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- Convenors:
-
Tom Breen
(Oxford Brookes)
Clare Hickman (Newcastle University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Energy and Infrastructure
- Location:
- Linnanmaa Campus, SÄ110
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 20 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
The national park is often seen as a symbol of pristine nature, but its creation and development were heavily dependent on oil. This panel examines the desire to preserve and protect such rural landscapes in the context of environmentally destructive petroscapes.
Long Abstract:
The concept of a ‘national park’ is a relatively recent invention, dating back to the establishment of Yellowstone in the United States in 1872, but really flourishing in the late twentieth century with the formation of hundreds of national parks worldwide. The national park movement grew out of a desire to preserve the natural beauty of special landscapes from environmental damage. However, the oil industry was needed to build the infrastructure, roads, and cars that made it possible for people to visit national parks. This created an ongoing dichotomy in which people seek the solace of nature through environmentally destructive, noisy, and polluting means. This panel will examine national parks and the wider rural landscape through the lens of the ‘petroscape’, focusing especially on car-oriented infrastructures, recreational tourism, and our over-reliance on oil.
We welcome papers that explore the following themes:
• Transformation from labour to leisure landscapes
• The role of the motorised transport and ‘cheap gas’
• Seeing the rural through the lens of the car
• Our relationship with nature and ‘wilderness’
• The accessibility of the path network
• The impact of honeypot sites on the environment
• Weighing the environmental damage of tourism with social gain
• The social and cultural implications of petroscapes for national park visitors and local communities
By bringing together scholars from a range of disciplines, this panel aims to contribute to the growing field of environmental history and stimulate discussion about the complex relationship between oil, modernity, and rural landscapes.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 20 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
Using a set of oil company road maps owned by a US oil field worker, this paper explores how the consumption of petroleum products was tied to the consumption of US settler history, particularly through illustrations and landmarks of rural pioneer life.
Paper long abstract:
In 1954, Mrs. George Allman gifted some of her husband's belongings to the University of Oklahoma. Within this collection is an assortment of travel ephemera that Allman collected during his work in the Oklahoma and Texas oil fields: hotel brochures, train time tables, World War II gas rations, and multiple road maps of various US states. The road maps - published by a variety of US oil companies - feature illustrations and information about US white settler history, from the homes of founding fathers to sites of westward expansion. In this paper, I explore how the consumption of petroleum products is connected to the consumption of settler history. I also suggest that the concept of maintenance can help explain how mundane ephemera, like road maps, legitimize and celebrate a specific white settler history and obscure the relationship between North American Indigenous peoples and their homelands.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines Sinclair’s National Parks advertisements alongside the earlier 1930s “To visit Britain’s landmarks, you can be sure of Shell” campaign in the UK to understand how oil companies promoted travel via petrol automobiles to natural and cultural heritage sites.
Paper long abstract:
In 1955, Sinclair Oil Company launched a special advertising campaign in encourage the public to visit American National Parks. Full page advertisements in major magazines featured amazing US western park destinations like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Bryce Canyon. In addition, the Sinclair Auto Tour Bureau passed out free maps to help drivers plan their visits to the National Parks. Of course, the public was intended to visit via the family automobile -- and use Sinclair petroleum products to do so.
This paper examines Sinclair’s National Parks advertisements alongside the earlier 1930s “To visit Britain’s landmarks, you can be sure of Shell” campaign in the UK to understand how oil companies promoted travel via petrol automobiles to natural and cultural heritage sites. Deploying landscape painting and photography, these ad campaigns engage in forms of environmental storytelling that promote a vision of cars, roads, and petroleum as nearly invisible conduits to nature. These campaigns were part of a larger toolkit of activities, such as the US Mission 66 ten-year program launched in 1956 to expand National Park infrastructure, that aimed to reorient the natural and cultural heritage sites toward the automobile. Sinclair’s previously understudied National Parks series demonstrates that the twentieth-century petroleum industry moved far beyond promoting physical infrastructures of cars and roads to promoting their products as enablers of natural and cultural heritage.
Paper short abstract:
I will explore the notion of ‘traveler’s freedom’ as represented in late 19th and early 20th-century Finnish travel literature and contemporary newspaper articles on Finnish national parks. The focus of presentation is on the material conditions of transportation to and within the parks.
Paper long abstract:
Put in crude terms, nature tourism is a product of Romantic and American Transcendentalist thought, and in its core lies the idea of ‘freedom’ of wandering. This freedom is characterized by the wanderer’s solitude, his connection to nature and independence from society, and the (ostensible) absence of modern infrastructure. When national parks became a mass tourist destination in the postwar United States, the car-driven society was fascinated with another form of freedom, namely, the false freedom made possible by the use of fossil fuels. Thanks to oil – asphalt and automobiles –, Americans were free to drive to Glacier National Park (Going-to-the-Sun Road) or Rocky Mountain National Park (Trail Ridge Road).
In my presentation, I will first explore the notion of the ‘traveler’s freedom’ as represented in late 19th and early 20th-century Finnish travel literature, and then compare that notion to respective representations in contemporary newspaper articles on Finnish national parks. The focus of the survey is on the material conditions of transportation to and within the parks.
Is the traditional idea of the national park any longer sustainable, in light of today’s visitor numbers, visitors’ continuously changing notions of recreation and activities and the carbon footprints of visitors’ transportation and national park infrastructure maintenance? The Romantic idea of freedom, which manifests in several ways in national park visitors’ expectations and desires, seems to have potentially negative environmental impacts both locally and globally.