History of the ES Program at UCSB

Over 35 years ago Santa Barbara experienced the worst oil spill in U.S. history up to that time. The University of California at Santa Barbara was within sight and smell of the littered channel and its beaches. The university was forced into the realization that it overlooked a very important aspect of education: teaching students how to care for and respect our fragile world and how to develop plans and policies to protect it. On February 18, 1969 a group of twenty-one faculty members, calling themselves The Friends of the Human Habitat, met to discuss the possibility of promoting some form of environmental education at UCSB. The members of this ad-hoc committee were geologists, geographers, engineers, biologists, an economist, and an historian.

By the Fall of 1970, an Environmental Studies Program was established at UCSB, one of the first of a new type of education. The ES program was set up as a multidisciplinary program employing the strengths of many disciplines and providing a generalist approach to complex environmental issues. Faculty were drawn from several departments in order to maintain a balance within the university framework. Over the years, the ES Program has adapted to meet the challenges of an ever changing world, both educationally and environmentally, while holding true to its goal of a generalist approach to education.

The first graduating class in 1972 had only 12 students. In 1980 the total number of graduates rose to 871. Today the Environmental Studies Program has approximately 300 majors and 4,000 alumni actively working to preserve and protect our environment.

The following are some articles published regarding the SB Oil Spill and the creation of the Environmental Studies Program at UC Santa Barbara.

1) View: Making an Impact: A look at Santa Barbara's active role in the environmental movement and the influence of the Environmental Studies Department on its 30th anniversary, by Eric Simmons, Daily Nexus (May 19, 2000)

2) View: Education of a Generalist: The UC Santa Barbara Experience, by A.H. Schuyler, Jr. in 1978

3) View: The Big Spill, By Nick Welsh - The Santa Barbara Independent (January 26, 1989 )

4) View: The Oil Spill Heard 'Round the Country, By Miles Corwin - Los Angeles Times (January 28, 1989)

Making an Impact: A look at Santa Barbara’s active role in the environmental movement and the influence of the Environmental Studies Department on its 30th anniversary.
By Eric Simmons, Staff Writer, UCSB's Daily Nexus, Friday May 19, 2000.

On Jan. 28, 1969, history Associate Professor Rod Nash stood at the beach with his children and watched a black tide creep in, witnessing one of the worst environmental disasters of the century.

Wave after wave of oil crashed on the Santa Barbara coast, staining sand and water, and perfuming the air with the smell of tar. Watching over 3.5 million gallons of crude oil spilling out of Union Oil Platform A and into the channel, Nash and 20 other faculty members committed themselves to preventing such an environmental disaster from occurring again.

Their creation- an interdisciplinary program of environmental education called environmental studies- celebrates its 30th anniversary today and Saturday.

“The first waves broke, and the beaches were black and all the birds were covered,” Nash said. “So, we wandered down there, and we got to thinking, what is it about my profession that I can do to make things better here- to prevent catastrophes like that and to solve environmental problems?”

The faculty group called itself Friends of the Human Habitat, and included professors and researchers from different fields and disciplines such as geology, biology, chemistry, and history. Their efforts culminated in the creation of an Environmental Studies Program starting in fall of 1970, with Nash as chair.

Nash started by running the Environmental Studies Program “out of his daypack,” but the demand quickly proved to be overwhelming. He took his case to Chancellor Vernon Cheadle to request money and office space for the burgeoning program, but was met with skepticism. However, Nash came prepared with a trump card- a letter to the parents of the environmental studies majors, explaining to them that the university could no longer afford a program in “this vital field,” and that their children would not be able to take work in the field. Cheadle asked for time to think.

Several days later, Cheadle granted the Environmental Studies program office support and space. Nash switched from full-time history professor to environmental studies and history, and “off we went,” he said. The program blossomed in the 1970s. Almost 160 students joined the major in the first year and over 1.000 students enrolled in the ES courses.

“We had huge enrollments right from the beginning, because there was a lot of pent-up demand for that kind of thing,” Nash said. “People for the first time were concerned about human impact on the earth, about the impact of population. There was a clientele out there ready for what we put forward.”

Thirty years later, over 3,500 students have graduated from the Environmental Studies program and close to 200 will graduate this year. In 1995, Science Watch magazine ranked UCSB the #1 college in the country for the study of the environment/ecology.

“I think a lot of us on that faculty had the feeling of trying to be relevant,” Nash said. “We have a big university here and we have a lot of intellectual firepower, but are we really talking about the problems society is concerned about? The ‘60s was a time of great unrest in this country…people looked to the universities to stand a little taller on these kinds of issues.”

The interdisciplinary approach to environmental studies was unique, and did not always meet with approval. In 1985, Gregory Holmes wrote a senior thesis examining the history of the program, in which he wrote of the objections of UCSB faculty- particularly from members of the Biological Sciences Dept. Holmes reported a personal communication between biology Professor Jim Case and Chancellor Cheadle, in which Case extolled the virtues of the more science-driven system at Princeton University.

“The biologists there seem to feel that there is no intellectual content in environmental programs- that the fact and theories are well in hand and that all that remains is in the realm of the practical,” Case wrote. Holmes added, “Case and the organizers of the Princeton program echoed the sentiments of many at the university, namely that a program such as that at UCSB was not academically rigorous enough to warrant its existence and that the environment was simply a fad that should not have enough influence to restructure the university.”

However, its creators and proponents argued that the intent of the ES program was to incorporate different disciplines, not attack other fields. “The program was founded 30 years ago on providing a balanced education on environmental issues,” ES Chair Jo-Ann Shelton said. “My goal is to make sure we maintain that balance, so we have students who understand that environmental issues are very complicated and require examination from many points of view. We can use scientific data, but we have to understand that people make decisions based on their values.”

Nash chaired the program until 1975, and taught ES 11 until his retirement in 1994. He was succeeded as chair by Barry Schuyler, who reworked the lower division requirements, increased the unit requirements for the major and started an internship program. Schuyler also reversed the tack of the program, focusing more on science and less on humanities. The trend was continued into the 1980s, with biologist Daniel Botkin as chair.

After the rapid expansion in the 1970s, the 1980s saw a precipitous drop in the number of majors in the program, and witnessed an all-time low of 159 in 1987. Despite increased popularity in the 1990s- the number of majors peaked at 637 in 1993- the program lost support among faculty and was nearly shut down.

On April 9, 1993, a Daily Nexus headline read “Environmental Studies Program on the Ropes,” and a series of articles throughout April revealed a struggle by Nash, who was once again serving as chair, along with several concerned ES majors, to keep the program running. Nash said then that he was tired of fighting the university for funding, and that the program did not have enough money to operate effectively.

“The student demand was always there, but there was a certain loss of faculty support. I think, also, we began to see in the ‘90s and in the ‘80s a certain downturn in some of the idealism in America that we had seen in the ‘60s,” Nash said. “This was the era of Ronald Reagan, of course, this was the era where people started to make a lot of money- ‘as long as I had a lot of money, I didn't’t need to worry about the earth.’”

The program does not currently receive the funding acquired by full departments. The program status allows ES to draw from different disciplines, but professors stay in their own areas of research. “I think what’s attractive about our program is the balance among the disciplines and the balance between academic information and practical information,” Shelton said. “I think we all face the same issues- how do you provide students with a really rigorous program where they acquire a depth of skills and balance that out with the breadth that is also important? I think we’re doing a really good job.”

Over 120 students are placed in academic internships each year through the ES program, continuing Nash’s emphasis on practicality. “We’re training the next generation of leaders, and it is crucial that students have the opportunity to learn about the environment and humans’ role in protecting it, not only for our own well-being, but for every animal on the planet,” junior ES major Hannah Eckberg said. Eckberg is also a member of Get Oil Out! – a Santa Barbara organization created immediately after the oil spill to fight the continued oil drilling in the channel.

“I’m proud to be a UCSB student because of our ES program, not only because it is one of the first but because it is one of the best in the country,” she added.

The program will celebrate with a reception Friday at 4p.m. at the UCSB faculty club. Saturday, there will be guest speakers, including a keynote address from UCSB alumna Deb Callahan, who is the current president of the League of Conservation Voters. The events will continue throughout the day, ending in a closing reception at the UCSB greenhouse from 3:30-6 p.m. For more information, contact the Environmental Studies Dept. at 893-2968.

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The following is an excerpt from an article published in Environmental Education in Action in 1978. Written by a former UCSB Environmental Studies Program chair, this article takes a look back at why and how the E.S. Program at UCSB came to be:

The Education of a Generalist: The University California - Santa Barbara Experience
by A.H. Schuyler, Jr. in 1978

Some date the dawn of modern environmentalism from the odious Santa Barbara oil spill in January 1969. It was certainly a striking "media event." But some professors and students didn't have to watch the tube to get the message. The University of California, Santa Barbara was within sight and smell of the littered channel and its beaches. Reaction was rapid. Within weeks 21 broadly representative faculty formed an ad hoc committee to attack the twin problems of disciplinary "reductionism" and the "mind pollution" that lie at the root of environmental problems. By the fall of 1970 the Environmental Studies Program was in being at UCSB - one of the first of the new subspecies.

Eight years later the UCSB program remains remarkably true to its charter: a liberal arts process for generalists, not disciplinary training, administered as a multidisciplinary program, not as a department, striving for a "proper tension" between faculty borrowed from the sciences and the humanities. Environmental Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara came into being as the result of many influences: the call for relevance by students, the obvious pressures of the environmental crisis of the late sixties, and the demand from the citizenry that the university deal with some of the problems of society. In retrospect however, it became clear that a most powerful influence, although by no means the most obvious, was the deep seated dissatisfaction with the divisive nature of the university. Many thoughtful faculty were disturbed over the ever-increasing compartmentalization of intellectual activity at UCSB and the tendency of departments to withdraw into themselves, making little effort to communicate with other disciplines. Environmental Studies at Santa Barbara began as an attempt to create a general liberal arts education which, through pure chance of time and location, used the environment as a focus.

John Crowell, a geologist, and one of the first cochairmen of the Environmental Studies Program, preserved the carious committee minutes and reports that eventually brought the program into being. These records show that it all started on February 18, 1969 when a group of twenty-one faculty calling themselves Friends of the Human Habitat met to discuss the possibility of promoting some form of environmental education at UCSB. They were old pros and young turks united by concern for the environment and a desire to improve university education. Many were geologists, but there were also geographers, engineers, biologists, an economist and a historian. Two of the group, Garrett Hardin & Preston Cloud, were already nationally known for their writing on the environment.

They met in tense and disturbed times. Platform A had blown less than a month before and spilled crude oil could be seen on the beaches and smelled in the campus air. Comments like this by a senior appeared often in the campus newspaper: "It gets pretty depressing to watch what is going on in the world and to realize that your education is not equipping you to do anything about it." Citizens, oil companies and officials were all calling on faculty, especially biologists, for opinions on what to do about the spill and its effects. The "Friends" considered these demands and ideas and questions and by the end of the academic year faced several options. Within time, The Friends of the Human Habitat had evolved into a chancellor's ad hoc committee to plan the formation of Environmental Studies. Tribute must be paid to this committee; it resisted the temptation to throw quickly together a program that would appeal to the hysteria of the times, and when the Environmental Program started in the Fall of 1970 its administration was sound and philosophy clear.

What follows are the ground rules of Environmental Studies at UCSB. Viewed from the vantage point of eight years of operation they show great foresight-and perhaps a dash of luck:

Environmental Studies is a education for the generalist. It educates its majors to have a holistic view of the environment and to appreciate the contributions that all disciplines and professions can make to the identification and solution of environmental problems.

It is not in competition with the established disciplines. Its graduates must be able to communicate with the specialist and to know when to call on them but never to consider themselves, in a given area, equal in knowledge to the specialist. This point was emphasized over and over again to reassure the traditional disciplines that we were not a threat, we were not in competition. As Roderick Nash put it, "We are a process that brings all disciplines to bear on environmental problems."

The program encourages its students to belong to environmental groups, to campaign in local politics and to take stands on environmental issues. However, as a unit of the University of California, it has been scrupulous about not taking stands or lending support to any advocate groups. In the early years of the program, many students were strongly displeased with detached and scholarly attitude but anything else would have killed the program quickly.

We tried to strike a good balance between breadth and depth. The Environmental Studies major takes three preparatory courses that cover many disciplines-biology, chemistry, geology, meteorology, geography, hydrology, economics, history, sociology, political science. In the last few years an increasing number of students are extending the concentration to a second major; we expect almost 30 percent of our majors to be taking a double major in the eighth year of the
program.

We term ourselves interdisciplinary, but in actuality we are multidisciplinary. Emmelin (1977) defines interdisciplinary as the interaction of two or more disciplines ranging from simple communication to complete mutual interaction over a wide field. Multidisciplinary is simply the juxtaposition of various disciplines with no apparent connection between them. After eight years we are tired of belaboring this point and now, with some discussion in the senior seminar, leave it to the student to pull it all together and to discern how disciplines can or should communicate.

The basic philosophy of Environmental Studies at Santa Barbara is multidisciplinary education for the generalist. It is synthetic, not reductionist education. It implements what Bode, et al. (1949) refer to as "The education of a scientific generalist." The product would be a person of exceptional breadth of appreciation in the sciences; we extend their appreciation to the humanities and social sciences as well.

Through planning, perhaps luck, our curriculum has arrived at a proper balance of depth and breadth. Students appreciate the wide range of subjects that can apply to the major and also the coherence that comes by trying them into an environmental framework. Many have said that for the first time they saw "purpose to diversity". We believe we have found that proper "tension" between science and the humanities. Scientifically-inclined students will comment that they now realize why economics and history are important. Similarly, many who have been turned off by science are now attracted to it by their interest in the environment - an interest that may initially have been aroused by studies in ethics or sociology.

When Environmental Studies was being founded, the National Environmental Policy Act had just been passed, the California Environmental Quality Act had not yet appeared. No one appreciated what the need would be for men and women trained to do the environmental impact statements called for by NEPA and CEOA. Environmental Studies addressed this need and provided specific courses to educate and produce graduates who could meet this need.

In closing, we are extremely proud of two accomplishments. Our 500 (total in 1977) graduates who will, in various degrees and ways, affect the environment positively as citizens, educators, politicians, parents, businessmen and officials, is one. The other is the quiet conviction that we helped pioneer an important and exciting academic undertaking, the return to an education that is synthetic in nature and that promotes the generalist view.

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Headline: The Big Spill
January 26, 1989 The Santa Barbara Independent
By Nick Welsh

Workers on Union Oil's Platform A were pulling the drilling tube out of well A-32 at 10:45 on Tuesday morning, January 28, 1969. The tube was stuck, but they kept pulling anyway, for another 450 feet. In the process, they dislodged critical drilling mud, and all hell broke loose. Gas and mud from 3,000 feet beneath the ocean's surface shot into the air, splattering the panicked workers on the platform with grease and grime. They managed to plug the well, but nothing could control the oil and gas. Eight hundred feet away from the platform, the sea boiled furiously.

The oil had burst through its fragile geological formation, ripping five long gashes through the top of the ocean floor. At least 77,000 barrels escaped in the first 100 days of the spill. The Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 remains a morality tale all the more tragic because it could have been avoided. In short, the federal agency regulating offshore oil production-the United States Geological Survey-granted Union Oil, an oil company with a reputation for cutting corners, permission to waive federal safety regulations when drilling in an oil formation that was known to be extremely volatile and fragile.

Santa Barbara's catastrophe sparked a local environmental movement that fused the youthful and militant energies of student activists with the money, connections, and indignation of well-established blue-bloods. Together these forces were directly responsible for founding the Community Environmental Council, a major think-tank; starting numerous grass-roots organizations like GOO, the January 28th Committee, and later the Environmental Defense Center; and opening UCSB's Environmental Studies Program, the first of its kind in the nation.

These forces played a key role in the victory of the statewide initiative that created the California Coastal Commission and contributed to the State Land's Commission decision to ban oil drilling in state waters for 16 years. Nationally, they aided President Richard Nixon in his push to reduce special tax breaks enjoyed by the oil industry and, most important, the forces played a major role in Nixon's decision to sign the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) on January 1, 1970. The law stipulates that the environmental consequences of federal projects be considered before the appropriate federal permits are issued, requires that public hearings be held, and that the public be given access information previously viewed as the property of the developer. The state of California passed a similar law, known as the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA)....

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Headline: The Oil Spill Hear 'Round the Country!
January 28, 1989 Los Angeles Times
By Miles Corwin

SANTA BARBARA - From a large crack on the bottom of the Santa Barbara Channel, about 5 miles off the coastline, a few barrels of oil bubble to the surface each day. The slick and the nearby Unocal Corp. drilling platform Alpha are the last visible vestiges of the worst oil spill in the nation's history.

Twenty years ago today, on Jan. 28, 1969, a "blowout" erupted below the platform and, before it was plugged, more than 3 million gallons of crude oil spewed from drilling-induced cracks in the channel floor. For weeks national attention was focused on the spill's disturbing, dramatic images. Oil-soaked birds, unable to fly, slowly dying on the sand. Waves so thick with crude oil that they broke on shore with an eerie silence. Thirty miles of sandy beaches coated with thick sludge. Hundreds of miles of ocean covered with an oily black sheen. But the spills impact went far beyond the fouled beaches. The disaster is considered to be a major factor in the birth of the modern-day environmental movement.

It was the Spark, "The blowout was the spark that brought the environmental issue to the nation's attention," said Arent Schuyler, lecturer emeritus in environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. "People could see very vividly that their communities could bear the brunt of industrial accidents. They began forming environmental groups to protect their communities and started fighting for legislation to protect the environment."

During the next few years there was more environmental legislation than at any time in the nation's history. In 1969, Congress passed the National Environmental Policy Act which requires environmental impact studies before any federal action can be taken. California adopted similar legislation in 1970. A wave of national environmental legislation followed, including clean air and water acts, and laws that protected sensitive coastal areas and endangered species. The spill caused many people to doubt the safety claims of the oil industry and the government, said Michael Paparian, state director of the Sierra Club. Environmental activism gained widespread support he said and in the two years after the oil spill, Sierra club membership doubled......

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