Fossil-fuel Canoes?

If you’ve ever been to a Southern California beach within sight of the Channel Islands, you may have stepped on a tar ball. This part of California’s coast has long been tied to fossil fuels, with oil derricks covering parts of the landscape in the 1930s. In that era, California produced a quarter of the world’s petroleum, racing headlong into West Coast car culture and environmental destruction.

And those tar balls on the beach? Some of them come from naturally occurring “asphaltum” seeps, which the native Chumash people used to seal their canoes for thousands of years.

Long before the automobile would help change the very climate of our planet and an oil well blowout would blacken the waters around the Channel Islands (and help inspire the very first Earth Day), the Chumash were paddling their canoes, made waterproof by tar.