Where the couches go to die...

At best, the concentrated Goleta neighborhood of Isla Vista is a strange community. Yards from the campus of University of California Santa Barbara, Isla Vista's population is composed of young men and women, most between the ages of 19 and 23. Most are living in their first apartment or house that didn't have mom and dad riding herd.

Think of a young adult equivalent of Escape from New York.

Pedestrians rule, motor vehicles crawl through streets teaming with students on foot and on bicycles.

And like many UC campuses and the surrounding environs there is more than a whiff of entitlement as well as the certainty of the newly educated who envision themselves saving the world from their less enlightened parents. Here's where Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth is embraced as gospel, where Michael Moore's biannual video rants are cheered, and where anything remotely conservative is vilified.

As it should be for this is the age for idealism and big dreams and youthful confidence.

Green? Hell, yeah! Vegetarian, vegan? Absolutely.

This year a UCSB environmental group attacked a perennial problem that occurs with the mass exodus of students at academic year end. As the houses empty tons of furniture, electronics, household goods, clothes and books are unceremoniously dumped. Garbage cans and dumpsters overflow. Couches are strewn along every street. And while this group did admirable work, creating a central clearing house for large pieces of furniture, there are still pockets of hold-outs.

As I walked Isla Vista following graduation last week, I was appalled and sickened to see a landscape that resembled a bombed-out Baghdad or a Tijuana trash site. Front yards filled with empty bottles and plastic glasses. Scorched streets littered with carbonized hardware from couches burned to "celebrate" graduation. Lawn furniture tossed from homes on Del Playa onto the beach, and most shocking, a couch floating in a kelp bed in the ocean.

If they care so much about the environment, trot out green credentials, and eschew chewing animals, why do so many of these privileged young adults think they have a free pass for the week surrounding year-end?