by Rebecca Chen (class of 2019, English & pre-med)
Oil defines Texas and living in the Gulf Coast more than one might assume from the impact it’s had in literature and media. The Indian writer Amitav Ghosh notes that as “one of the few who have tried to write about the floating world of oil, I can bear witness to its slipperiness, to the ways in which it tends to trip fiction into incoherence” (Ghosh 141). Writing about oil and especially about its impact on humans can therefore be a difficult task to grapple. The appearance of oil in US media usually surfaces on occasions of an oil spill. But this interest is situational, as long as the disaster lasts. Petroleum may also be cast in a foreign light , outside of the US, in a way that distances it from the communities close by. By such strategies, people learn that few understand not know how to relate oil to their everyday lives. Encouraging a collection of oil narratives, as I have attempted to gather here for this short essay, hopes to help readers puzzle out what oil means to them.
Gulf Coast identity is inexorably tied to oil. Petroleum drives environmental and cultural change, and we rely overwhelmingly on oil to serve industrial and personal needs. Even though petroleum has cast such an impact on culture, one doesn’t read a lot of stories about it. That is, its effects are not visible in written or creative works to the extent that one would expect. In 2002, The Economist called Texas “a giant south-western state that is best known for its cowboys and oil barons” and declared it the exemplar for American social development (Future). Not only oil barons but all Texans and Gulf Coast inhabitants have their lives submerged in and shaped by oil. Nonetheless, there’s a dearth of literature and creative production surrounding oil. By looking at the Gulf Coast and specifically Texas, we can consider why this dearth of literature exists and alternative ways in which petro-culture surfaces in the imagination of the Texas coastline.
The inherent qualities of petroleum, as several critics have argued, may partially help explain the lack of literature surrounding it. Uniquely, oil “bulks out and inhabits place, changing the quality of air, water, noise, views and light” (LeMenager 13). Yet that very ability to make a unique impression may forestall attempts to capture oil in literature. Experiences of oil across global contexts “run counter to many of the historical imperatives that have shaped writing” as Gosh notes. They are multilingual, shifting between settings, and more obviously rooted in the past than thinking about the future (Ghosh 141-2). Further, the cost of finding oil, in terms of political maneuvering and often backroom dealing, manual labor requirements, and economic investment, makes oil a complex political topic, often immersed in global power struggles. Americans think oil “reeks of overseas dependency, economic uncertainty, risky and expensive military enterprises” (Ghosh 139). Along with these complications, the ecological consequences of burning fossil fuels pervades many important discussions of petroleum. Given such challenges, writers have stayed away from oil as a literary topic.
Still, at times, oil is a topic, and a captivating one at that. For instance, oil is in the news most consistently when a huge spill happens, damaging wildlife and human communities. For most disasters, including those that involve a loss of human life, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism sees interest in along with coverage of them peter off shortly after they occur and therefore terms them “one week wonders.” By contrast, “the Gulf of Mexico oil spill was a slow-motion disaster that exceeded the usual media attention span, commanding substantial coverage week after week” for 14 weeks until June 20 (100 Days 1). Importantly, newspaper images of “oil-soaked birds and other wildlife, crippled, dying, or dead” following a period of oil leaks from 1967 to 1977 “contested older visual narratives of oil as abundant and powerful, the source of American economic and national dominance” (Morse 124). The publication of environmentalist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 alerted Americans to the peril that pesticides and environmental damage caused wildlife, and mass media coverage of petroleum adding to such damage tainted its reputation with the American public. Following the 1969 Union Oil spill, “images both reflected and drove public anger at the spill, Union Oil, and lax government regulation of offshore drilling” (130). This occurrence finds its parallel in more recent events, most notably the BP or Deepwater Horizon spill and subsequent outrage at the Obama administration.
Coverage of oil spills focuses on ecological as well as human effects, and this trend is a consistent feature of the production of knowledge around oil. From the 1970s to today, coverage of oil foregrounds impacts on animals. Animals at times provide “visual narratives of consumer guilt and individual salvation” (Morse 132). The humans impacted, on the other hand, may seem to have been forgotten. After the Deepwater Horizon spill, cleanup crew workers got sick from the contamination as requests for fitted ventilators were ignored for far too long. The public saw a similar disregard for human safety occur following the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989. In that disaster, rescue workers did not get the proper equipment, prompting some to criticize that “and what Exxon did was, they threw these people away” (Oil Spill). The focus of media outlets on animals, some have argued, overlooked humans. Animals functioned “as symbols of the disaster, “pathetic victims” who evoked sympathy and provided visual stand-ins for the humans threatened by loss” (Morse 133). Yet these visual stand-ins, as important on their own terms as they might be, did not force the issue for viewers to consider the human cost of oil spills. Nobody can seem to focus on the perils of life for all humans when images of “innocent animals” polluted by oil are the alternative choice.
It is possible, though, that the Deepwater Horizon spill presents an opportunity for change in our attitudes regarding oil. For political effectiveness, previous portrayals of oil spills involved birds and otters in order to place “emphasis on helpless victims—both real and symbolic—trapped by oil” (Morse 132). Some accounts of the 2010 spill seem to follow this pattern. For instance, a NPR report on reactions to the spill starts out by describing the environmental damage: “Tar balls appeared on beaches as far east as Pensacola, Florida. There were some reports of oil-soaked sea birds in Texas. Everywhere in between, both wildlife and the people who work on and around the water continue to struggle” (Oil Spill). In this manner, people appeared last in a litany of harm wrought by oil spills, even though ecological damage affects all populations on this planet. New forms of media coverage have enabled more human voices to illustrate the effects of oil though. Six years after the Deepwater Horizon spill, a movie depicting the crew’s escape from the flaming rig debuted on the silver screen. Petroleum engineering professor Eric van Oort opines that the movie lent a necessary perspective to the disaster since “[m]ost people seem to remember that the…blowout…caused the worst environmental oil spill in U.S. history, but forget that it also killed 11 offshore workers” (van Oort). In a similar manner, a broader variety of media platforms has allowed people to tell their personal stories about the spill. Narratives not only include rig workers but also tourism and seafood-industry businesspeople, who have been empowered to appear “as individuals with names and voices, not as powerless victims but as citizens demanding recourse” (Morse 134).
Oil narratives such as those above allow people to express how oil has impacted their lives and share that experience with an audience that may otherwise hold a stereotyped view of the industry as well as the Gulf Cost environment. A great example of this problem can be found in the work of environmental reporter Colin McDonald. “Two-foot-high brown waves, mosquitoes and oil rigs were my first impressions of the Texas coast. I don’t think I had ever seen an uglier shore,” McDonald declared (McDonald). This impression of the Texan coast may be common to many, but unlike other people, McDonald set upon a journey of rewriting that impression in an ongoing blog project. In 2009, McDonald kayaked the whole Texas Coast and catalogued his experiences online. He already knew that resiliency in Texas manifests in that “[w]hatever industry the community has hitched its economy to—from fishing to petroleum to tourism—could crash on a whim and sit dormant for years, only to boom again to keep the hope alive.” His posts are informative, readable and not reliant on stereotypes; as such, they offer a platform for Texans to investigate their relationships both with water and oil (Donsky).
The power of oil narratives lays in its intersection between areas of study and potential audiences. This era is known for Tough Oil, termed thus because oil is in harder-to-reach places like deep oil and shale reserves. Attaining oil involves very deep drilling and a “devastating scale of its externalities,” and thus oil is easily equated with environmental, economic and moral risk (LeMenager 3). Petroleum itself may be physically repulsive but still alluring as a substance “that no one wants to touch, smell or taste, yet everyone wants to control” (Doran). In that sense, living with and from oil “comes down to distance, geography, risk, technology, and greed,” all of which are a focus of films depicting petroculture (Doran). The movie Giant, based off a novel of the same name, shows an American sense of entitlement and exploitation through Texans’ conquests of land for ranching and oil riches. Giant refers to Muslim women in highlighting the patriarchal order of Texas society, which “suggests links between oil rich regions of the world and global capitalist support of patriarchal authority” (Comer 215). In this manner, oil narratives have connected regions across the world in both economic and social similarities. Giant thus gives a feminist account of oil culture and a form of critical regionalism centered around Texas.
Narratives align with the goals of public humanities in broadening access to and accumulation of knowledge. Stories “have emotional, psychological, symbolic and cultural content absent or sublimated in more purified ‘objective’ data. So, stories invite a different intellectual and emotional framework, beyond the (fictional) logical brain” (Moezzi 3). Scholars have been recognizing this truth about storytelling and the access this medium allows. Encouraging fictional and factual portrayals of oil will allow for spreading knowledge to a greater audience than the scholarly realm. Especially folklore, which “specializes in looking at the everyday, the commonplace, the informal, the otherwise ignored,” represents human relationship to natural elements in a more accessible manner to the general public than does scholastic literature (Moezzi 3). Critical regionalism also does its job of going against the grain in scholarly thought. While critique of expectations surrounding land, economic bounty and youth employment has been addressed through critical regionalism, applying this lens to studying oil will prove fruitful as well since oil has engulfed residents of Texas for so long. Oil narratives thus serve a purpose in critical regionalism and public humanities. By exploring the ways in which people see their lives and their land affected by oil, pieces about petroleum contribute to public knowledge of oil, regions like the Gulf Coast, and human reactions to both.