University of Chicago Press
Review by Brian Tanguay
The city of Santa Barbara, California, has always traded on its unique location, tucked snugly between the Santa Ynez mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Its Old Mission, County Courthouse and Lobero Theater are landmarks recognized around the world, while its temperate climate and quality of life are as notable as Oprah Winfrey, Jeff Bridges, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, to name just a few of its famous residents. Without a doubt, Santa Barbara is a very special place, and for a very long time its residents have sought to keep it that way.
In Natural Attachments, scholar Pollyanna Rhee uses Santa Barbara as a lens through which to analyze a particular brand of environmental awareness — Rhee calls it “ownership environmentalism” — that followed two calamities, the 1925 earthquake that destroyed much of downtown, and the 1969 oil spill in the Santa Barbara Channel.
In the wake of the earthquake, civic-minded actors saw an opportunity to rebuild in a different way, with an eye to aesthetic considerations and adoption of a unique architectural form. The result was a Spanish Colonial Revival style that became Santa Barbara’s unique signature. Red tile, white stucco, arches, wrought-iron, courtyards. Pearl S. Chase, Bernhard Hoffman, and the architect James Osborne Craig were among those who guided this project. Values of civic improvement, beautification, and harmony between the natural and built environment, imposed primarily through education and persuasion, had an effect that wasn’t unintentional. Aligning the city’s aesthetic with its natural surroundings increased property values, a boon to owners, most of whom were affluent and white. It also made clear what sort of people belonged and who had marginal status. While civic improvement and beautification had a sheen of organic neutrality, residents hardly benefited equally.
With the dramatic increase in California’s population after World War Two, Santa Barbara was forced to confront the pressures of growth, how much to allow, of what type, and where. Polluting industries were unwelcome. Property owners resisted any proposal that created congestion, increased density or altered the landscape, and through homeowners associations and other means sought to restrict growth and protect their quality of life.
This “not in my backyard” stance was severely tested after the oil spill in 1969. Scenes of desecrated beaches and oil-soaked birds circulated so widely that the disaster in Santa Barbara became linked in the public imagination with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the first Earth Day in 1970. Twenty-eight miles of shoreline from Goleta to Ventura were coated with oil, threatening the pristine beaches on which Santa Barbara depended to maintain its status as a tourist attraction and unique enclave of natural beauty and sophistication. Horrified residents found themselves pitted against giant oil companies. As Rhee points out, the spill united some strange bedfellows: country club Republicans, militant leftists, long-haired college students, and many who occupied the big gray middle. Along with an organization called Get Oil Out, better known as GOO, which still exists today, this affiliation of convenience derided lax government regulation of offshore drilling and the primitive nature of the oil industry’s extractive technologies. In the view of many people, Santa Barbara was a victim; if such a disaster could happen in a place of natural beauty and affluence, it might happen anywhere in the country.
But Santa Barbara residents, like citizens elsewhere, had to confront another uncomfortable truth. How did their desire for a high quality of life in a clean environment square with their own consumption of gasoline and other common consumer goods whose production was made possible by fossil fuels? The ethos of postwar America was about having all one wanted and could pay for without troubling oneself about the consequences. As is still the case today, local governments back then depended on the revenues they received from oil extraction to continue providing the public services that maintained Santa Barbara’s desirability. Santa Barbara County is currently embroiled in a dispute with Sable Offshore Corporation over granting permits to restart a 125-mile-long pipeline that failed in 2015, spilling 142,000 gallons of hot crude oil. The Board of Supervisors recently held a marathon seven-hour meeting on the subject, with a deadlocked 2-2 vote at its conclusion. Writing in the Santa Barbara Independent, columnist Nick Welsh noted: “Given the love-hate tango Santa Barbara County has long danced with Big Oil, especially since the first huge oil spill of 1969, its current lack of even the most minimal leverage is unprecedented.”
While Natural Attachments is a deeply researched academic book, it’s written clearly enough to be accessible to a general reader. Rhee’s conceptualization of “ownership environmentalism” speaks to the central conundrum we face in our efforts to slow the negative effects of climate change: who’s willing to sacrifice? Who’s willing to moderate their consumption and use of resources? Who deserves or is entitled to a livable environment?
