Former congressmember, presidential candidate, and environmental leader Pete McCloskey passed away in early May at age 96 at his home in Northern California. I had the good fortune to have known and loved him as a mentor and a friend for over 60 years.
While Pete never lived here, he played a vital role in Santa Barbara becoming widely and rightfully known as “the birthplace of the environmental movement” in the aftermath of the nightmarish blowout and oil spill off our coast that began on January 28, 1969. Then serving his first term in Congress from his home district on the San Francisco Peninsula, Pete immediately recognized that the catastrophe presented an opportunity to set the whole country on a new path of environmental awareness and protection.
Pete got busy helping to write and enact new federal environmental protection laws. He also became co-chair of the group working to plan and support nationwide annual Earth Day observances. The effort was inspired by what had happened in Santa Barbara, and Pete rightly figured that the Santa Barbara community’s response to it would serve as an excellent example of what other communities might do in their own particular circumstances.
Pete worked hand-in-glove (more like lots of phone calls) with me and others in the Santa Barbara community to plan and carry out an event on the first anniversary of the blowout and spill that would carry a message of determination and hope to the whole country. The resulting daylong conference, at which nationally prominent leaders discussed and endorsed the newly released “Santa Barbara Declaration of Environmental Rights,” did just that.
Pete was among several prominent speakers at the conference, and he brought with him Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes who received an encouraging foretaste of what Earth Day might become.
Pete helped mightily to secure the attendance of several of the other participants whose presence helped make the conference program a success. Two in particular stood out.
Stewart Udall, former Secretary of the Interior who had authorized the ill-fated drilling to commence over spirited local opposition, came to deliver a mea culpa and to explain that the new National Environmental Policy Act co-authored by Pete would prevent such hasty actions in the future.
Paul Ehrlich, Stanford professor whose then-recent book The Population Bomb was atop the best-seller lists, was like a rock star whose presence was bound to attract interest, and Pete, who was in the process of bringing him into the Earth Day planning process, deftly reeled him in.
Reports out of Santa Barbara in the media told the story of a community working optimistically and effectively to demonstrate how to think globally and act locally in the face of environmental conditions and challenges.
The next time Pete came to Santa Barbara was in fall 1971 as a candidate for President of the United States. Himself a highly decorated combat veteran of the Korean War, Pete was a fierce critic of the war in Vietnam and the conduct of it under the Nixon administration.
His decision, as a Republican, to run against an incumbent Republican president, did much to earn him the label of “Maverick,” and it catapulted him to national fame. Pete spoke to an overflowing audience at UC Santa Barbara that included his son Peter, then a freshman, and me and many veterans who had served there. As I was leaving, I overheard a woman say that Pete had “the looks and charisma of a Republican JFK.”
Tobe Plough, currently a member of the board of directors of the Montecito Water District, grew up with Peter and Pete’s other children in Portola Valley, and he fondly recalls his work on Pete’s first congressional campaign while in high school and on his presidential campaign while in college.
Pete’s son Peter, by the way, went on to become a distinguished lawyer in his own right as a trial lawyer with the U.S. Justice Department and prosecuting attorney with the International Criminal Court in the Hague, handling cases against alleged perpetrators of war crimes.
The final time I was with Pete in Santa Barbara was in 2015 when he and his wife, Helen Hooper McCloskey, came to UCSB to speak on the 45th anniversary of the Environmental Studies Program. We offered to fly them down and put them up in a hotel, but they chose to drive down in their camper with their dogs. They then proceeded to stand together at the microphone and take turns speaking to us and, hilariously, to each other. Their love for and enjoyment of each other spilled over all of us. I have never experienced a talk in an academic setting that tickled me more or for so long.
The last time I got to be with Pete was in 2017 when I visited him and Helen on their farm in Yolo County and was put to work picking olives atop a ladder in the orchard within an hour of my arrival.
Pete’s departure was at the age of 96. For me and many, it was still too soon.