The Central Place of Place in Shaping U.S. Environmental Policy: Santa Barbara before and after the Spill

Why is the turning point in the US environmental movement placed in Santa Barbara after the oil spill there in 1969?  Many other communities experienced pollution on a grand scale in the 1960s.  In Santa Barbara, the concept of the pristine was the preeminent response to a pollution event that erupted without warning and covered over not only the sea and the land but also the imagery of Santa Barbara by local, national and political interests. The literature and images of tourism in Santa Barbara derived from and fostered the national perception of Santa Barbara as the California Riviera. The spill brought the effects of modern industrial world onto the beaches of the Riviera. The changed landscape shocked the nation’s consciousness of that place: place, however pristine and pre-industrial in the imagination, was no longer safe from pollution’s devastation.  However problematic this framing might sound to historians, such was indeed the outcry of the local residents and the center of Edmund Muskie’s newly energized mission of a national environmental policy.  After years of political failure, despite outstanding work by leaders such as Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold and the Wilderness Society, the oil-soaked beaches of Santa Barbara provided for Muskie a clarion call for national action and a political cudgel with which he forced passage of the nation’s first major federal laws on clean water.   This interpretation suggests a direction for scholarship in environmental history.  Along side work that focuses on economics and the environment as resource, it is critical for scholars to investigate people’s experience and perception of place and their relationship with these places as major forces of change.   This research concentrates on national environmental politics and policy but historians need to investigate and take more seriously how place influences larger historical actors.