was really good at a dispassionate, factually based argument,' said Marcia Hanscom, an environmental activist and managing director of the Coastal Law Enforcement Action Network who frequently worked with Vandersloot. 'He had a lot of things where he lost, but he was more successful than most because of his style.' Hanscom said Vandersloot worked on many other issues including preserving park land surrounding upper Newport Bay and 'every other wild area remaining on a mostly developed Orange County coastline.' Along with his son, Vandersloot is survived by his wife, Cheryl, and daughter, Tiffany. 