Todd Miller spent his boyhood wading in Bogue Sound with a net, looking through the clear water for blue crabs skittering along the bottom. At sunset on summer evenings, fishermen would come out in small boats to net shrimp as they moved from the shallows toward deeper waters.

"What was remarkable was how clear the water was in summertime," Miller recalls. "When I went off to school and visited other coastlines and looked for what we had here, that is when I realized just how special what we had here was."

Fresh out of college in 1982, Miller founded the N.C. Coastal Federation to protect the coastal waters, using a back bedroom as an office and a $20,000 foundation grant. Despite such meager resources, the federation helped derail a plan to strip-mine vast acres of wetlands in Eastern North Carolina -- land now protected as national wildlife refuge.

Today, the nonprofit environmental group has three offices on the coast, a $1.4 million annual operating budget, a staff of 18 and about 8,000 dues-paying members in Eastern North Carolina and the Triangle.

The federation will be busy this spring trying to make sure lawmakers uphold stricter standards on pollutant-laden stormwater runoff set to take effect this summer. It's a fight that has defined Miller and the federation, which have long stressed water-quality protection.

As its membership and budget have grown, the group has expanded its mission beyond advocacy. Today, the federation also conducts environmental education in schools, buys coastal land for preservation and restores wetlands.

"The work of the Coastal Federation shouldn't be about telling people what is right," Miller says, "but more about helping people accomplish what they know is right."

The federation has been especially vigilant about tougher restrictions on pollutant-laden stormwater runoff -- the No. 1 source of pollution along coastal waters. New restrictions adopted by state environmental regulators will take effect this summer in the 20 coastal counties if the legislature doesn't strike them down when it reconvenes next month.

"I think ultimately we'll prevail, and hopefully it will happen this year," Miller says. "The science is so indisputable. We know what we are doing now is a failure, and the state is violating the Clean Water Act by allowing it to occur."

State water quality regulators asked for the tougher limits on runoff, admitting that its existing restrictions were not protecting coastal water quality. Because of pollution, the acreage of coastal waters permanently closed to shellfishing has increased about 13 percent in the past two decades. But the state home builders lobby will ask the legislature to repeal the new runoff rules or delay them at least a year for further study.

"We have some significant issues with the rules," says Paul Wilms, director of government affairs for the N.C. Home Builders Association.

A formidable advocate

Wilms, who often finds himself opposing Miller on issues, said the federation's advocacy had been formidable, even when he disagreed with their views.

"I think the contribution of the Coastal Federation has been phenomenal and productive to debate on coastal issues," Wilms says. "It seemed to me prior to the advent of the Coastal Federation that there was no effective voice for coastal issues in North Carolina. Citizen voices were pretty disparate and disorganized.

"We certainly haven't always agreed with their public policy positions," Wilms says. "But they have done a superlative job in organizing the public and encouraging participation. That is positive regardless of the position."

When the federation was organized, there were statewide environmental groups, but none that focused on the coast. While in graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill, Miller worked on a national study of how to protect water supplies. He was a research assistant, studying under Ray Burby, a professor of regional planning at UNC-CH. The experience gave him a firsthand look at effective environmental groups around the nation, such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in Annapolis, Md., which has worked to restore and protect the bay and its tributaries from pollution.

"It showed him that if people are proactive, there are ways to do things right," recalls Burby, who is now retired. "He really had a commitment to coastal North Carolina. He has this strong interest, particularly in water quality."

Miller developed a vision for a group modeled on the Chesapeake Bay Foundation to protect North Carolina's sounds and waterways.

"He saw the changes that were coming at a rapid pace and saw a need for like-minded citizens to come together to protect what was special about the North Carolina coast," says Derb Carter, director of the Southern Environmental Law Center's office in Chapel Hill, who drafted the federation's articles of incorporation.

Strip-mining battle

The first issue Miller tackled in the early 1980s was a proposal by the peat mining industry to strip-mine 120,000 acres of peat bogs between the Pamlico and Albemarle sounds. Miller, seeing a threat to water quality, organized opposition.

"We needed someone who could go talk to fishermen," says Bill Holman, visiting scholar at Duke University's Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions and a former lobbyist for environmental groups. "They probably wouldn't have listened to Bill Holman, Sierra Club lobbyist from Raleigh. Todd got in his truck and went from fishing community to fishing community."

More than 600 people -- a good slice of Hyde County's population then -- showed up at a public hearing. Many were fishermen.

"That became the turning point in many ways," Derb Carter says, "and the project was eventually abandoned."

The federation has undertaken dozens of ambitious wetland restoration projects and tapped state clean water grants, federal money and foundation money to preserve fragile coastal lands and restore them. Since 1996, more than 7,000 acres have been preserved, including Hoop Pole Creek, 31 acres of maritime forest and salt flat on Atlantic Beach, where the public can enjoy nature trails.

Jim Swartzenberg, owner of J&B AquaFood in Holly Ridge and president of Shellfish Growers of North Carolina, said Miller rallied concerns about a proposal to put high-rise condominiums on Permuda Island, a narrow island in Onslow County.

"We have oyster leases all around it," Swartzenberg says. "The neighborhoods opposed it. He helped us out a lot."

Today, Swartzenberg said, when he looks across the Stump Sound at Topsail Island, he sees houses and development. But nearby Permuda Island remains in a natural state, now part of the state's coastal reserve.

"Todd had a vision for the Coastal Federation to preserve the coast," Swartzenberg says. "He hasn't lost sight of that vision. It took a lot of guts to do what he did."