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- Convenors:
-
Blake Earle
(Texas AM University at Galveston)
Charlotte Leib (Yale University)
Sheng Fei
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Energy and Infrastructure
- Location:
- Room 11
- Sessions:
- Thursday 22 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how the transition to the wide-spread production of petroleum during the twentieth century transformed landscapes around the globe. Extracting, producing, and transporting petroleum have altered human and natural environments beyond the story of polluted air and befouled waters.
Long Abstract:
The twentieth century was the petroleum century. From international relations, to the global economy, to cultural formation, nearly every aspect of life was, in some way, touched by the ever-increasing production and consumption of petroleum around the globe. While scholars have work detailing the political, economic, and social ramifications of petroleum consumption, less attention has, surprisingly, been paid to the environmental ramifications of petroleum production. Fouled waterways and toxic air are obvious consequences of the widespread embrace of petroleum, but this panel looks beyond by investigating how petrocultures have altered landscapes (and seascapes) in places like North America, Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. This panel presents an environmental history of the petroleum industry that seeks to understand the material transformations of places occasioned by the intended and unintended consequences of building refineries and transporting petroleum.
This panel engages with the theme of the conference by elucidating how the energy transition to oil and gas of the twentieth century played out in the transformation–often, degradation–of environments around the globe. Though firmly rooted in history the ideas and stories explored in this panel offer the opportunity to reflect on how these transformations continue to resonate in the current day and will, presumably, into the future.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 22 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
In the 20th century the coast of Texas became the site of extensive production and refining facilities to support the state’s petrochemical industry. This paper investigates how this development changed the coast's estuarine ecosystems by focusing on the degradation of the state’s shellfisheries.
Paper long abstract:
From the discovery of oil at Spindletop in 1901 the coastline of Texas radically transformed to meet the needs of the growing petrochemical industry. From production sites, to refineries, to pipelines, to transportation infrastructure, and the myriad ancillary industries that developed to support the oil and gas business, the coast of Texas stretching from Beaumont in the north to Corpus Christi in the south became the home of a thick web of interconnected petrochemical facilities that generated significant wealth while imposing significant costs. The costs were, and still are, borne by the complex of bays and estuaries that define the state’s coastline in the form of petrochemical spills and industrial accidents. This paper investigates the transformations of the coast in response to industrial development and pays particular attention to how this development impacted the fish and shellfish of the region along with the fishermen and communities that relied on those marine resources. While petrochemical companies reaped huge profits from the degradation of the coastline, ecosystems were altered and communities like Palacios, Port Lavaca, and Rockport were forced to adapt to changing economic and ecological circumstances.
Paper short abstract:
Since the discovery of offshore oil in the mid-twentieth century, southeastern Arabia's two Gulfs have been transformed from seas primarily known for small-scale pearling and fishing into crowded lakes of extraction and circulation for the global fossil fuel industry.
Paper long abstract:
Since the discovery of offshore oil in the mid-twentieth century, the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman have been transformed from seas primarily known for small-scale pearling and fishing into crowded lakes of extraction and circulation for the global fossil fuel industry. Over the last half-century, the entire seascape around the Arabian Peninsula has been remade in the image of fossil capital. Oil rigs sit atop pearl beds that divers visited in living memory. Fishing boats must carefully weave through tankers that clog the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20% of the world’s oil flows each day. Yet fisheries carry on, despite their diminished economic importance and the increasing despoliation of the environment occasioned by oil. Aside from their potential toxicity, the rigs, tankers, and ports that circulate fossil fuel are also highly securitized spaces closely guarded by international navies. Approaching them is both dangerous and illegal, but many fishermen simply don't care; for now, oil infrastructure turns out to be an ideal place to catch fish. Pearl oysters and other sessile organisms that attract fish completely encrust the footings of rigs. Platforms and tankers cast large shadows that help shoaling fish hide from predators. And fishermen often return from these sites with full nets. This paper draws on archival and ethnographic research in Oman and the U.A.E. to advance a more capacious understanding of the causes and consequences of oil extraction in southeastern Arabia, and looks to Gulf fishermen as ideal interlocutors for narrating and interrogating the petroleum century.
Paper short abstract:
Were there damaging marine oil accidents or spills prior to Torrey Canyon? Surprisingly this question has been hardly addressed. This paper presents oil accidents and spills in the northern Baltic Sea from the end of WWII until the late 1960s. Marine oil pollution has a long and dark history.
Paper long abstract:
S/S Torrey Canyon, one of the first supertankers in the world, ran aground off the coast of Cornwall, England in March 1967. Ever since, her disaster has repeatedly been named as the ‘Big Bang’ of oil pollution in marine areas. But were there damaging oil accidents or spills prior to Torrey Canyon? Surprisingly this question has been hardly addressed. Historical studies on oil related environmental problems have focused exclusively on coastal cities or land operations. In this paper, the focus will be on the northern Baltic Sea, which is a good place to begin research into the existence of early oil accidents and spills, because it has been an exceptionally challenging shipping area due to its shallow waters, numerous islands and reefs, and difficult winter conditions. This study is, in all likelihood, the first in the world to systematically study the environmental history of early oil accidents and spills. It indicates that awareness of marine oil accidents and spills began to develop in the north Baltic at the end on the 1940s and began to significantly strengthen at the end of the 1950s and throughout the 1960s when oil pollution incidents began to continually appear on the frontpages of local and national papers as well as television broadcasts. The prevailing understanding that the Torrey Canyon disaster was the genesis of oil accidents is highly questionable, if not totally wrong.
Paper short abstract:
This paper offers a comparative account about the construction of oil refineries in two Indian Ocean port cities, Mumbai and Aden, during the early 1950s. It pays attention to the transformation of landscapes and seascapes to highlight localised differences attending the global proliferation of oil.
Paper long abstract:
The 1950s saw a series of new oil refineries built across the world, in line with the exponential increase in global oil consumption during the decade. Usually this story is told through the huge increase in European refining capacity. Less known, however, is the proliferation of oil refineries across the Indian Ocean, which were especially important following the the 1951 nationalisation of the world's largest oil refinery in Abadan in Iran, denying oil companies access to regional markets. Two of these new refineries were in Mumbai (India) and Aden (present-day Yemen), built by Burmah-Shell and BP, respectively. This paper offers a comparative account of the construction of these two refineries to highlight localised differences attending to the global proliferation of oil in this pivotal moment. It pays special attention to landscapes and seascapes, both in the choices of oil companies when selecting sites for new refineries, and in the subsequent environmental transformations attending construction. It will examine these on material and representational levels, making use of corporate documents found at the BP Archive. Finally, it reveals what impact changes in landscapes and seascapes had on local coastal communities and their relationship to surrounding more-than-human environments.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines understudied connections between petroleum-fueled political economies, global warfare, and processes of urbanization and renewal by attending to the ways the material substance of New Jersey's meadows was adapted to serve the U.S. military-petroleum-industrial complex.
Paper long abstract:
In 1881, Standard Oil built its first pipeline system across the United States. One of the lines leading to Bayonne, NJ, crossed through an area that, over the next century, came to be known as the New Jersey Meadowlands. Known to Lenape people as Musgichteu-cunk, this vast peaty landscape was by 1928 declared by planners to be “a most attractive laboratory” for the invention of a new planned city designed to serve automobile traffic and the expanding industries of the New York Region. By the late 1930’s, the same planners envisioned this landscape as an engine of war. This paper examines how planners, pipeline-builders, road engineers, petrochemical companies, and plant scientists called upon New Jersey’s meadows to serve the purposes of warfare and national planning from the 1880's through the Vietnam War. Combining methods from the plant humanities, urban environmental history, and discard studies, it shows how the meadows helped to build “The Petroleum World”—a world full of gassy marshes and tar-laden estuaries, illustrated by oilman Harold Smith in an eponymous poster (ca. 1948-1966). It highlights how—from the rubber tires the meadows’ Goldenrod plants helped to create, to the asphalt roadways its coastal grasses helped to cure—the material substance of meadows was adapted to serve the U.S. military-petroleum-industrial complex. It then shows how environments and economies of war and oil caused American planners to begin to see cities as “disposable” and the “waste” of war as crucial to the reinvention of meadows and cities in the 1960’s urban renewal era.
Paper short abstract:
The Bay of All Saints was formed during the opening of the South Atlantic Ocean, in perfect geological conditions to form oil over 145 million years. Today, its inner beaches are lined with massive petrochemical infrastructure of fields, refineries, ports, pipelines, storage tanks and spheres.
Paper long abstract:
This work looks at different aspects of the first oil fields in Brazil, located around the Bay of All Saints. The search for oil entails many layers of history, coming together through human action. The first layer is the geology and its massive timescales, going back millions of years. On top, lies the ecology of the region. In a different timescale, the ecology of the bay went from Atlantic Forest, to sugar plantations, to petroscapes that dominate the region today. The third layer are humans themselves. Living on top of these layers, humans went looking for oil around the Bay of All Saints. Humans finding oil were essential in this story - but we were not alone. Accompanying humans were pathogens that infected people in and around the fields. They form the fourth layer. The fifth is the material layer. Having struck oil in 1939, Brazil was on the cusp of the Great Acceleration. This is by no background to this story. The search for fossil fuels was driven by global movements of capitalism and industrialization. Framing it in the context of the Anthropocene, takes it to a planetary scale. The Bay of All Saints was formed during the opening of the South Atlantic Ocean, in perfect geological conditions to form and accumulate oil over 145 million years. Today, its inner beaches are lined with massive petrochemical infrastructure of fields, refineries, ports, pipelines, storage tanks and spheres. This is a short narrative of that long and layered story.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the political contest over "environmental colonialism," the petrochemical industry, and political dependence that emerged around a controversial petroleum "superport" proposal in Puerto Rico in 1974.
Paper long abstract:
By the early 1970s, the petrochemical industry had already reshaped Puerto Rico's environment. "What is an island?" the magazine "Claridad" asked. "An island is a portion of cement surrounded on all sides by contaminated water. Puerto Rico is an island," it responded. In 1974, the tensions between economic and environmental priorities heightened around a controversial petroleum "superport" proposed for Puerto Rico's southern shore. Advanced by local politicians, mainland corporate concerns, and the US federal government, the superport sparked a mass movement in Puerto Rico to oppose its creation. Protestors reevaluated the environmental track-record of existing petrochemical industries and opposed the superport on ecological grounds. At the same time, opponents developed a critical analytic framework to describe the uneven distribution of environmental costs onto colonial territories by mainland petroleum companies. Anti-colonial nationalists in particular wielded charges of "environmental colonialism" to challenge the ongoing transformation of Puerto Rican landscapes by the expanding petroleum industry.
This paper explores the convergence of anti-colonial nationalism and environmental activism catalyzed by the Puerto Rican superport complex. It examines how histories of environmental degradation and colonial subordination informed a mass movement against the superport during the mid-1970s. At the same time, it considers how the Puerto Rican example fits into a larger historiography on environmentalism and environmental justice that has paid only scant attention to environmental movements across the archipelagic geography of US overseas empire.
Paper short abstract:
Between the 1960s and early 70s, several refineries were built in Sardinia, including the plants of Porto Torres and Ottana. This paper aims to question the different levels of interpretation of this project and the landscape and environmental transformations involved.
Paper long abstract:
Between the 1960s and early 1970s, several refineries were built in Sardinia. Among these, we focus on the plants of Porto Torres - an industrial and commercial port in the North of the island - and Ottana - an inner small town at the feet of the Gennargentu mountain. They were part of the Piano di Rinascita della Sardegna, an economic development plan for the region, and mobilized funds from the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, a public investment fund supporting industrial initiatives. The aim was to introduce large-scale industrial activities on an island considered underdeveloped and archaic in its costumes. In the words of Pietro Soddu, a leading Christian Democrat and seven-time President of Sardinia, it was a question of radically changing social practices that were difficult to control, in particular pastoralism, and of giving an economic boost to a region that had not even experienced the phase of agrarian capitalism.
But how did this ideological will finally materialize in space, resulting in a radical transformation of the landscape? And to what extent did this territorial metamorphosis result in a real anthropological transformation?
By taking an interest in a history that is written from above, materialized on the ground, and lived "at ground level" (an expression borrowed from historian Jacques Revel), this intervention is based on a cross-fertilization of sources, combining archival and topographical research, on-site observations, and interviews with a wide range of players (decision-makers, workers and trade unionists, as well local residents).
Paper short abstract:
Relying on archival documents pertaining to industrial history and oral history interviews, the paper uncovers the ways economic dependence on the oil refineries in Los Angeles impedes citizens’ ability to speak up regarding the environmental injustices they are confronted with, on a daily basis.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines the production of polluted spaces in Wilmington, which is predominantly a minority and socially disadvantaged neighborhood in South Los Angeles. Relying on archival documents pertaining to industrial history in the area and oral history interviews with residents, local business owners, teachers, and homeowners which were collected in Los Angeles in 2022, the paper uncovers the ways economic dependence on the oil refineries impedes citizens’ ability to speak up and become politically active regarding the environmental injustices they are confronted with, on a daily basis. It looks at the ways oil refineries in the area (among them Phillips 66, Valero, Texaco, etc.) seek to engage with the public through philanthropic actions to build for themselves a good PR image, and how this affects the ways people in Wilmington perceive these industries. By sponsoring events at the local schools and providing internships to the local students, refineries manage to capitalize on the residents’ sense of pride and gratefulness, thus impacting their most intimate experiences, as well as their past, present and future academic and economic endeavors. Building on works about the politics of ignorance and environmental risk, the paper studies how specific territories and landscapes, especially waterfront territories such as Wilmington have been sacrificed to petrotoxicity, in the context of a city like Los Angeles, which has often been referred to as the epitome of individualism and capitalist expansion.