Beyond Oil: History and Consumption
Editor's note: Any hope that the Deepwater Horizon would mark a turning point in the fight for a climate bill quickly evaporated. But the spill still offers us a "teachable moment" on many critical issues. In a series of essays in our magazine and online, some of the nation's leading environmental writers and thinkers reflect on our two national disaster areas: the one in the Gulf and the other in Congress. In our final installment, a historian looks back at the beginnings of the oil industry and wonders if increased knowledge about the energy we consume will affect our actions.
Every major news channel transmitted the same video feed: the sheared-off industrial pipe from which erupted swirls of black and gray plumes, a churning cloud of oil and natural gas moving into the marine ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico, eventually coating coastal birds in petroleum.
No doubt the BP Oil Spill of 2010 has earned a spot in the eco-disaster pantheon, along with Love Canal, the Valdez Spill, and others. But by merely defining the spill in this way, we are missing a larger lesson: as viewers and consumers, we have to expand the meaning of this event from simply the latest unfortunate industrial calamity to a referendum on our era of energy gluttony.
There were no live video feeds when the first commercial well of crude was struck in Titusville, in northwestern Pennsylvania, in 1859. It was a sloppy, yet effective enterprise. Rapid expansion of productive tracts was followed by the abandonment of unprofitable wells: an ethic of extraction, in which the oil industry’s primary concern was the next frontier, not the footprint it left behind. Built on a few gushers and a wake of dusters (wells that come up dry) and empty towns, the industry always forged ahead. Unfettered and unregulated, the production of crude was a unique industry from the start, since it combined a value similar to gold but flowed like a liquid. It occurred out of sight and in unmeasurable amounts until one chance strike sent plumes of it spraying out of the earth.
And from the beginning, this legacy has included spills. To help ship oil down the aptly named Oil Creek, which runs through Titusville, workers created false floods, or freshets, by breaking small mill dams in sequence along the stream to create surges of water that lifted the loaded skiffs and carried them toward the Allegheny River and Pittsburgh. But the freshets consistently caused more than half of the loaded crude to spill. To make matters worse, most of the early derricks were placed on the hillsides along this slight creek, allowing waste crude and loosened soil to run into the stream. History’s lesson is clear: as long as we need oil, there will be spills -- whether in Oil Creak or the Gulf of Mexico -- and there is little reason to expect that this can ever be entirely altered, particularly if oversight remains inadequate.
In Pennsylvania, the cradle of U.S. petroleum exploration, supplies of crude were largely depleted within a few decades. Today, the residue of years of industrial extraction is not immediately observable; Oil Creek even offers some great fishing. However, many private water wells have been left corrupted and unusable. Even less visible is the ethic of transience that enabled the spills in the first place: the industry and most of its workers would simply move on, following the oil to its next frontier. Another history lesson: temporary residents make poor environmental stewards.
The early oil industry differed from anything that came before it. When unbelieving Americans in the 1860s demanded visual evidence of the bizarre enterprise, the only sources to verify the new industry were written descriptions or glass-print negatives, used for lantern slide shows, of derricks, wagons, wooden pipelines, and accidental fires. These images piqued the public’s interest in an entirely new interaction between humans and the earth -- oil spraying from the ground, derricks controlling its flow, and barrels carrying crude to consumers. In scientific journals, geologists even pondered whether or not the escaping lubricant might cause the planet to stop spinning.
By contrast, contemporary viewers, thanks to that live video feed, know more than they would perhaps like to about petroleum -- the morass of technical challenges and hazardous risks that accompany each and every deep-water project, the larger costs of our need for cheap energy from fossil fuels. Yet our willingness to accept those costs -- to still embrace an ethic of extraction -- is also reflected in what we don’t know about spills farther from home. While the Gulf disaster garnered immense media attention -- for good reason -- daily spills in locales such as the Niger Delta or the rainforests of South America continue to go unnoticed and largely unmonitored, although industrial accidents in less-developed nations should be as repugnant to us as those threatening American fishing and tourist businesses. In these places, as well as in the more than 1,000 abandoned oil platforms littering the Gulf of Mexico, we see an unfortunate ethical coherence between today’s pursuit of oil and that of 150 years ago.
The most surreal moment for me -- maybe the perfect capsule of our 21st century energy dilemma -- was watching Larry King interview Lady Gaga while, in the lower right of my screen, the Deepwater Horizon well head spewed crude and gas two and a half miles beneath the Gulf of Mexico. We live a gluttonous existence of petroleum consumption even as we’re confronted with two realities: the supply of petroleum will end, and its use is damaging the earth and its creatures. As we consume petroleum in all we do, that indelible image should remind us of the futility of our present condition. The question remains whether our new awareness of petroleum’s implications will give us a more informed sense of responsibility and purpose.
