My residence is located near County Supervisor Peter Adam’s residence in Orcutt. We live close enough to hear the same coyotes howling at night. I also share some background with Mr. Adam. Yet, our views are worlds apart.
My first job was stacking hay in a barn down the road from where I lived when I was 13. My brothers and I grew up on a 10-acre property that had formerly been a farm started 150 years before my family bought it. It was wild when we moved onto it, with swamp and a wooded hillside full of cedar, maple, and ash trees.
I remember surprising a white-tailed buck in our woods as a boy, and walking up within a few feet of a great blue heron, and hearing bullfrogs during summer dusks. We also shared our property with muskrats, raccoons, milk snakes, dragonflies, salamanders, and mallard ducks. We drew our water from our own well.
All this is why my parents bought and loved the land I grew up on.
My parents are buried on a hill also down the road from my former home. The cemetery dates back to the 1700s. You can see our old house and all 10 acres from their gravesite.
With the help of my parents, I learned something important by exploring those 10 acres: that the land I grew up on never really belonged to my family. Nor does it really belong to the family that holds its deed today. I discovered instead, what it means for people to belong to the land. The proverb—that we borrow the land from our grandchildren—is profoundly real for me.
If there’s another person in this county who should understand what I am talking about, it’s Peter Adam. His family is surely indebted to land, land that it has obtained so much from, for so long.
But during the Oct. 11 Santa Barbara County Supervisors meeting, Mr. Adam championed an effort to overturn the decision by our county Planning Commission to deny Pacific Coast Energy permission to expand its oil drilling on Orcutt Hill. Pacific Coast Energy seeks to double the number of its oil wells on Orcutt Hill. Mr. Adam’s motion to approve Pacific Coast Energy’s appeal of the Planning Commission ruling was voted down. The appeal will be revisited by county supervisors at their meeting on Nov. 1.
Mr. Adam should understand that this expansion of oil drilling will harm the Orcutt Hill land. This is not the right thing to do, especially now with the world awash with oil.
Volatile oil pricing undermines the reliability of tax gains for Santa Barbara County from this expansion of oil drilling. The wildly fluctuating market value of oil also renders the long-term net return on Pacific Coast Energy’s investment in new oil wells on Orcutt Hill as suspect.
Benefits in jobs and taxes from the expansion of oil drilling are for our generation to reap. But the costs of remedying ongoing oil seepage and the eventual need to close down and contain the oil wells will burden generations that follow.
Pacific Coast Energy is an important and generous employer in our region. Oil was the reason Orcutt was founded. Oil was essential in the industrialization of our society and powered its technological progress. But while oil served us well in the 19th and 20th centuries, it threatens our well-being and prosperity in the 21st.
Supervisor Adam and Pacific Coast Energy should adopt a longer and more sustainable view on economic growth and development.
Scott Fina is a Santa Maria resident. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Temple University in Philadelphia, where he taught courses in public policy analysis and state and local government. Send comments to the editor at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Oct 27 – Nov 3, 2016.