New offshore drilling in California threatens livelihoods

Katherine Terrell is a mom, a designer, a surfer and a business owner. She’s also an ocean lover and advocate. That’s why when she founded her Los Angeles-based swimwear company, Jeux De Vagues, she had the environment at the forefront of her mind and wanted to make sure that the business decisions she was making reflected her personal passion of protecting our shared natural resources. On her website, Terrell states, “It is my hope that we can reach beyond our lives as waveriders and connect to the global movement to protect and preserve the oceans that we love.”

Terrell was living in Malibu when the 2015 Refugio oil spill devastated the California coastline and harmed diverse and abundant ecosystems. Explaining the shock of the impacts, she said, “North Malibu in particular never gets tar balls, but tar balls mysteriously washed up in places that they’d never been in before.” One of Terrell’s most heartbreaking memories is the images of children walking out of the water after a day at the beach with tar balls stuck to them. “My child had it on his body after Refugio. It made me angry. All pipelines leak. All of them do,” she said.

When the Trump administration released the most radical offshore drilling plan in U.S. history earlier this year, she was rightfully upset. Terrell has seen the impacts of oil spills first-hand and knows that spills don’t respect economic, political or state boundaries. She doesn’t want her favorite surfing breaks to become sheened with oil. She doesn’t want children to have to pull black sludge from their suits as they leave the beach. Oil spills dramatically impact the livelihoods of coastal residents and business owners that depend on clean waters.

So, when asked how the U.S. should move forward as a country, Terrell had a quick response: “Transition as much as we can to renewables. We need strong leaders to support us. There’s nothing radical about that.”