If Linda Krop were a baseball player, her batting average would be on par with Shohei Ohtani.
Krop is not a baseball player — but when she swings, she rarely misses. Working for the Environmental Defense Center since 1989 — and as chief counsel since 1999 — her specialty is in ensuring the biggest polluters don’t make a mess — and clean it up when they do.
She fought oil and gas companies along the Central Coast for years even before joining the region’s mitochondria of environmental defenders, seeking to speak for the coastal resources and critters that cannot speak for themselves. In her time, she has led efforts to ban offshore fracking, end federal oil leases, and preserve beloved outdoor areas, such as the Carpinteria Bluffs.
It was well-deserved, then, when Congressmember Salud Carbajal gave Krop a proverbial kiss on the cheek on Wednesday during an intimate gathering in the Environmental Defense Center’s backyard in Santa Barbara. He presented Krop with his Woman of the Year award, celebrating her unmatched stamina in the courtroom.
Over three decades of environmental advocacy, Krop has produced lasting protections for communities and ecosystems throughout the Central Coast, the congressional record states.
But Carbajal is currently enamored of Krop because of her tireless work against an oil company that’s shaped up to be their shared enemy: Sable Offshore and their friends in Washington, who have trampled over state regulatory agencies in their quest to restart oil production through a pipeline that burst in 2015.
From the beginning, Krop has had skin in this game. She played a leading role in the response to that oil spill, which released 140,000 gallons of crude oil into the environment. She led the EDC’s team through slick legal territory to force the companies to pay more than $700 million in damages.
Overall, her “leadership, service, and dedication have made a lasting impact on the community,” Carbajal said. It was just one dandelion in his bouquet of verbal flowers.
There was no shortage of colorful praise for Krop. “There are some people who show up when it matters, and then there’s Linda Krop, who shows up every single time for all of us,” said Maureen Ellenberger, chair of the Santa Barbara-Ventura chapter of the Sierra Club.
“She is the person who, after a long day of fighting oil companies and federal agencies in court, will turn around and spend another hour making sure the rest of us understand what is happening and what we can do about it,” Ellenberger said. Krop speaks with fire, that kind of fire that makes you want to do something — like make noise and march, she added.
Standing in front of a crowd of colleagues, family, and friends, Krop had similarly kind remarks to fling back at Carbajal and her team before recounting her career.
Krop said she remembered dreaming of being an attorney. Once just a fledgling with a love for nature and a drive for activism, she’s developed into a successful advocate for the natural world through the EDC, she said.
“We protect and defend nature. We are activists,” she said. “We’re not just lawyers sitting at computers.”
She went on to admit that she did not go to a school that had an environmental law program. Everything she learned, she learned on the job, “and I still learn something every day,” she said.
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