Not only is this disgusting, but it just seems ironic and wrong especially in a city like Santa Barbara. Some of the pipes, off of Butterfly Beach for example, are easily within swimming distance. Heal the Ocean is considered a “citizens action group” which hires engineers, scientist and researchers to logically deal with the bacteria and pathogens that are being dumped into our water, and to facilitate homeowners (like at Rincon for example) in hooking up to more efficient means of waste disposal, and to create new standards for treatment of sewage in Montecito, Goleta, SB, and Carpinteria.

Hillary Hauser is an amazing woman, and she is a realist. She said that she learned early on of the dangers of "single interest environmentalism—you don't see anything but what you want to see. You have to consider everything. Then you have to figure man into the equation."

Hillary's love of Santa Barbara is almost tangible. She remembers, as a kid, and a loner wandering around Miramar and Sharks Cove, "the water was so alive.” Her family had a beach house at Fernald's Point, but they spent time between SB and Seattle, “always near the ocean.” She remembers the joy of rounding the bend at Refugio heading down the 101 and seeing that first snippet of blue. She loved this moment, seeing and smelling the ocean. At an early age, Hillary learned the importance of having "me time"—time to enjoy the quiet of nature. Possibly without realizing it, Hillary was developing a relationship with the ocean that would eventually become the backbeat of her life.

Hillary knew she loved being near the ocean, but she loved other things too. She played piano, loved music and ended up in school studying English at the University of Washington.

After she graduated in 1966, she came back to SB and was befriended by a boat captain by the name of Glen Miller. She cruised around the Channel Islands on "The Emerald,” the very first dive boat in SB. From its deck, Hillary watched the divers getting ready. She watched them breathing underwater. Glen asked if she wanted to try, and being the adventurous soul that she is, of course accepted the offer. Glen handed her a wetsuit along with this advice, "Don't hold your breath dammit or you're dead." She jumped into the ocean, and hasn't left since.

Hillary's ideas about life are just like that story she told us. "Jump in!" she says. "You can't hold back, and that's true in surfing too." With her career as a teacher, a writer and as a pioneer of underwater film, she has done just that. If she was ever afraid of anything, she never acted on that fear; she never "stuck her head in the sand." She was always up for the adventure. In fact as a diver, she was coined "The diver of the bazaar."

"One of the spookiest dives was Mavericks," she says. "It was just nasty. Dark and sinister and full of Whites.” She told us that her longtime friend Jim, who had also dived in White shark territory said to her, “Hausie, when you get in the water, go immediately down.”
“The reef is like a football stadium, with ledges and tears and funnels that can suck you in…that was an insane dive," she says.

She describes Pipe as warm, clear and shallow—“really quite fun.” She actually snorkeled it with some friends who own a house there. She also saw the bottom of Jaws, which she says is a contrast to Pipe in that it is "so, so deep and there are these enormous boulders, as if God just threw them down into the ocean.”

Possibly one of Hillary's most terrifying adventures in her life was when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She was going through a divorce at the time and remembers thinking, "Wow, now I'm going to die." She continued going to the ocean everyday and screaming or just talking out loud, trying to deal with the fear and sadness of it. It was during this time that she found out how very polluted her loved beaches were; so polluted that she wasn't even allowed to get into the water, something she absolutely needed to do. The unsafe water situation profoundly affected her. "I was polluted and the ocean was polluted," she remembers thinking, and that was the birth of Heal the Ocean.

Dealing with cleaning up the beaches and enlightening Santa Barbarans was sort of cathartic. "I would go to the beach everyday, ride waves, then go to the hospital and get radiated."

"It was an Odyssey."

Just as Hillary offers back the healing energy to the ocean that it gives to her, she also gives to the community in a way that influences and affects all of us as surfers, swimmers, and lovers of this city.

Hillary is inspiring because she has found things in this world that she has loved and lived and thrown herself full force into. She has based her career around the things she is passionate about, and won’t back down from what she believes is our right—clean safe water.

The day Naomi and I sat in Hillary's office, listening to her stories, she told us "Yesterday, I went on my weekly visit to the doctor, and he said 'Guess what Hillary, you don't have to come see me anymore.'" Her smile is incredulous. And with that she left us with this advice "Pay attention. When things get really tough, that’s when you find yourself. Life is a gift, not a right"