Drilling Santa Barbara
By 
Arguably the most important moment in the development of the popular environmental movement in the United States was the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara. Along with the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the Cuyahoga River catching on fire in 1969, the oil spill galvanized Americans to stand up to corporate despoliation of the environment. We are a long ways from this. A couple of things have happened to weak the bipartisan nature of environmentalism in the 60s and 70s. One is its sheer success–we don’t taste the air anymore unless you live in a severely polluted zone like Cancer Alley in Louisiana and the people living there are among the poorest in the nation. The second is that the potential of environmentalism was based on the idea that good paying jobs would remain in the nation and the collapse of those jobs for the working classes and thus the unions that pushed for them–something that Democrats are as responsible for as Republicans–cleaved working Americans off from the environmental movement by the late 70s and early 80s. The third is that in the Reagan area, Republicans built off the second point to blame environmentalists for costing American jobs, a great political move, even if they were lying about it.
Jeremy Frankel was camping with his buddies among beachfront palm trees nearly a decade ago when he smelled oil. He watched as black sludge pouring from a drainage pipe smeared the pristine waters off Refugio State Beach before authorities forced him to evacuate.
He would learn later about the oil-covered birds, the dead dolphins and sea lions — casualties of a pipeline that ruptured and spilled more than 120,000 gallons of crude oil along the Gaviota Coast, one of the last undeveloped stretches of Southern California oceanfront.
“The full extent will never really be known,” Frankel said as he walked amid those same palms, many of them now teetering and washing away from winter storms and rising seas. He has become a lawyer for the Environmental Defense Center, a Santa Barbara-based nonprofit, and one of the people trying to block an effort to restart that defunct pipeline and boost an offshore oil industry that for years has been fading into the California sunset.
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Sable’s plan — to resume drilling at three offshore platforms and pump oil through a buried pipeline running for miles up the coast — is reopening old wounds in this winsome seaside city. Many places are pro-environment and wary of pipelines. Santa Barbara was the first, with oil spills spawning an environmental ethic that is central to the city’s identity.
In 1969, another major spill at an offshore oil platform disgorged 100,000 barrels of crude into the Santa Barbara channel — a catastrophe that helped launch an environmental movement in the United States. It prompted the first Earth Day, led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and helped spawn bedrock laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act.
The pipeline plan looms at a time when many Californians fear backsliding on climate and environmental issues, as President-elect Donald Trump returns to office with promises to “drill baby drill.” During his first term, Trump pushed to expand offshore drilling in California, even as many platforms have stopped producing and the federal government hasn’t issued an offshore oil lease in the state since 1981.
We’ll see how many people really care. Environmentalism is today often seen by working people as an elite movement and there are good reasons for that. It’s not always true, but environmentalists themselves have made many mistakes over the decades to create this sense, especially in California where they have gotten real cozy with green capitalists who hate unions more than they want to save the planet.