Intervention
Oil + the Limits of Narrative?

An oil rig located about 200 miles west of the BP Deepwater Horizon site exploded today. The media has covered the explosion only cursorily, making brief mention of three points: (1) 13 workers on board the rig escaped safely; (2) The rig, owned by Houston-based Mariner Energy Company, was about 150 feet shy of the depth subject to the Obama Administration's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling (which applies to wells located in 500-feet of water or deeper); and (3) Although the explosion has not yet resulted in an oil spill, the event no doubt strengthens environmentalist calls for an expanded ban on drilling.

It is this final point that gives me pause. For it exposes a chasm between those who believe oil to be an increasingly risky, unjust, and untenable source of energy—a belief underwritten in part by the scientific consensus about climate change and in part by the history of difficult-to-drill regions like the Gulf of Mexico and Niger Delta—and those who see our oil-based economy as the cornerstone of economic growth, job creation, and middle-class livelihood. While my sympathies are with the former, I am struck by the inability on both sides of this energy gulf to imagine a future beyond and without oil.

As a scholar of literature, I find this hypothesis interesting because it suggests that something about the present is limiting our capacity to narrate the future. Of course, apocalyptic and speculative fictions that take climate change and energy consumption as springboards do exist. (Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy is perhaps the most well-known of these.) But, as critics have observed, the number of science fiction novels about space exploration or artificial intelligence dwarf those that envision a future in which climate change has altered the earth's ecosystems and in which the disappearance of oil and coal reserves has transformed human societies. We see a similar phenomena in the realm of political discourse. One strain of climate change and energy rhetoric no doubt sees a revolution of modern life just around the corner (think here of the peak oil and eco-village movements). In the main however, neither proponents of renewable energy and climate policy nor advocates for the oil, coal, and nuclear industries have created narratives about where we are heading that look very different from where we are now. And yet, the capacity to imagine multiple futures—futures that are radically different from the present and recent past—seems fundamental both to how narrative works and to how human cultures develop and change. In light of the imagination (or, innovation) that enabled oil companies to drill a mile below the ocean's surface in the first place and in light of the variability that structures nearly every aspect of cultural and ecological life, I find the failure to imagine a plethora of stories about the future—a future that will almost certainly be without oil—at once baffling and fascinating.

One explanation for these imaginative limits inheres in the staggering complexity of the energy grid itself. The latest issue of Mother Jones includes an illustration of this dense, tangled and increasingly submarine system: "The Deepwater Horizon rig was just one environmental time bomb in the Gulf. There are 33,000 miles of pipeline. 50,000 wells. Thousands of abandoned rigs." And that's just in the Gulf of Mexico. Put differently, our present relies on a network that is too complex to represent except through maps, graphs and other abstract models; by extension, it impedes us from dreaming up stories about how the future, which we assume to be all the more complex, might unfold. And yet, to surmount the impasse between those who wish an end to deepwater drilling and those who hope to pursue fossil fuels to the earth's core, new narratives about both the present and the future are in order—narratives that address but also counter the dizzying scale of our global energy grid.

(Originally posted at envo)

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