Legacies of the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill: A Catalyst for Environmental Consciousness 

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Fifty-five years ago, the Santa Barbara area experienced the largest oil spill in the United States at its time of occurrence. In the afternoon of January 28, 1969, offshore of the Santa Barbara, a blowout of Union Oil's Company Platform A caused the release of more than 4.5 million gallons of crude oil to seep into the ocean floor, resulting in crude foam to rest across 150 to 200 miles across the coast of Santa Barbara, washing up dead and dying bodies of seabirds, fish, and other marine life (LeMenager 21).

In the days following the oil spill's aftermath onto the Santa Barbara Channel, the spill sparked public outrage from Santa Barbara residents and others across the nation. As residents of the Santa Barbara area and other Americans across the nation witnessed the violence of cheap energy, many trying to cope with the devastation transformed people into activists working to protect the environment. Media and print coverage of clean-up and rescue efforts of marine life in the Santa Barbara channel galvanized the influential environmental activist group "Get Out Oil!" to form just days after the spill. 

This website aims to demonstrate how visual/print media and galvanized activist groups such as (GOO)sparked an environmental consciousness that led to legislative action, ecological laws, and an explosion of consciousness that shifted an internal remaking of the desired golden standard of living in the 1960s that petroleum culture enabled.