Fifty years ago this January, there was a blowout on a Union Oil rig in the Santa Barbara channel. For nearly two weeks the oil kept coming. It soon blighted, clogged, choked and tarred the Central California coast as far south as Ventura and as far north as the Channel Islands. At the time, it was the United States’ worst oil spill in history and a seminal moment in this country’s environmental movement. In the aftermath, activists marched down Wall Street to create the first Earth Day, and a more bi-partisan Washington created the Environmental Protection Agency and passed a succession of the world’s strongest environmental laws.

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