The Irreparable Harms of Oil

What constitutes a negative ecology? For David Bond, channeling inspiration from Theodor Adorno's (2003) negative dialectics, negative ecologies indicate the irreparable ecological devastation inherent to the oil industry. For Adorno, negative dialectics divorced dialectics from the positive orientation of overcoming contradictions as part of historical materialism's fundamentally hopeful view of progress leading inexorably toward socialism. Whereas Adorno's negative dialectics attempted to resuscitate philosophy and ethics after the Holocaust, Bond's negative ecologies similarly try to rethink ecology in the ongoing catastrophe of the Anthropocene. For Bond, negative ecologies maintain a materialist focus on life while advancing the critique that “in stunted forests, obstructed migratory routes, asphyxiated ocean layers, deformed animals, poisonous groundwater, and contorted elemental cycles, the negative ecologies of crude oil outweigh any accrual of power or profit. Fossil fuels are destroying the world” (2). The point is not that economic gains are accompanied by ecological harms and externalities but that any sane system of accounting would recognize that the destruction far outweighs any benefits.What this optic arguably makes less clear are the highly unequal distributions of both damages and profits. Negativity is deployed as a corrective to what Bond criticizes as new materialism's tendency to valorize the dynamism of ecosystems. If characterizing work such as Anna Tsing's (2015) description of the possibility of life in the ruins of capitalist destruction as “positive” seems somewhat ungenerous, the contrast is perhaps better grasped by Bond's focus on the injustice of negative ecologies of oil in the present tense rather than considering futures transformed by fossil-fueled capitalism's toxicity.The book combines this theoretical approach with a range of ethnographic case studies that draw together over a decade of observations and interviews. The fieldwork documents the material harms associated with the North American oil industry, the affected communities and activists struggling with the toxic legacies of oil, and their struggles with a regulatory environment that often seems designed to support and absolve polluting industries. The range and breadth of detail from the multisite ethnographic fieldwork is a real strength, with a range of heartbreaking quotes from residents, Indigenous activists, and calculating corporate executives illustrating the human and ecological devastation that surrounds the oil industry.The ethnographic case studies cover the BP-owned Deepwater Horizon oil spill (chap. 2, “Governing Disaster”), tar sands extraction in Alberta (chap. 3, “Ethical Oil”), opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline (chap. 4, “Occupying the Implication”), Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) contamination in Hoosick Falls (chap. 5, “Petrochemical Fallout”), and how leaky oil refineries in the Caribbean moved from the promise of postplantation modernity and economic abundance to ecological devastation (chap. 6, “The Ecological Mangrove”). The impressive range of case studies collectively depicts the centrality of the negative ecologies of oil to the post–World War II American dream of a seemingly abundant consumer culture underpinned by cheap energy and synthetic materials.A key insight that emerges from the ethnographic case studies is that scientific understandings of the environment and attempts to embed regulatory frameworks based on toxicological thresholds and environmental impacts are often produced in response to the ecological devastation caused by fossil fuels. Examples mobilized to support this argument include the understanding of the deep ocean ecologies in the Gulf of Mexico that arose from the Deepwater Horizon disaster and knowledge of the ecological functions of mangroves that arose after numerous oil spills and leakages in the Caribbean. In both cases, Bond adeptly outlines how the discovery of environmental functionality emerged in response to fossil fuel–based disasters; producing an impact report required a more sophisticated understanding of the affected ecologies than previously existed, so disaster catalyzed and financed the scientific labor necessary to define the irreparable harms to those ecosystems.Bond argues that toxicological thresholds and impact assessments have become key techniques employed by the state to regulate toxic industries and that frameworks such as IPCC assessment reports and planetary boundaries deepen institutional commitments to these approaches. Toxicological thresholds are criticized for mandating industrial pollution to almost intolerable levels, displacing and dispersing pollutants in ways that transform class conflict surrounding the politics of industrial labor into questions of technical compliance.While noting ways that Indigenous and activist groups have used these techniques to advance specific goals, Bond explores PFOA to challenge the toxicological doctrine that the dose makes the poison. PFOA did not exist before 1947 but is now almost universally detectable in organic bodies. Even in concentrations measured in part per trillion, PFOA is associated with detrimental health outcomes in humans: “There is no threshold under which there are no effects” (132). PFOA therefore contradicts the Paracelus principle, that “all things are poison and nothing is without poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison” (quoted in Borzelleca 2000). At sufficient concentrations even substances such as water and oxygen are toxicants. However, recent discoveries surrounding petrochemical derived substances challenge this principle's universality. While Bond focuses on PFOA, where no dosage avoids harmful effects, other substances such as phthalates exhibit U-shaped dose-response curves, with significant harms occurring at both low and high levels, further problematizing the notion of a straightforward threshold of harm and indicating that synthetic petrochemicals necessitate “new ways of thinking about material agency” (Liboiron 2015). This suggests a complex and uneven science and politics of thresholds, one well suited to the specificity and nuance associated with the politicized form of ethnography Negative Ecologies advocates for.If at times overarching claims are at times a little overstated—such as the argument that twentieth-century American imperialism was unique in inflicting temporal harms on the future rather than expanding spatially, which somewhat ignores the long history of imperial ecological devastation—the book's strengths are the amassed ethnographic evidence of ecological desolation wrought by the oil industry, the linkages between environmental harm and scientific discovery, and the provocation that the fossil fuel industries should be understood as the antithesis of progress.

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