CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The response to a 1969 oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, reveals how the modern environmental movement has been used to protect the interests of private homeowners, said a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researcher.
Landscape architecture professor Pollyanna Rhee chronicled how affluent homeowners use what she calls “ownership environmentalism” to focus on protection of property and community norms, rather than society as a whole, in her new book “Natural Attachments: The Domestication of American Environmentalism, 1920–1970.”
Rhee said she was interested in examining how people create an environmental consciousness and develop ideas about what a healthy, high-quality environment looks like. Santa Barbara was a good case study because of its long history of community involvement and because the oil spill shone a spotlight on its environmental concerns, said Rhee, who spent a year-and-a-half living and doing research in the city.
The Santa Barbara oil spill drew national attention for its damage to the picturesque coastline and inspired the founding of Earth Day and the Environmental Protection Agency. In the same year as the oil spill, the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire, but the fire did not garner the same level of news coverage and outrage as did the oil spill, Rhee said.
At the time of these disasters, the country was moving from a focus on conservation, which was concerned with natural resource management and was led by scientists, experts and government officials, to environmentalism as a social movement of ordinary citizens, she said.
Their concerns included exposure to chemicals and industrial pollution, the nuclear threat, the destruction of wilderness for highways and suburbs, and the desire for places for outdoor recreation.
“They were concerned about quality of life, and environmentalism was a big part of that,” Rhee said.
At the same time, the government was encouraging home ownership and private developers were creating neighborhoods with racially restrictive covenants. Ownership environmentalism centered on maintaining social hierarchies and protecting particular places, and it opted for protection rather than justice, she wrote.
Such environmentalism was often seen on the small scale of everyday lives — in how people plant their lawns, for example — rather than on a national policy level. “There is not an overarching political vision or a well-informed idea of what environmental quality should be,” Rhee said.
The social movement echoed earlier rhetoric of the 1920s and ‘30s, which concerned itself with local issues, such as the natural beauty of a place, and was led by home gardeners and voluntary civic organizations run mostly by women, she said.
After a 1925 earthquake destroyed Santa Barbara’s downtown, the city rebuilt in a unified Spanish Colonial Revival architectural style now codified in city regulations.
“It was embraced as a style that was supposed to be aligned with the climate and geography of the place, the mountains and beaches, and the Spanish and Mexican history that wealthy whites wanted to embrace,” Rhee said.
The oil spill challenged their expectations of the environment, but the concerns weren’t about changing the status quo or seeking a reduction in fossil fuel use, Rhee said. Instead, the citizens of Santa Barbara sought to protect their community and believed oil extraction should be located elsewhere, such as in Alaska or the Middle East.
“The political horizons for this type of environmentalism are restricted to a privileged few. It conveys a lot of what people think of as the scope of their environmental responsibilities. I think it’s a major reason why environmentalism has faced a lot of criticism for its lack of concern about equity and justice,” she said.
The criticisms of the environmental movement include that it has no relevance to the lives of many people and appeals to a narrow range of interests of the well-off for open spaces, wilderness and biodiversity. It also is seen as antigrowth. Communities have used ownership environmentalism to oppose multifamily housing developments and urban sprawl.
“Environmentalism is a pretty effective weapon, not just in Santa Barbara but in a lot of affluent places more generally, to use the protection of green space or nature preserves as a way of limiting a certain type of development,” Rhee said. “The limited social relevance of environmentalism is because of how these interests are wielded — not in the way of expanding equity or justice but in protecting people who already have these privileges.”
Ownership environmentalism is not limited to Santa Barbara. Such attitudes are shared in other affluent communities. But they are facing more outward criticism from environmental justice and climate activism movements and from advocates for affordable housing, Rhee said.
She said she believes there is value in thinking about environmental issues such as biodiversity, as well as examining the way we live and how that aligns with larger political and structural forces.
“It’s worth thinking about how people’s everyday lives and experiences are major factors shaping how they think about environmental health and environmental quality,” Rhee said. “I wanted to see how people respond to environmental pressures that are close to home.”
Editor’s note: To contact Pollyanna Rhee, email cyrhee@illinois.edu.
