On Friday night, Santa Barbara’s environmental community packed into a place aptly named the Hub — not to be persuaded, but to align, and, by design, to do so “upliftingly.”
The People’s Hearing on a recently released federal offshore drilling project drew a packed room of students, elders, tribal leaders, elected officials, business representatives, and a celebrity advocate, united less by novelty than by memory. Many speakers acknowledged it outright: this was preaching to the choir.
But as the night made clear, choirs matter — especially when the stakes are generational, the threat is federal, and, in Santa Barbara’s case, people understand and have witnessed the profound dangers of an oil accident…