Hermosa Beach hosted a booming post World War II Jazz scene and influential punk rock scene in the 70’s. It even played little sister to Venice Beach in the explosion of skateboarding. This forty block stretch of beach is filled with culture and history, and for all these reasons Hermosa Beach residents are incredibly proud of their hometown–adopted or otherwise. Ironically, As Kevin Sousa touches on some of these characteristics of the place he’s called home for twenty-two years, a man walks into the beachside restaurant where we’re having lunch sporting a simple t-shirt that says Keep Hermosa Hermosa. For three years the slogan was the centerpiece in Hermosa Beach’s fight against E&B Natural Resources. A fight that upheld the Coastal Preservation Act, but most importantly it tells the story of how a beach town filled with surfers, skaters, musicians, professional athletes, artists businessmen and families went from the threat of going bankrupt to creating a shared appreciation and vision for their hometown. They’re three words that defeated the almighty dollar and are literally becoming a new handbook for environmental activism.
In March of 2012, E&B Natural Resources settled a hefty lawsuit for the people of Hermosa, proposing they could safely and responsibly recover oil underneath the city. The deal saved them from a 1984 initiative giving Macpherson Oil the lease to recover oil in the same land, but with voters shooting down proposal after proposal for two full decades, the South Bay city was now facing breach of contract to the tune of three quarters of a billion dollars. E&B payed the settlement for rights to the original lease, then offered as much as $600 million to the people of Hermosa Beach through the new Measure O, an initiative that would set up thirty oil wells and four injection wells in the one-and-a-half square mile city. They were saving the day one minute and promising funding for schools, revenue to improve the pier and public safety the next. And it would all be debt free. The deal didn’t seem so sweet to Sousa and some of his neighbors, though.
“I thought about flipping the keys to an oil company here and what that would mean to the very nature and character of what Hermosa Beach is. Say what you will about Huntington, but they’re an oil town. There are oil derricks all over the place. It’s different down there now, and when you see those oil rigs it changes the whole vibe. We didn’t want to become that.”
So the campaign to fight E&B was on. Kevin was given sage advice: Mother Theresa and Gandhi would never join an “anti-movement” but they would join a “pro-movement.” It was the philosophy that led the Stop Hermosa Beach Oil group to create an inclusive campaign rather than one aimed at cutting down an oil company with deep pockets. They set out to remind people what they were fighting for, rather than who they were up against.”It was collaborative,” says Sousa.” We would talk about how we wanted it to look, feel, what we wanted the movement to taste like.”
And when Sousa and a friend came up with the
Keep Hermosa Hermosa catchphrase, community members jumped behind with a wave of support, each bringing their own look, feel and taste to the cause. Surfers swam into the lineup with “No on O” signs, photographers paddling nearby to put the movement and one of Hermosa’s pastimes, surfing, side by side. Artists designed banners that were soon hung on every other patio along The Strand, a boardwalk along the beach that runs through the entire town. Art shows auctioned off pieces to raise funds for the campaign, musicians played in the “
No On O Show“, a webcast produced to get their message out. Hats and t-shirts with the slogan were everywhere from pickup volleyball games on the beach to bar patrons on the pier. Instead of alienating the people in favor of Measure O, they were instilling pride in what the city
is, not what it could become. Hundreds of donors contributed, and skate shops and surf shops gave boards away for auctions. The group of activists that made up Stop Hermosa Beach Oil invested in Youtube ads and online banner ads that cost them a tenth of the six figures E&B invested in expenses like television ads and PR.
“The coalition of artists and musicians latched onto this. The creative part, which is Hermosa. It’s this funky little beach town, and that sold itself.” Sousa says proudly. “I’m telling you, the art and the music all that stoked and inspired this community on a deep psychological level to come out against it.”
After a three-year campaign, the people of Hermosa Beach defeated Measure O with more than eighty percent of voters choosing to keep Hermosa Hermosa. It’s a margin so large that even though E&B could fire back with a new proposal any time, they’ve gotten the message that doing so would just be another waste of time and money. So now that the battle is over Sousa is writing a dissertation on his experience of creating and supporting this movement, and from that, he’ll eventually write a book. It’s nearly a month since the March 3rd voting day, but Keep Hermosa Hermosa is still plastered all over town. Odds are the banners, the t-shirts, and the flags will still be in every corner of Hermosa Beach long after E&B has packed their bags and moved on to some other town. Because that one slogan became a movement that reminded people why they call this place home to begin with. That one slogan made the entire city to lock arms.
Meanwhile, SurfRider is battling for Trestles again. The same goes for the Outer Banks community as they take on offshore drilling near their coasts, along with countless other places where the call for renewable energy sources isn’t as loud as the push to keep cashing in on the planet’s finite natural resources. Sometimes it seems like the individual battles will never stop. Maybe, just maybe, the Stop Hermosa Beach Oil campaign can offer a guide on how to win the war, and not just the battles.
