Natural Attachments

"A massive oil spill in the Pacific Ocean near Santa Barbara, California, in 1969 quickly became a landmark in the history of American environmentalism, helping to inspire the creation of both the Environmental Protection Agency and Earth Day. But what about Santa Barbara itself? As Pollyanna Rhee shows, that city's history and demographics played crucial roles in making the oil spill so iconic. Moreover, well-off and influential Santa Barbarans subsequently "domesticated" the larger environmental movement by arguing that individual homes and families-not society as a whole-needed protection from environmental abuses. This put environmental rhetoric and power to fundamentally conservative-not radical-ends"--