EARTH DAY – THE REAL HISTORY

On April 22, 1970, the first Earth Day “teach-in” was celebrated.   It was 44 years ago, on the 100th birthday of Vladimir Lenin, that the U.S. first began this environmental protest.  Another little known fact about Earth Day (other than it is Lenin’s birthday) is that President Richard Nixon died on that day in 1994.  Nixon was the one man most responsible for the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency one year later by special executive order.  Also, in many ways, he was responsible for Earth Day. 

Let me explain…..

The scene is the beach in Santa Barbara, California.  The date is January 28, 1969.  The place was 6 miles from the coast on Union Oil's Platform A in the Dos Cuadras Offshore Oil Field.  On that day a blowout occurred which resulted in an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil spilling into the Channel and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara County in Southern California.  Within a ten-day period, the spill fouled the coastline from Goleta to Ventura as well as the northern shores of the four northern Channel Islands. The spill had a significant impact on marine life, killing thousands of sea birds, as well as marine animals such as dolphins, elephant seals, and sea lions.

Media coverage of the spill was intense from the moment the oil reached the shore. The spill was the major headline in many morning newspapers on February 5, also receiving wide coverage on radio and television. The same morning, a U.S. Senate subcommittee interviewed local officials as well as Fred Hartley, president of Union Oil, on the disaster in the making. Three major television networks were there along with over 50 reporters, the largest media turnout for any Senate subcommittee meeting since the Committee on Foreign Relations discussed the Vietnam War.

During the meeting, local officials made their case that the Federal government had a conflict of interest, in that they were making money from the same drilling they were mandated to oversee and regulate. Hartley defended Union's record and denied that the event was a disaster: "I don't like to call it a disaster, because there has been no loss of human life. I am amazed at the publicity for the loss of a few birds."

Late on February 6, the day after the spill washed ashore, President Richard Nixon announced a complete cessation of drilling, as well as production, in federal waters of the Santa Barbara Channel, with the solitary exception of the relief well being drilled to intersect the blown-out borehole.  Still the spill continued to spew from fissures in the ocean floor, undiminished, and by noon on February 7 a $1.3 billion class action lawsuit had been filed against Union Oil and their partners on Platform A.

On March 21, President Nixon came to Santa Barbara to see the spill and cleanup efforts for himself. Arriving at the Point Mugu Naval Air Station, he then took a helicopter tour of the Santa Barbara Channel and Platform A.  Dressed in a suit and tie, he walked along the polluted, partially cleaned beaches. He spoke to residents in Santa Barbara and promised to improve his handling of environmental problems.  He told the crowd, "...the Santa Barbara incident has frankly touched the conscience of the American people." He also mentioned that he would consider a halt to all offshore drilling, and told assembled reporters that the Department of the Interior had expanded the former buffer zone in the Channel by an additional 34,000 acres, and was converting the previous buffer zone into a permanent ecological preserve now known as the Channel Islands National Park.

Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, a staunch environmentalist and Vietnam War critic, was on a trip to California, where he spoke at a water conference and took time to check out what he described as the "horrible scene" of a major environmental disaster - the Santa Barbara oil spill.  On a plane, he picked up a copy of a magazine and read an article about “teach-ins” on college campuses against the Vietnam War. "I suddenly said to myself, 'Why not have a nationwide teach-in on the environment?’" Nelson recalled. "The objective was to get a nationwide demonstration of concern for the environment so large that it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy," Senator Nelson said, "and, finally, force this issue permanently onto the national political agenda."

In 1995 Nelson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, our nation's highest civilian honor. "As the father of Earth Day, he is the grandfather of all that grew out of that event: the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act," said the proclamation from President Clinton.  But this was not true.  It was a Republican President, not a Democratic Senator who really founded the modern environmental movement.

Overall, long-term environmental effects of the spill seemed to be minimal. In a study  through the Allan Hancock Foundation at the University of Southern California, the authors suggested several hypotheses for the lack of environmental damage to biologic resources in the Channel aside from pelagic birds and intertidal organisms. First, creatures there may have evolved a tolerance to oil in the water due to the presence of natural seeps in the vicinity for at least tens of thousands of years; the area around Coal Oil Point has one of the most active natural underwater oil seeps in the world. Second, the abundance of oil-eating bacteria in the water may be greater because of that routine presence of oil in the water. Third, the spill happened between two large Pacific storms; the storms broke up the oil, scattering it more quickly than happens in many other oil spills, and additionally the sediment load in the seawater from freshwater runoff would have been greater, and this assisted the oil in quickly sinking. Fourth, Santa Barbara Channel crude oil is heavy, having API gravity between 10 and 13, and is both minimally soluble in water, and sinks relatively easily. Therefore fish and other organisms were exposed to the oil for a shorter time than was the case with other oil spills.

While the Santa Barbara oil spill was not the sole event which built the regulatory and legislative superstructure of the modern environmental movement in the United States – some prominent pieces of which include the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Water Act, and in California the California Coastal Commission and California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) – it was one of the most dramatic and visible of the several key events that led up to those changes.   President Nixon was the one who signed the legislation and executive orders to implement these changes.

Through the 1960s, industrial pollution and its consequences had come more and more to the public attention, commencing with Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring and including such events as the passage of the Water Quality Act, the campaign to ban DDT, the creation of the National Wilderness Preservation System, the 1967 Torrey Canyon tanker accident which devastated coastal areas in both England and France, and the burning of the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland, Ohio.   But none of these events mobilized the American politicians to pass legislation to clean up the environment.

At the time, the Santa Barbara spill was the largest oil spill ever in U.S. waters, and its occurrence during a fierce battle between local residents and the very oil company responsible for the spill only made the controversy more intense, the battle more public, and the anti-oil cause seem more valid to a wider segment of the populace.   In many ways, the modern environmental movement is more anti-oil than pro-environment. In the several years after the spill, more environmental legislation was passed than in any other similar period in U.S. history.

Earth Day indeed increased environmental awareness in America, but without the Santa Barbara oil spill and the subsequent actions of President Nixon, the modern environmental movement may have been just another sensational news story.