lightblueline

In this week's (April 12, 2007) Santa Barbara Independent, Nick Welsh points out the ongoing effort that lightblueline is making to get the lines on the streets. He makes a lot of good points too about local impacts of climate change. Well barked!

A couple of notes: seven meters is actually 23 feet (22.97), not 21 feet. Perhaps angry poodles, like some other male mammals, just can't count beyond 21. And the Street Department has been both extremely helpful, showing us the best way to do the line, and, at the same time, really reluctant to see this actually happen; fearing, perhaps, a precedent that would lead to other public demands for street decorations. Lightblueline appreciates the professionalism the Department has shown, and understands its need to be deliberate in this activity. We plan to work closely with the Street Department to install the line, and are certain they will also see the result as both beautiful and important, particularly when cities around the globe point to the streets of Santa Barbara as the place the line was first drawn against human-induced climate change!

Here is some of the Angry Poodle article (there's a link at the end to the actual piece):

"When art and reality collide, don’t expect traffic engineers to be too helpful. They’ve got other things on their mind — like parking garages. A group of homegrown eco-agitators are hoping to call attention to the peril of global warming by using Santa Barbara streets as their canvas of choice to depict how high the sea will rise if and when Greenland’s vast repository of prehistoric ice sheets actually melts. Among the doom ’n’ gloom crowd, this eventuality is widely acknowledged as a worst-case scenario, though it becomes less far-fetched with each passing minute. It’s generally conceded, even by global warming agnostics and atheists, that if Greenland were to melt, sea levels worldwide would rise about seven meters, which, in American terms, translates to about 21 feet.

A group calling itself the Light Blue Line set out to show what that disaster would look like in Santa Barbara. Enlisting the help of UCSB geographers and cartographers, they have devised a pretty detailed map that nicely illustrates the local consequences of such a catastrophe. For starters, you can kiss the beaches good-bye. Gone too would be the city’s famed waterfront. Overall, about 120 square blocks of downtown — between the Bird Refuge and Hendry’s Beach — would be submerged. Santa Barbara would lose not just its most scenic landscapes but much of the freeway, the train station, and the airport. Much of lower State Street and the lower Eastside would be erased, replaced with a new giant bay that would reach all the way up Milpas Street to Canon Perdido Street. Santa Barbara High School would remain, but barely. Culinary landmarks like La Super-Rica Taqueria would be required to offer patrons scuba gear.

The Light Blue Liners, led by Bruce Caron, are hoping to paint a blue line along the streets of Santa Barbara where the 21-foot watermark is projected to be. Actually, Caron and crew are hoping to “bake” the lines onto the streets as a more or less permanent fixture designed to jolt careening motorists out of their road-rage reveries and into an urgent appreciation of the doom they face. Caron estimates no less than 68 street crossings would be involved.

Naturally, the traffic planners in Public Works are opposed. In the first place, they’re too busy figuring out why the new $26 million five-story Granada Garage has been such a colossal flop. Fewer people are parking there now — 16 months after the garage opened for business — than before when it was a one-level surface lot. Beyond that, they are aesthetic minimalists where their streets are concerned. Painted lines don’t belong on streets unless they tell motorists and pedestrians where to go. If Caron — and his ally Mayor Marty Blum — want a blue line, the traffic engineers have suggested placing it on the sidewalks instead. That way people walking along could reflect on the tsunami of doom that awaits them and perhaps pick up their pace a bit. That makes sense to me, but Caron and crew don’t regard pedestrians as the problem; it’s the people in their cars he’s trying to afflict with artistic shock therapy.

The matter should be going to the City Council in the next few weeks, and it’s unclear just how quickly and unilaterally the council can act. Already, while the idea has been enthusiastically and unanimously embraced by the city’s arts advisory board, the traffic guys have suggested the Light Blue Line should be reviewed by the city’s Historic Landmarks Commission and perhaps Architectural Board of Review. For the process junkies out there, this is a strong argument, and one that threatens to effectively stall Caron and his project until well after Greenland has ceased to exist.

Caron’s case has been buttressed by the recent release of two dire reports on global warming. The one released by the United Nations commission studying global warming since 1988 paints a pretty scary picture, however watered down, of the worldwide consequences of human-made climate change. The other details how 18 out of 19 climate studies predict that the American Southwest drought cycle will become intensified, with dust-bowl conditions becoming more frequent and intense. It’s worth noting that Santa Barbara lies on the cusp of this drought zone, but some scientists have speculated that these new steroid-powered heat waves will suck the coastal marine layers further inland with the consequence that our so-called June Gloom will spread out for months and months."

Dogs Gone Wild