"I took two things with me on a boating trip with a friend, out to one of the islands that had been hit by the oil spill: pen and paper, and a copy of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. I sat there on watch, piloting the boat, coming down the channel, porpoises jumping on the bow, and wrote the gist of what became this declaration. It seemed to me that it would be appropriate to use that same kind of form of a declaration to express the fact that nature was being oppressed by our civilization and that the rights of nature was a concept that made a lot of sense."
Rod Nash, First Chair of the Environmental Studies Program at UCSB, as told to Pacific Standard magazine
As the emergence of environmental policies in the 1970s grew, activists and environmental groups continued to pledge toward other environmental policies. The Santa Barbara Declaration of Environmental Rights on January 28, 1970, written a year after the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill, acknowledged human-caused environmental harms and recognized through ecological consciousness that change could happen. Composed by UCSB Environmental Studies Professor Rod Nash, the declaration motivated the remembrance of the catastrophic oil spill into the Santa Barbara Channel.
Image Credits:
Get Oil Out (GOO) Collection. SBHC Mss 10. Department of Special Research Collections, UC Santa Barbara Library, University of California, Santa Barbara. Box 75, Folder 10.