Santa Barbara’s Earth Day Celebration Over the Years
A massive oil spill from a platform off Santa Barbara’s coastline in 1969 gave rise to the first national Earth Day celebration held on April 22, 1970. The community-led event was spearheaded by the Community Environmental Council, a grassroots organization that was just taking root.
Today, the Santa Barbara Earth Day Festival is held at Alameda Park in downtown Santa Barbara, typically the last or second-to-last weekend in April.
Read on to learn how the celebration has evolved over the years, continuing to gather community around the environmental needs of the day.
1970
The story of Earth Day Festivals can’t be told without the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill – when three million gallons of leaked oil devastated wildlife along our coastline. This catastrophic event - then the largest oil spill to date (the third-largest currently) – happened during a time of rising concerns about the environment. Pollution and disappearing wildlife were on the rise, and people were starting to notice.
Senator Gaylord Nelson and Denis Hayes visited the scene of the Santa Barbara oil spill and were struck by the wreckage. They realized – as did many others at the time – that swift environmental action was needed. Soon after, they made a national call for people to put together environment “teach-ins” — similar to the anti-war teach-ins of the day — to elevate the importance of protecting our planet.
Here in Santa Barbara, a group of energized young adults with a bunch of books, a small office on Anapamu Street, and a desire to protect the environment heard Nelson and Hayes’ call. They created a non-profit organization called the Community Environmental Council (CEC), and their first action was to organize a Santa Barbara Earth Day event.
CEC organized environmentally-aligned community members and businesses to set up booths on the street and made Santa Barbara’s first Earth Day Festival. It was “a modest affair,” according to former CEC Executive Director Paul Relis, but it was the start of something big.
Resource: How an Oil Spill Inspired the First Earth Day, Smithsonian Magazine
1970s
1980s
The 1970 Santa Barbara Earth Day Festival planted a seed of local environmental action. Although we have no record of Earth Day Festivals between 1971 and 1989, the community worked hard to help environmental progress blossom throughout California’s Central Coast. CEC would go on to build Santa Barbara’s first community gardens in the 1970s and advocate for recycling and household waste programs in the 1980s.
1990
After having lain dormant for almost twenty years, the Santa Barbara Earth Day celebration was ready to emerge into a new era. Karen Feeney, then the head of CEC’s Pollution Prevention program, attended a national conference in Washington D.C. Dennis Hayes spoke at the event and echoed the national call for Earth Day events that he and Senator Gaylord Nelson had two decades earlier. This time, he challenged the crowd to make “Earth Day every day” to bring environmental issues and action out from the shadows and back into the sunlight.
Karen left the conference inspired and invigorated, returning with a vision to bring the Santa Barbara Earth Day Festival back – bigger, bolder, and refreshed. Karen and fellow colleague Sharyn Main gathered their CEC staff and board members, other local environmental organizations, and environmental activists to join together to form the Santa Barbara Earth Day Committee. Together, the Committee grew the modest street fair of 1970 into a large-scale community event.
Held at Santa Barbara City College, headlining musicians of the day Jackson Browne, Kenny Loggins, Jim Messina, and others graced the mainstage. Environmental leaders and politicians, including Senator Gary K. Hart spoke to the animated crowd about concerns for the planet. Over 120 booths offering information and actions to take to protect our global ecosystem rounded out the experience. Although the event set a festival scene, the music, speeches, and environmental organizations resounded messages of concern about pollution, deforestation, and species decline. It was both a huge celebration and a concerted push for more environmental action that would set the tone for years to come.
