A Crude reality – oil, environmental responsibility and global commodity chains

On Swedish TV citizens can view the damage being caused by the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the waters of the Mexican gulf. Ironically, it says at the website for Deep Water Horizon that it is “capable of operating in harsh environments and water depths up to 8,000 ft”. Well, it was, and that might be the problem now. The disaster has provoked very interesting questions about environmental responsibility, some Americans for example question whether the citizens should be allowed to veto against off shore drilling off their coast. U.S. President Obama has stated that British Petroleum BP is not only liable for what happened, but has to cover all the economic costs for stopping the spill, and all the damage on nature, humans, life and local economy that the incident causes. This will likely imply a legal act, which in turn brings in another set of actors, lawyers and courts. The role of courts and lawyers is documented in the documentary CRUDE, which follows the law suit of indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazonas against the corporation Chevron. My sister who is at home with her newborn son asked me what she can do from her suburban home in a small Swedish town. Use less petrol would be an immediate answer. Simultaneously I have read No Logo by Naomi Klein who tells the story of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the writer and environmental activist who was executed by the Nigerian government in 1995 after having fought against the crude oil extraction by Shell. In total they make up a thought provoking backdrop about environmental responsibility for me.

While Klein reflects on the need to “brand” the struggle against transnational corporations,
I think about the fact that the Swedish householders that I interviewed in 2005-2006 expressed that the most difficult everyday activity for them to change was the transports with their private car. There is little incentive to boycott petrol, I take it. Running the risk of reaching too far in my attempt to reveal global connections and commodity chains I think about the campaign that Solidarity Sweden – Latin America is running with the slogan ”it is better with soup in the stomachs than in the engines” – a slogan which need some explanation since ”soup” is slang for gas in Swedish. The focus of the campaign is to question the use of land in Latin America to produce fuel for Swedish cars, a policy supported by the EU, instead of producing food for the local population, or food sovereignty as it is expressed by Via Campesina.

In attempting to disentangle the assemblage around oil we can thus follow a set of actor groups who are involved – the transnational corporations, individual citizens, nation states and environmental justice NGOs, and media. Here I want to reflect on what a single event of an environmental crisis means with the attraction of journalists and photographers and TV channels waiting for oil smeared birds to represent in picturesque forms, before moving on to the next crisis, and the more continuous crises that the use of petrol implies.

Thinking of environmental justice and action competence, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s brother said to Naomi Klein that ”It is important not to make people feel powerless. After all, they need to fill their cars with something. If we tell them all companies are guilty, they will feel they can do nothing. What we are trying to really do, now that we have this evidence against this one company, is to let people have the feeling that they can at least have the moral force to make one company change.” (quoted in Klein 2000:423) Klein herself reasons as follows: ”Since resource companies don’t sell directly to the public, they barely have to worry about their public image – a factor that brings up what is perhaps the most significant limitiation of brand-based campaigns: they can be powerless in the face of coprorations that opt out of the branding game. So all over the world children work in fields with toxic pesticides, in dangerous mines and rubber and steel factories where small fingers and hands are sliced off or mangled in heavy machines. Many of these children are producing goods for the export market: canned fish, tea, rice, rubber for tires. But their plight has never captured the world’s imagination like that of the kids who make soccer balls with swooshes on them or clothing for Barbie dolls, because their exploitation is unbranded, and therefore less identifiable, less visible, in our image-obsessed world … When brand image is the weapon, an unbranded company can get off the hook entirely … but why single out Nike or Michael Jordan when the U.S. government itself is implicated in the same sickness?” (Klein quotes William Greider from his book One World, Ready or Not 2000:421, 424-5)

I would argue that the above quotations place the attention on the issue of how to make the problem comprehensible, and the pedagogical challenge inherent in transforming the problem description into a manageable solution i.e. what should I answer my sister when she asks me what she can do to act on the oil spill in the Mexican Gulf, or when motivating myself to think that another world is possible, and that the 30,000 Davids can fight Goliath in Ecuador.