http://www.independent.com/news/2015/oct/09/paul-relis-environmental-frontiersman/
Paul Relis: Environmental
Frontiersman
By Phyllis de Piciotto and Stan Roden
Paul Relis didn’t just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
For Santa Barbara’s environmental movement, Relis was the right
place and the right time. In the aftermath of Santa Barbara’s 1969 oil
spill a genuine pivot point in the evolution of American
environmentalism Relis’s genius lay in not knowing what he didn’t know.
Which was a lot. Consequently, the UCSB English
major-turned-environmental activist accomplished far more than he ever
could have imagined.
As a rhetorical firebrand, Relis was nothing special. His real
achievement was in creating a sustained institutional framework the
Community Environmental Council (CEC) from which a multitude of
seemingly modest but decidedly utilitarian programs would emerge over the
years. The most obvious, of course, is recycling. Absent the stubborn
determination of Relis and CEC, Santa Barbara would never have embraced
recycling when it did and as passionately as it has. Likewise with
community gardens. While such programs now seem so obvious as to be
almost boring, they were initially dismissed as unimaginable and part of
the radical fringe.
Relis set out to chronicle his political adventures as quietly crusading
eco-wonk in a new book, Out of the Wasteland: Stories from the
Environmental Frontier. The result is a revelation in remembrance for
those of us who perhaps never appreciated how much political turmoil was
required for us to enjoy a landscape we so comfortably take for granted.
Relis reminds us of the megalomaniacally audacious development proposals
slated for the Gaviota coast defeated the Carpinteria Salt Marsh
defeated and Cabrillo Boulevard vastly modified. Like many of his
generation, Relis grew up idolizing TV actor Fess Parker, but as a
community activist Relis went toe-to-toe with the Disney icon over
development schemes for the city’s waterfront that would boggle the mind
of contemporary observers. Ultimately Relis and the environmental
community would get the upper hand. Eventually, Relis would be
appointed to California’s Solid Waste board pushing, prodding, and
regulating what would emerge as a $10 billion recycling industry. From
there, he would move on to join the private sector, promoting the
gasification of trash and using the clean-burning fuels produced to power
heavy-duty trucks that would otherwise generate large quantities of
pollution.
Internationally acclaimed journalist and author Pico Iyer will gently
give Relis a longtime friend and soul mate the third degree Monday
night at the
Lobero
Theatre, simultaneously walking Relis down memory lane while
extrapolating the shamelessly hyper-localism of Santa Barbara’s
environmental experience to a more global scale. "Evolution," a
short film about Relis made by documentary videographers Stan Roden and
Phyllis de Piciotto, will be shown at the Lobero. Here, the second film
in the series, "Serendipity," describes Relis and his very
unlikely journey. Nick Welsh