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Paper short abstract:

St. Croix is home to one of the world’s largest oil refineries, and one of the most negligent. This paper describes how petro-pollution surpasses property as a leading vehicle of enclosure within the American Empire of Oil and shows how anthropology can help lay the groundwork for future commons.

Paper long abstract:

The plight of St. Croix offers a parable for our age of unearthly upheaval. Fittingly, it is a parable whose end is not yet written.

The Hess/Limetree Refinery bent the island of St. Croix into an imperial conduit of cheap gasoline for the US: close enough to seize the gain but far away to avoid any responsibility. This Caribbean outpost in the American Empire of Oil now stands atop an entangled history of harm often grasp as discrete events: colonial dispossession, environmental disaster, economic addiction, climate superstorms, and carcinogenic fears. For residents, this onslaught is coming into focus as a single continuum of fossil fueled disaster, one that must be broken.

Another accounting takes shape at the desks of decision-making, where the refinery is being recast as the most reasonable plan to generate revenue adequate the need of now. Oil refining decimated coastal fisheries, poisoned aquifers, ruined farmland, and assaulted health, all of which now conspire against any easy return to self-sufficiency. Perversely, ecological devastation naturalizes oil refining as the only viable economic lifeline. Here, endemic pollution surpasses privatization in advancing a new regime of enclosure.

But all is not lost. This paper is rooted in 4 years of collaboration with residents struggle to hold the refinery accountable and build a better future. Reflecting on this ongoing fight, this paper argues that the most transformative ‘future commons’ must come from the struggle for justice today and that anthropology has an instrumental role to play in that struggle.