Editor’s note: Our Chapter Chair Katie Davis was honored this year by the Santa Barbara Independent’s Local Heroes award. Below is a reprint, by permission, with some extra prose.
By Jean Yamamura
Katie Davis and her family moved to Summerland in 1970, where the first offshore oil wells in the nation were drilled. She was just a baby at the time, one year after the infamous 1969 oil spill, but by 2012 she was training with Al Gore on the reality of climate change.
Her name has now become synonymous with Santa Barbara progressives’ fight to end fossil-fuel production in the county.
Davis worked for a Santa Barbara start-up in the 1990s, finding an audience for the new concept of online meetings they’d pioneered. She was grateful for the company’s flex-time options, as she had children, two kids that crystalized for her what the future held.
“We did everything we could,” Davis recalled, to decrease their carbon footprint. “We put solar panels on our house. I think I bought the 7,000th Nissan Leaf produced. I advocated at our co-working space and organized volunteers to work on a website with NOAA on ocean acidification.”
Davis began offering her climate change presentation to groups in Santa Barbara, including the Sierra Club. “That gradually took over my life,” she said. The Sierra Club went from being a hiking group to an essential partner for nonprofits like the Community Environmental Council (CEC) and the Environmental Defense Center. (Editor’s note: Our chapter has always been more than a hiking group with its generations-long community activism; able to handle recreation, conservation and fighting in the political realm.)
She recalled visiting every city councilmember with Michael Chiacos of the CEC to talk about 100 percent sustainable energy. “The nice thing about that approach was as cities began to do it, California saw the momentum. Now we have President Biden saying the national goal is for 100 percent clean energy.”
Meeting climate goals this decade is important, she said. “There is a pathway, but it matters a lot what we do now. Will the atmosphere warm in a way we can deal with, or will it spiral out of control? The next decade really matters.”