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.

You got all these beautiful sailboats, you've got pelicans, just like two dolphins,

sun's beginning to set.

It's a rough life.

Uh-oh, here comes a wave.

That was close.

And it 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 Roderick 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.

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