Ecological disaster brought reality check

Crude oil blasted nine stories into the air on Jan. 28, 1969, from a pipeline that blew out in the Santa Barbara channel. The offshore drilling operation spewed three million gallons of thick inky blue-black oil, grounding hundreds of thousands of birds, leaving them to die a slow death. The fish were luckier. They died fast. “The animals all need our help,” Jacob Thompson, a kindergartner says while standing on tiptoe at the Ansonia Nature Center to make eye contact with a turtle in a terrarium in Connecticut after hearing a bit about Earth Day’s ecological origins. “I worry about the animals — all of them — because they can’t survive with all the garbage outside. And I’m thinking the garbage is gonna kill all the animals — especially the metal cans because they have sharp edges that’ll cut them up.” “Or maybe, something worse,” Jacob whispers, his eyes widening behind his gold-wire rimmed glasses. “Maybe all the trash will just bury the animals alive.”

When the Santa Barbara pipeline burst 39 years ago, crude oil flowed for 10 days, eventually covering an 800-mile square area with a dark sheen. The oil even silenced the tide. With the viscous oil melded to it, the waves no longer lapped at the shore. Instead, they landed with a heavy thud.

For the environmental movement, this disaster was the spark that launched Earth Day, which is observed on April 22 with volunteer litter cleanups, symposia, protests and teach-ins at schools about the environment.

Connecticut was suffering its own environmental problems on the Naugatuck River around the time of the Santa Barbara incident. Some days, the water would run red. Other days, it was tinted a bright green or yellow. It depended on the chemicals that the factories that hugged its shores were discharging that day.

Former Environmental Protection Agency Region One Administrator Julie Belaga says the televised environmental disasters in California and on the Cuyahoga River in Ohio where the “water burst into flames from all the [industrial] chemicals” being discharged shocked the public.

Belaga, of Westport, co-chairs the Connecticut League of Conservation, and serves on the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Sustainability, a group advising the MTA on ways to become “greener” by boosting energy efficiency and reducing its carbon emissions.

“We’ve made some enormous progress since (the first) Earth Day and because of the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency,” says Belaga, who co-chairs the Connecticut League of Conservation. And there is certainly more that needs to be done, especially because of global warming and climate change.” “The environment and all its problems are very large, and it’s difficult for people to appreciate all this unless they can see the damage up close for themselves,” Belaga says. “That’s what these environmental disasters in Santa Barbara and Ohio did for people. It brought the damage to their living room. It turned them into witnesses and once you’ve seen this kind of disaster you can’t forget or ignore it.

“Back in the 1970s, we were at a point where our air pollution was actually visible,” Belaga says. “You could wipe your car with your hand and feel the grit from the air pollution on it. And you didn’t always have to be in a city to see this. The winds carried this sooty, gritty pollution for miles.” Connecticut newspapers like the Bridgeport Post and Telegram, the forerunners of the Connecticut Post, published air pollution indexes that listed some of the particles and metals circulating in the atmosphere.

In Connecticut, the first Earth Day featured community litter cleanups, a beachside vigil in Westport, where young and old gathered to hold hands and show solidarity with Mother Earth.

In Hartford, a Trinity College student, Joel Houston, deposited 37 pounds of soil for “safe keeping” at Connecticut Bank & Trust, “to dramatize the value of the earth.” The soil stayed put at the bank for a year in a series of safe deposit boxes. The Santa Barbara drilling explosion represents the first televised environmental disaster in history with millions of people witnessing dying birds, dead fish and aquatic plants washing up daily on the shore.

The idea for Earth Day was the brainchild of Gaylord Nelson, a senator from Wisconsin, who observed the disaster from the plane. He looked out his window and saw the oily sheen of the crude oil cripple and kill what it touched. He vowed to bring national attention to the plight of the environment with teach-ins and demonstrations, using some of the same techniques that worked for the civil rights and anti-war movements.

“It was a gamble,” Nelson told the Milwaukee Journal years later. “But it worked.”

Twenty million people across the country, including thousands of college students, turned out to protest the deterioration of the environment that first Earth Day. They called on the nation’s leaders to take action before it was too late to combat everything from oil spills, air pollution, toxic dumps, pesticide use, habitat and wildlife destruction.

When Earth Day debuted in 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency didn’t exist. Neither did the Clean Water Act. And neither did Connecticut’s Department of Environmental Protection. Corporations expressed no concern about the environment in the design or planning of their office parks.

Go to any zoning commission anywhere in Connecticut or most parts of the country nowadays and even the most environmentally recalcitrant developers are cognizant of the need to include trees, buffers, wetlands and habitat preservation into their projects. It’s the law.

“Ultimately, developers are finding that it’s just more cost effective and makes for a better development” when they take the environment into consideration, Fairfield’s Planning and Zoning Director Joseph Devonshuk Jr. says. “It’s just smarter to develop this way.”

A decade after the nation celebrated its first Earth Day, Fairfield was adopting new zoning regulations for mixed-use residential, retail and office complexes that went so far as to include a ratio for shade trees to parking spaces.

“It wasn’t just for aesthetics, although I do think it contributed to better-looking projects,” Devonshuk says, “it also was intended as a way of keeping cars cool” in the peak sun hours, which contributes obviously to using less air conditioning and lowering carbon emissions.

As Earth Day turns 38 — still young, but obviously middle aged, and while aspects of the environment have improved — thanks to recycling programs and reductions in particles released by power plants, industry and vehicles, environmentalists agree that more work needs to be done. This includes reducing greenhouse gas emissions, finding new alternative fuel sources that reduce our dependency on oil, especially foreign oil.

Concern in the 1980s centered on the final destination for the nation’s trash. Landfills were running out of space. Recycling became the law midway through the decade and 867,333 tons of newspapers, bottles and cans were being removed from Connecticut’s waste stream by 2006 as recyclables, according to the Northeast Recycling Council, which tracks recycling.

And still more of what Connecticut residents chuck out has been pulled out of the waste stream. In 1999, the Connecticut Resource Recovery Authority began recycling electronics, accepting everything from broken televisions, computers, even discarded cell phones. In its first year alone, 2.6 million pounds of electronics were recycled.

“The issue central today are reducing sources of pollution in the air, in the water and on land because of development,” Dennis Schain, spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, says. “The bottom line is the lifestyle choices we make — about where we live, where we’ll work and how we get there have a direct bearing on our environment. It’s all interconnected.”

At the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which oversees Metro-North Commuter Railroad, efforts are under way to “green” the railroad. A 20-point list of recommendations unveiled by its Blue Ribbon Commission calls for MTA and Metro-North to derive seven percent of their energy needs by 2015 from solar, wind and other renewable sources. The proposal includes placing some solar panels at Metro-North stations in Connecticut, using wind turbines to fuel buses, and tidal energy too.

Donna Lindgren, director of the Ansonia Nature Center, believes people are more sophisticated — at times — in their environmental awareness.

In the 1970s, “there was no such issue as ‘global warming. That term wasn’t on the horizon. Now, people are aware of it,” she says.

Credit for this awareness, Lindgren says, is due to documentaries such as Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” media attention and television programs geared to the nonscientist.

Whether one believes in global warming or not, the term has seeped into mainstream conversation.

“It seems as though more people have an awareness about environmental problems and want to see more done to address them,” Lindgren says. The motivation however, does not always spring from direct concern for the environment. Rather it comes, Lindgren says, from their pocketbook. The biggest environmental problem that needs addressing, she says, “is where we get our food, where its grown and how far we have to go to get it — the farther it is, the more emissions we are putting into the atmosphere.”

For that reason, Lindgren is a big supporter of home-grown foods. From a garden in her backyard, she grows “heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, basil like there’s no tomorrow, squash and broccoli.”

There’s also been a recent push to eliminate the use of plastic bags.

In fact, Stephanie Cash, a mother who works for Shop Rite as a cashier, applauds a program that her supermarket chain launched recently to reduce plastic grocery bags in the waste stream.

“We give customers a three cent discount for every plastic bag they bring back and reuse instead of having us give them new ones,” Cash says. “I see a lot of our customers using their plastic bags over and over again. None of them mind. They think and we know that they are doing something good for the environment.”