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Tuesday, July 22, 2025

The political life of the environment

by

20140119

What caused the oil spills in the south of the coun­try? Sab­o­tage? A fail­ure of main­te­nance? Hu­man er­ror? Nat­ur­al seep­age?Is Petrotrin cul­pa­ble, as the EMA says? Are there oth­er fac­tors still to be known? A cov­er-up, even?De­pend­ing on who's talk­ing, the an­swers vary.While we wait and hope for in­de­pen­dent an­swers, the oil spill pro­vides an op­por­tu­ni­ty to think about the po­lit­i­cal life of the en­vi­ron­ment and what can be sal­vaged from this dis­as­ter.

In writ­ing about the 2010 Deep Wa­ter Hori­zon oil spill in the Gulf of Mex­i­co, an­thro­pol­o­gist David Bond not­ed that: "Dis­as­ters are made man­age­able by an ex­treme nar­row­ing of the range of in­ter­pre­ta­tion and ac­cept­able ev­i­dence."By this he meant that the "en­vi­ron­ment"–a com­plex in­ter­con­nect­ed sys­tem–is re­duced to a sin­gu­lar en­ti­ty, and an oil dis­as­ter a sin­gle event. This leads the gen­er­al pop­u­lace to see the dis­as­ter through sim­plis­tic no­tions of an oil spill, which can be con­tained by "sci­ence."

Look for oil on the sur­face of the wa­ter, on land, and any dam­age to seabirds and an­i­mals. Once these have all been tack­led, the clean-up is sup­pos­ed­ly over.In this sense, a gov­ern­ment, along­side the hy­dro­car­bon in­dus­try, can be seen to take charge of events and sup­pos­ed­ly man­age the prob­lem. The log­ic be­ing: we have iden­ti­fied the prob­lem and we will now fix it. In this sense, the en­vi­ron­ment takes on a po­lit­i­cal life to be eas­i­ly solved by sci­en­tists and tech­nocrats.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers


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