This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

There are a lot of beautiful places in California, downtown Oakland, for example.

But Santa Barbara is like stupid beautiful. Yeah, it's like a comically picturesque California scene here.

A few months back we sent producer Emmett Fitzgerald down to Santa Barbara on a really

taxing reporting assignment. We've got all these beautiful sailboats, you've got pelicans,

just saw two dolphins, the sun's beginning to set. It's a rough life. Oh, here comes a wave.

That was close. Emmett really put himself in harm's way for this story.

But if you look out at the ocean from this scenic spot, you'll see something else. Something

a little less conventionally attractive. Right along the horizon line, you've got one, two,

three, four, five, six, seven, eight big offshore oil platforms. They look like buildings out there

floating in the water or giant battleships or something. Not the prettiest. You can tell why

people here don't love them. Those oil platforms off Santa Barbara are at the center of a

complicated debate going on right now within the environmental community about the relationship

between nature and human infrastructure. Although they have been a source of controversy since they

first went in the water back in the 1950s and 60s. I came to Santa Barbara in 1966. This is Rodric

Nash, an environmental historian who moved to Santa Barbara from New Hampshire to take a job in

the history department at UCSB. And it didn't take him long to fall in love with his new home.

I began to realize what people had told me. They said Santa Barbara is like the American Riviera.

It's kind of a paradise. It's a land of endless summer. But at the time he says there was a sense

that this coastal paradise and its lucrative tourist economy was under threat from these massive

oil rigs going up all throughout the Santa Barbara channel. There were cries from the people of

Santa Barbara saying, not so fast, let's think about the consequences of this. We look out at the

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