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They supported the Environmental Defense Center, a public interest law firm that has worked on behalf of cleaner oceans, air, and endangered species while taking on dozens of cases against oil exploration, extraction, and processing, not to mention a golf course owned by the oil company ARCO, since 1977. Santa Barbara became a demonstration project, with wealthy locals offering both money and volunteer time to back a citizen’s campaign against oil that didn’t have support elsewhere.
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But Santa Barbara’s independent environmental groups remained committed to “Getting Oil Out”-entirely, not just reducing oil drilling. Smith.Īfter the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, national environmental groups focused their energy on reducing oil drilling in the U.S. But when oil prices were high, they’d reverse their opinion on the sanctity of national parks and pristine beaches to vote in favor of drilling, according to work done by UC Santa Barbara professor Eric R.A.N. Consumers saw environmentalism as self-interest, used purchasing and boycotts to vote with their pocketbooks, and when it came to oil they were torn between their cars and their environmental aspirations.įor decades, Californians voted like conflicted consumers, too: When oil prices were low, they voted against oil drilling offshore. What’s more, the movement morphed from a citizen’s initiative that was concerned with community into a consumerist one. The environmental movement deflected energy from the civil rights struggle, he says. McGinnis taught environmental law for 33 years at UC Santa Barbara. In June of 1969, Marc McGinnes was a young lawyer with a new baby when Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey encouraged him to move to Santa Barbara to start the new field of environmental law. “But, unlike 45 years ago, now we have the technology to do it. “We developed a blueprint for getting off oil,” he says of his fellow activists. Relis, like many transformed by the spill, went on to a lifetime of environmentalism, working at California’s own environmental protection agency and then as entrepreneur with a company that converts waste from 40 Southern California cities into renewable natural gas. “The oil hit the shores and it energized us,” said Paul Relis, who was one of the original members of Get Oil Out, or GOO, a grassroots activist group that expanded its mission from cleaning up the oil spill to a radical opposition to oil use itself. Photographs of thousands of pitiful oil-soaked birds sparked the creation of Earth Day and the EPA, among other environmental institutions. It was in this wealthy jewel-box community that the modern environmental movement was born in 1969, with a 4-million-gallon oil spill. To better understand this change, I recently drove north along the coast to Santa Barbara. He recoiled when I asked if he considered himself an environmentalist. When I found Hubina early one morning in June, he’d just come back from surfing. And the participants are hardly ideologues. Technologies as diverse as Facebook, compost bins, and electric vehicles have made many Californians see themselves as participants in building an oil-free future, without much fear of the potential downsides. Today, with the drought making the idea of global warming more real, there’s a different kind of discussion.
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But that is exactly what many Californians are imagining.įor decades, any discussion of limiting oil was quickly overwhelmed by fears about job losses or high gas prices, and as suburbs and cars expanded, oil consumption rose. Paul Getty and Armand Hammer to the state’s famous car-and-freeway culture-that it is hard to imagine the state without oil. The history and idea of California are so tied up with oil-from the oil fields of Bakersfield and Signal Hill to millionaires like J. The two photos were shared more than 2,300 times on Facebook, with people adding anti-oil hashtags, including #leaveoilinthesoil.
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Then he saw another dolphin and photographed that, too. He quickly realized it came from the 100,000 gallon Goleta oil pipeline spill north of Santa Barbara and took a photo with his phone. On the morning of May 31, Robert Hubina hurt his foot, so he skipped surfing to walk on the beach in Ventura, where he saw a dolphin with black tar in its mouth, lying dead amongst the rocks.