Sam Holloway (class of 2021, Engineering School)
Simply by living in the Gulf Coast region and participating in its economy, we are implicit beneficiaries of its largely oil-based prosperity and of its significant economic dependence on the Gulf waters themselves. There is, resultantly, an elevated ecological culpability falling upon the shoulders of each resident that is inextricably linked to our physical place. Gulf Coast occupants are especially responsible for protecting nearby bodies of water and the petroleum products beneath them because living here necessitates accountability to the governmental, cultural, and economic institutions that facilitate commodification of the surrounding nature for worldwide use. We are users of the Gulf and its resources, like infinitely many other players in global trade, but by actually living along the waterside, we also monetarily support (via spending locally) and physically enable (through labor) the nearby economy which allows resource extraction and environmental exploitation to proceed.
The Gulf has rich and varied culture, natural beauty, and historical significance to help warrant its ecological preservation, but because it is not culturally constructed as a fashionable coast whose people and waters are worth saving for aesthetics alone, its geo-specific environmental imperatives do not frequently enter public consciousness among its residents. Instead, because the Gulf of Mexico has long been cast as a place for utilitarian capitalist activity rather than an aspirational site of leisure and cultural development, its residents take comparatively less pride in its physical care than people who live in areas traditionally valued for their beauty and their continuous creation of cultural ephemera. The Gulf Coast isn’t popularly granted the same “placeness” as other coastlines; in fact, because its water holds so little significance in the popular arena other than utility, forgetting that the coastline is so nearby becomes easy during daily life. This phenomenon appeared to me even before I ever officially moved to Houston. Just before starting my freshman year at Houston’s Rice University, I joined other incoming new students on a week-long immersion in the rawest social, economic, governmental, and environmental issues that challenge the city. We spent a few hours on Rice’s tree-insulated, almost pastoral campus immediately after arriving before proceeding to our lodging in a church amidst Houston’s clean, recently-developed downtown skyscrapers. Three days later, a 20-minute bus ride carried us to the headquarters of T.e.j.a.s., a local environmental justice organization whose “Toxic Tour” took our group through residential areas near some of the city’s most active sites of industrial production located a mere ten miles from the heart of Houston. To get a better view of the oil refinery bordering one neighborhood, we stood in the sports fields of a public school; on all sides, residents of the “fenceline community” immediately outside this refinery fought to stay above the poverty line while surrounded by almost unbreathable air.
Without deliberately seeking out knowledge of the petrochemical industry’s wrath upon this area and others like it, so close to where we would attend school in the following fall, we as future residents of Houston (hosted by an institution that encourages our hyper-involvement in the city surrounding us) would have been completely unaware of what the city’s most potent economic activity actually leaves behind. Physical side effects of industrial manufacturing and petrochemical processing, such as climate change, get their share of public discussion. Less discussed, however, are the consequences that pollution creates for socioeconomically disadvantaged people. Massive centers of production, and their byproducts, drive away people who are able to relocate. The result is the creation of deeply impoverished, often minority-majority neighborhoods that exist among inhumane levels of toxins. Residents of these areas may lack the empowerment or reach to take action against the companies around them, or they may be ignored because of extant societal racism or classism. Oil, therefore, is actually an issue whose perpetuation of social inequality deserves as much attention as its environmental impact.
In showing us this situation, Rice reflected a popular hope that we, as youth, would be able to do something about the problems we had seen. The university’s institutionally sponsored endeavor to make incoming students aware of Houston’s most stubborn problems manifests an abstract societal faith in young people’s ability to use uncertainty and impossibility as a framework for path-breaking ingenuity. In about the past 30 years, as neoliberal philosophy and market deregulation have caused economic, social, technological, and governmental issues to grow more integrated across global scales, youths have been newly designated as ideal problem solvers. They are understood to be capable of causing change in these complex environments where older people previously could not. Globalized media coverage, rapidly evolving methods and cultures of communication, digital commerce, and growing demographic heterogeneity create what amounts to an informational language with which present-day youth have native fluency. These understandings source from an effective shrinking of the world that is based in technological development and shifting thought about free markets. Culturally and economically, youths can now be influenced by forces located anywhere on the planet. Resultantly, expectations for youth today combine a traditional view of young people as a source of fresh thinking with the opinion that they are obligated to use their instantaneous informational fluency to understand societal problems as never before possible.
This new role of responsibility for young people developed as a side effect of more neoliberalized global thinking about how economies should be structured. In about the last 50 years, there has been a shift away from the system of thought that sociologist Anita Harris calls “modern liberalism,” an era defined by state-sponsored welfare services. Modern liberalism’s emphasis on social and economic equality has remained a defining feature of neoliberal rhetoric, but the executors of that equality now come largely from the private sector. This transition from public sector to private sector activity accompanies a stronger emphasis on valuing capitalism as a way to provide equality through unfettered opportunity. More people can achieve success and respect by becoming innovators, the thinking goes, but that promise is conditioned on one’s ability to develop something unique that solves a major problem in some new way. Young people’s ability to thrive economically at all, in fact, now depends on their ability to find their own direction in this more freeform social and political context. Harris argues that, to be “successful” in the new structures of market economies, young people must offer “projects of the self,” “develop[ing] individual strategies and tak[ing] personal responsibility for their success, happiness, and livelihood by making the right choices in an uncertain and changeable environment” (Harris 4). Importantly, however, is an unspoken obligation for these developments to be widely beneficial and socially responsible. They are conceived in the “self,” but they must be extensible to be seen as legitimate.
By this logic, the Gulf and its coastline have all the trappings of such an “uncertain and changeable environment” whose future modern youth are particularly equipped to shape. Currently strong and stable, the region’s economy is crucial to the remainder of the country through its dominance in industries like petrochemicals, fishing, and shipping; the steadily swelling population of the coast, which added 8 million people between 1960 and 2008[1], also indicates an ongoing need for workers to help grow output even more. The future of the Gulf Coast economy seems assured on first glance because of this dependable production and consistent demand. In actuality, however, trouble is hanging at the horizon. Global demand for oil may never completely be eliminated, but as Stephanie LeMenager writes in her analysis of petroleum culture, we are now in a “Tough Oil World.” Oil is now “tough…because of the devastating scale of its externalities,” which result from using complex oil-producing formations in the deep sea or in politically unstable regions (LeMenager 3). It is difficult to make definitive predictions about the future of the Gulf Coast oil business specifically, but the industry as a whole is in flux because of increasingly difficult engineering challenges and heightened anxiety about climate change and pollution. Interest is growing in alternatives to petroleum energy as environmentalism becomes popularly treasured, but even if oil companies continue producing at today’s rate forever, the externalities of the move to tough oil that LeMenager describes mean that the industry will face more scrutiny and repercussions than ever as it makes progressively more consequential grabs at any reserves that are technologically accessible.
The Gulf, to be sure, already suffers from a branding issue; widespread apathy dooms the area as unworthy of the environmental maintenance which would facilitate cultural development around the water and coast. An increase in the collateral damage caused by oil extraction will only harm the Gulf’s economy and public image further. Herein lies the greatest paradox of oil that this region currently faces, one that withholds it from becoming a place treasured in its own right. The Gulf Coast could take steps to confront the toxic impacts inherent to its status as “oil country” by fleshing out other economic industries and emphasizing the preservation of its existing cultural institutions, waterways, bays, estuaries, bayous, and other waterways. But because the petroleum industry is now totally immersed in its new and more dicey tough oil epoch, the Gulf Coast fights more controversy and scorn than ever before. Houston, for example, is the most ethnically diverse city in the US[2], nurtures a nationally-recognized museum district, hosts the largest medical center in the world, and is surrounded by a developing system of parks along its expansive waterways[3]. The area’s previous interactions with oil, however, have cemented an “dirty” connotation that attenuates the popular impact of this cultural prestige. A notion that this “dirtiness” is unfixable discourages activist work to reduce the burden of more difficult oil extraction. The Gulf Coast needs to figure out how to overcome this labeling and attract developments that address the implications of tough oil, but traditionally powerful actors are intertwined so thoroughly with the present supremacy of oil that they alone could not question their status quo harshly and guiltlessly enough to generate truly necessary reform.
Texas’ government, as one example, isn’t even adequately equipped to address crises of its current petrochemical industry. Just before Hurricane Harvey, Governor Greg Abbott “announced that companies would not be held liable for storm-related pollution,” and “he also suspended record-keeping rules for environmental contamination;” inevitably, following the storm, the Texas coast contended with over 460,000 gallons of spilled gasoline, an unreported 457 million gallons of oil refinery waste that spilled into a tributary of Galveston Bay, and explosions at a major chemical plant, among other environmental disasters. As Abbott desired, the state’s government did not hold anyone responsible (Langford). It would be a pipe dream for the same people who made that decision to feel like they should compel Texas’ fossil fuel industry to do anything for the future of the state other than increasing output. Though this example of governmental shortsightedness is particularly egregious, it clarifies a need across the Gulf Coast for fresh thinking about how to handle a singular point of transition for oil, what the aims of future environmentalism should be, and the potential for the Gulf to realize its “placeness” more popularly.
In considering these issues, youth again becomes a locus for debates and anxieties about the future. From a historical standpoint, young people have a challenging responsibility. They have eternally been viewed as the best authors of a more perceptive and progressive future, but in the current time period that Harris calls late modernity, young people contend with elevated expectations that are deeply contradictory. Youth find themselves at once made responsible for the future yet delegitimized in their thinking about how to move forward. The changes they propose carry the risk of disdain from elders who may be alienated by thinking that threatens the structures which brought them success. Even against (and sometimes energized by) disapproval from older people, however, late modern youth offer particular promise to fix and evolve problematic institutions via a new drive to develop neoliberalized “projects of the self” that bring previously unimagined improvements to society. This spirit of adventurous originality, in conjunction with the strong self-empowerment and connections to individual identity that also fortify late modern youth, are the ideal characteristics of a demographic that can bring a much-needed change in thinking to the Gulf Coast. Young people of today, because of their newly self-motivated nature and the unique societal expectations levied upon them, are better equipped to develop a principled solution for tough oil than any generation before them.
In figuring out a plan of attack, though the upbringings of late modern youth allow them to consider issues like no one ever before, intergenerational collaboration is critical to provide the necessary support for an enduring solution. Youth is societally constructed as a savior, implying that responsibility for any problem unsolvable in the present shifts to young people. Proving this conception correct, young late-modern thought has foundationally impacted an incredibly rapid Internet-driven cultural revolution, inspired an increased global commitment to social awareness and governmental accountability, and demonstrated vigorous commitment to physical sustainability. It therefore becomes particularly easy, considering that present youths are proving themselves able to solve more and more complicated problems, to expect that they will also be able to independently conquer something as daunting as tough oil. But the forces that constrain oil production, realistically, are inaccessible to an effort made exclusively by young people. From a practical standpoint, because oil is so heavily regulated, changing the industry’s operation would require concerted cooperation between young people, attorneys, scholars, and government officials. Youth provide a holistic, forward-thinking perspective that would help form policy to keep Gulf Coast oil producers accountable for their environmental pollution and social injustices. The actual implementation of that policy falls upon government officials, however, necessitating a beneficial intergenerational alliance. Similarly, young people inherently cannot compete with the education (either formal or lived) of older generations. Even if young people spearheaded something radically new, when dealing with an issue as multilayered as the petroleum industry, collaboration with subject matter experts would be absolutely necessary to contextualize ideas and to develop more cogent arguments.
There is no shortage of people, old and young, with a vested interest in preparing the Gulf Coast for a newly challenging age. Late modernity encourages youth to contribute, but the specifics of oil demand much more input and agency than a single generation can provide. Regardless of age, though, our entire conception of what society should aspire to is influenced by our upbringings in an oil world. Our economic and cultural development has been predicated on accessible energy for hundreds of years. Historically speaking, however, there is now a uniquely good framework in which to conceptualize a transition to humanity’s next era of energy usage. By emphasizing the hidden outcomes of major institutions like petroleum, late modernity forces a wide recognition that change must occur, and it even suggests an agent (youth) to be the philosophical architect. Even so, it is impossible for us to guide these efforts by forming a rational image of what a post-oil society will look like. Incrementally challenging the dominance of oil, rather than trying to prepare for its replacement all at once, is a more practical endeavor.
Works Cited
Harris, Anita. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. Routledge, 2005.
Langford, Cameron. “Hurricane Harvey’s Toxic Effect Still Unknown.” Courthouse News Service, Courthouse News Service, 23 Mar. 2018, www.courthousenews.com/hurricane-harveys-toxic-effect-still-unknown/.
LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford University Press, 2016.
[1]https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.census.gov/prod/2010pubs/p25-1139.pdf&sa=D&ust=1525326929485000&usg=AFQjCNH61OaAp3Xb2m1DZywfQiq2UmiDQg
[2] http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-houston-diversity-2017-htmlstory.html
[3]https://www.google.com/url?q=http://houstonparksboard.org/news/trail_replacement_on_sims_bayou_greenway/&sa=D&ust=1525326929490000&usg=AFQjCNEenmgXnDGRIgz27e1cqdWkvGMtpw