Introduction

There’s a strange phenomenon that biologists refer to as the boiled frog syndrome. Put a frog in a pot of water and increase the temperature of the water gradually from 20c to 30c to 40c to 90c and the frog just sits there. But suddenly, at 100c something happens: The water boils and the frog dics like the summering frog, we face a future without precedent, and our senses are not around to warnings of imminent danger. The threats we face as the crisis builds global warming, acid rain, the ozone hole and increasing ultraviolet radiation, chemical toxins such as pesticides, dioxins, and polychlorinated biphenyls in our food and water are undetected by the sensory system we have evolved Gordon Suzuki 1990.

Underneath the Guadalupe Dunes a windswept piece of wilderness 170 miles north of Los Angeles and 250 miles south of San Francisco sits the largest petroleum spill in US history. The spill emerged as a local issue in February 1990. though not acknowledged, it was not unknown to oil workers at the field where it originated, to regulators that often visited the dunes, or to locals who frequented the beach. Until the mid 1980, neither the only sheen that often appeared on the beach, on the ocean, and the nearby Santa Maria River nor the strong petroleum odors that regularly emanated from the Unocal Corporation’s oil-field operations raised much concern. Recognition, as in the frog parable, was slow to manifest. The result of leaks and spills that accumulated slowly and chronically over 38 years, the Guadalupe Dunes spill become troubling when local residents, longer viewed the periods sights and small of petroleum as normal.

The specific intent of these books is to relate bow the change in perception took place, why it took nearly 40 years for the spill to become an agenda item and why the response was controversial. The premise of the book is that social and institutional preoccupation with the acute and the traumatic has left us passive and unresponsive to festering problems. I begin with a general description of what locals have dubbed the silent spill.

I first heard of the Guadalupe spill on local television news in August 1995. The scene included a sandy beach, enormous earth-moving machinery, a hard-hatted Unocal official, and a reporter, microphone in hand, asking the official how things were proceeding. The interplay of the news coverage and Unocal’s official response that caught my attention more than anything else. The representative asserted that Unocal had extracted 500.000 gallons of petroleum from a large excavated pit on the beach just in view of the camera.