On-Shore Youth Voters On Off-Shore Drilling

While running for president in 1976, the then Governor of California Jerry Brown, said that the country was entering an "era of limits." The idea was radical. Calling on the country to patrol itself when it came to environmental issues (and other issues as well) seemed in conflict with American ideals of prosperity and abundance, and led Brown to suffer a serious fall from power. Never to be called "Mr. President," Brown instead was called "Governor Moonbeam."

Today, the idea does not feel so extreme. With gas prices rising to a national average of $4.11, oil prices at about $120, and the reality of global warming, the nation once again has to reconsider being in an "era of limits."

Both John McCain and Barack Obama agree there need to be limits on our environmental impact. McCain wants to reduce carbon emissions 60 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and Obama wants to reduce our current emissions by 80 percent.

Still, even with this conventional wisdom of conservation, the question of offshore drilling will not go away. In June, McCain proposed lifting a ban on offshore drilling to alleviate our dependence on foreign oil. Even Obama, who had seemed a staunch opponent to this idea, said last week that he would consider drilling off the coast if it were part of a larger plan to lower energy costs.

Despite the fact that offshore drilling will not lower energy prices any time soon, despite the fact that the Arctic ice caps are melting away before our very eyes, and despite the fact that lifting of the ban on drilling could destroy sacrosanct waters off the coast of California, 51 percent of Californians back the plan.

Well, I was willing to guess that the 51 percent of Californians willing to allow drilling off the coast are not living in a beautiful environmental sanctuary like Big Sur. Anyone living in this kind of nature, the kind of nature that makes you want to live deep and suck the marrow out of life, would never want to pillage the sacred waters around them.

As I drove up Highway One, I decided to investigate this hypothesis, and began by speaking with a couple of park aids working at the Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park -- a place suffering from a different kind of destruction: forest fire. Seeing the wilderness destroyed has led a lot of people to think long and hard about environmental conservation, including the prospect of offshore drilling.

Andrew Malloy, a 23 year-old park aid and environmental studies major at California State University at Monterey Bay, makes up a tiny fraction (.000000056) of the 49 percent of Californians who oppose offshore drilling.

"Not only will this drilling not fix any of our problems, but there are plenty of environmental repercussions," Malloy said standing in the entrance kiosk to the park. "Oil spills could wipe out entire habitats, invasive species will be brought into areas by the ships. You can't drill without ruining whole areas of nature."

Working in a preserved area, Malloy has some fear that offshore drilling could have a deeper impact beyond immediate environmental concerns.

"I could see it happen that once you run out of oil, or you run out of the next resource, a president who is willing to drill offshore might be willing to come here," he said. "He could come here because the trees will always be here, and they will always be usable, so it's a possibility that they could move on to logging after the drilling."

Of course, the idea of logging at Big Sur is not outlandish, as that very practice continued to destroy the majestic Redwoods of this area until the early 20th century. Likewise, the thought of putting our country onto a slippery slope, a slope that could lead to the destruction of much of our natural beauty, was an idea that struck at least one other park aid, John Dillon, 20.

"I think about all the places I've been that probably looked just like this," said Dillion, who grew up in Monterey and goes to school in San Francisco. "At some point, people just stop caring about protecting natural beauty, and it's hard to know exactly when that point will come. I often think about how beautiful my neighborhoods must have been before they were built upon. Big Sur is beautiful, but it could always just become another city."

My next stop was Treebones Resort.

If you are driving along the coast through Big Sur and don't see Treebones Resort, that's because you are not supposed to. In line with California Coastal Commission law, and the general mission statement of the resort to have as little a physical impact as possible, the resort blends into the hillside so that it cannot be seen from the road.

Even on the resort grounds the structures have a way of fading into their surroundings. Guests stay in glorified tents, called Yurtz, which were designed by architecture students from nearby San Luis Obispo to resemble the tree stumps that remain from when the property was a wood mill (the resort gets its name from the skeletal driftwood that washed ashore when the mill was operational).

The resort epitomizes Big Sur. Like the area itself, Treebones somehow manages to maintain its beauty, its tranquility, and even its sense of isolation despite the influx of thousands of tourists. It's as if they disappear into the hillside.

Ben Geare, 24, one of the 12 workers at the resort has been camping here for years. The beauty and environment of Big Sur has been alluring enough to keep him returning to work at Treebones for the past 5 years. Having just graduated from the University of Berkeley with a degree in philosophy, Geare is now living in a trailer on the Treebones property, and will be doing so for the next six months.

Living in Big Sur, seeing what parts of this country could look like if only we focused on preservation and conservation, Geare said he wished he was hearing a lot more from politicians about environmental issues. He said he wants to see the country really rethink the way it deals with nature.

"Our economic policy has us believing that the environment is only valuable in terms of producing things for us to cut out of the ground," he said. "I don't want this to go away, this has value even if we don't chop down all the trees or cut off the tops of mountains for minerals. This has value just being here. I went walking yesterday and I saw dolphins, I saw seals, and all different types of birds. Seeing all this stuff gives you an awareness of this issue beyond just the talking points and fodder for politicians."

Geare said that one of the only things he has heard politicians really address when it comes to the environment is the debate over offshore drilling; a practice that he is wholly against.

"Offshore drilling shows the power of the oil lobbyists on our government," he said. "It certainly is not a solution. It's the government seizing on a crisis period to push an idea or a law through. Now that people are feeling the pinch of the price of gasoline they are a little more gullible to the promises of politicians to ease their pain. Think of it like a basic addiction. When you are addicted to something the solution is not to get more of it, it's to stop, to wean yourself off of it. You need to cut off the supply in order to become healthier. It's opportunism on the part of corporations, and that's all it is."

As I continued north, this same sentiment was repeated to me numerous times. Perhaps the most cogent summing up of the problem came from Steve Yahn, 29, who worked at the Fernwood Resort, a campground ensconced by 700-year-old Redwoods.

"We as a society are always looking for a quick fix, instead of getting to the root of the problem," Yahn said. "Instead of drilling, for instance, let's gauge the resources that we are using and come up with different technologies. We can do this if we struggle a little and spend a little, but we don't because if there's a different place we can drill or tap that's the easy way out. It's profit over responsibility. It's like this, my father works at a factory, and every day during his break he goes for a run. What do all of his coworkers do? They go to Burger King and smoke cigarettes. It's the ease versus really being willing to challenge yourself. It's the conflict that our country is going through everywhere, from people doing drugs in these woods instead of hiking them, to figuring out a responsible way to deal with the oil crisis."

Comments

[saltpeter]

"Drilling" would be an example of the Shock Doctrine kind of capitalism discussed by Naomi Klein in her book of the same name. It's when we use a seemingly crisis situation to push forward policies that in normal times would never have seen the light of day. And when I say "normal times" that very easily could mean the first 6 years of the Bush administration where the Republican majority leadership chose to keep the drilling ban in place. See, that's when we were supposed to get a new supply from Iraq but it didn't quite happen that way. And now that the call from more and more Americans is for the federal government to manage some sort of transition from fuel to renewable resources, BIG OIL is getting antsy. The signs were there that the desperation was seeping in. Heck, even our misadventures in Iraq is a massive sign of that desperation of BIG OIL to stop at nothing to maintain their undeserved and highly subsidiized control over our energy and foreign policy.

Still "drilling" is not unlike "surge" and "WMDs", there half-baked buzzwords thrown out to the American people to keep them satiated enough so that they wrongly believe that our government is actually doing something substantial even though there's absolutely NOTHING progressive or earth-shattering about these "solutions". The simply offput a growing problem.