Mission 039712: 2007-12-07, UC Santa Barbara - Pre-Mission Log Entry
From the Temporal Observation Log of Agent Britta 80065
Those guys at UCRRA (the United Climate Regulation and Restoration Agency) have finally seen the light. Last month, they contacted the Time Travelers' Consortium, asking to hire some agents to travel to places and times that were important in the early history of ecological preservation. They said they were in need of insight into how certain environments looked in the past, so that they can restore those environments accurately. Ever since I became an Agent, I've been saying that that's what UCRRA should do if they want to get anywhere.
As one of the premier Agents at the Consortium, I have been chosen to travel to an especially remarkable site, the University of California, Santa Barbara in its earlier days. Like so many of the other UC campuses, it hasn't always been located within its namesake city proper. During the period I will be visiting, it was located just outside it, in a town called Goleta. (To think there were only ten campuses that year! Merced was the newest. If I still have energy left after the mission, I think I'll take a second trip back and go see what my alma mater looked like as a brand-new school. It didn't have its reputation for coming up with great aerospace innovations yet; I wonder what people were doing there? It was really in the middle of nowhere back then, without even its own speedrail station. But I digress.)
This site is significant for many reasons. First of all, Santa Barbara is generally acknowledged to be the birthplace of the very notion of environmentalism. The idea was barely a few decades old. Historians believe that the beauty of the coastal location and a powerful sense that that beauty was violated during the 1975 oil spill were the causes of the movement's origin. UC Santa Barbara is the location of the historic Bren Hall, one of the very first buildings ever to receive the U.S. Green Building Council's highest possible certification for environmental friendliness, the LEED Platinum Award. The UCSB campus is also historically noted for its students' close relationship with the beach that surrounds two sides of the campus, especially the culture of surfing.
The goals of my mission tomorrow are as follows:
1. Explore and document the architectural and material features of Bren Hall.
2. Explore and document the environmental conditions and conservation efforts at Campus Point and around the lagoon. In particular, photograph and/or record video of someone participating in the now-lost sport of surfing.
3. Explore and document Del Playa Drive and the beach below it.
I look forward to exploring an environment that was once known for its beauty, but is now in the process of being restored. It will be my privilege to accept this mission.
This mission will require my standard complement of gear. Of course, I will be wearing my solar cape; it is unfortunate that so many modern-day humans live so much of their lives in enclosed, controlled structures and never become accustomed to constant exposure to sunlight, but I am one such, and these are the consequences. The solar cape measures the level of ambient sunlight and expands and contracts its protective cells to give the wearer the appropriate level of protection from harmful radiation.
I will also have my Mempod, which functions as an encyclopedia, camera, audiovisual recorder, and mobile temporal transporter.
The encyclopedia function is accessed via the use of a universal matter scanner. Pressing the black knob on the bottom, near where the headphone and microphone cords come out of the device, turns on the scanner and sends out a beam of light from the top of the device. When this beam of light is swept over any object, that object is looked up in the internal database, and information about it is played back in audio format over the headphones. The microphone on the headset can be moved down to record personal observations onto the device, or stored in the upward position when not in use.
I sometimes like to make written observations as well as spoken ones, so I will take along a notebook and pen, as well. I will be carrying them in a towel, because I make it a rule always to know where my towel is.
Since I'll be doing a lot of walking tomorrow, I think I'll wear my most comfortable purple pants. And my Milliways T-shirt. I don't care if anyone I encounter sees it; no one in that era knew what Milliways is, anyway.
Those guys at UCRRA (the United Climate Regulation and Restoration Agency) have finally seen the light. Last month, they contacted the Time Travelers' Consortium, asking to hire some agents to travel to places and times that were important in the early history of ecological preservation. They said they were in need of insight into how certain environments looked in the past, so that they can restore those environments accurately. Ever since I became an Agent, I've been saying that that's what UCRRA should do if they want to get anywhere.
As one of the premier Agents at the Consortium, I have been chosen to travel to an especially remarkable site, the University of California, Santa Barbara in its earlier days. Like so many of the other UC campuses, it hasn't always been located within its namesake city proper. During the period I will be visiting, it was located just outside it, in a town called Goleta. (To think there were only ten campuses that year! Merced was the newest. If I still have energy left after the mission, I think I'll take a second trip back and go see what my alma mater looked like as a brand-new school. It didn't have its reputation for coming up with great aerospace innovations yet; I wonder what people were doing there? It was really in the middle of nowhere back then, without even its own speedrail station. But I digress.)
This site is significant for many reasons. First of all, Santa Barbara is generally acknowledged to be the birthplace of the very notion of environmentalism. The idea was barely a few decades old. Historians believe that the beauty of the coastal location and a powerful sense that that beauty was violated during the 1975 oil spill were the causes of the movement's origin. UC Santa Barbara is the location of the historic Bren Hall, one of the very first buildings ever to receive the U.S. Green Building Council's highest possible certification for environmental friendliness, the LEED Platinum Award. The UCSB campus is also historically noted for its students' close relationship with the beach that surrounds two sides of the campus, especially the culture of surfing.
The goals of my mission tomorrow are as follows:
1. Explore and document the architectural and material features of Bren Hall.
2. Explore and document the environmental conditions and conservation efforts at Campus Point and around the lagoon. In particular, photograph and/or record video of someone participating in the now-lost sport of surfing.
3. Explore and document Del Playa Drive and the beach below it.
I look forward to exploring an environment that was once known for its beauty, but is now in the process of being restored. It will be my privilege to accept this mission.
This mission will require my standard complement of gear. Of course, I will be wearing my solar cape; it is unfortunate that so many modern-day humans live so much of their lives in enclosed, controlled structures and never become accustomed to constant exposure to sunlight, but I am one such, and these are the consequences. The solar cape measures the level of ambient sunlight and expands and contracts its protective cells to give the wearer the appropriate level of protection from harmful radiation.
I will also have my Mempod, which functions as an encyclopedia, camera, audiovisual recorder, and mobile temporal transporter.
The encyclopedia function is accessed via the use of a universal matter scanner. Pressing the black knob on the bottom, near where the headphone and microphone cords come out of the device, turns on the scanner and sends out a beam of light from the top of the device. When this beam of light is swept over any object, that object is looked up in the internal database, and information about it is played back in audio format over the headphones. The microphone on the headset can be moved down to record personal observations onto the device, or stored in the upward position when not in use.
I sometimes like to make written observations as well as spoken ones, so I will take along a notebook and pen, as well. I will be carrying them in a towel, because I make it a rule always to know where my towel is.
Since I'll be doing a lot of walking tomorrow, I think I'll wear my most comfortable purple pants. And my Milliways T-shirt. I don't care if anyone I encounter sees it; no one in that era knew what Milliways is, anyway.