Reckoning with Harm: The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia, Amelia M Fiske, 2023, University of Texas Press
It is a striking illustration of the degree to which the contamination of Ecuador’s Amazon region has become such a quotidian aspect of life in the South American country that students, journalists, lawyers, and even visitors can take “toxic tours”.
In these guided trips, local activists demonstrate the degree to which the soil just beneath the feet of so many settlements in the region has been poisoned in multiple ways by the oil industry.
Experienced guides show visitors not only the degree to which soil samples taken then and there are blighted by toxic waste, but how residents’ lives have become entangled with industrial contamination and the struggles for justice this has provoked.
In Ecuador’s oilfields it is not uncommon to find houses that are immediately adjacent to or sometimes even located on top of waste pits of buried crude oil, and these “toxic tours” are an excellent way of demonstrating the everyday realities of this poisonous legacy.
But as Amelia Fiske argues, context is everything for these tours led by local people, who can reveal from the point of view of their own close relationship to extraction the personal and political dimensions of the harm caused to their communities by oiled dirt.
The tours provide a good example of the argument at the heart of Fiske’s book—that any discussion of pollution must of necessity extend beyond the technical evidence of contamination and the physical damage quantifiable in one particular place and time.
The problem with such technocratic discussions is that they can ultimately let state and oil companies off the hook, allowing them to insist both that the harm in question is measurable and principally chemical in nature, and hence that it can be controlled and compensated for in a way that allows that the oil sector’s violation of the landscape to continue unhindered.
Harm is, in effect, being defined by its perpetrators—which, in itself, is harmful.
As the writer notes: “Harm is manifest in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It is evident, persistent, and unrelenting for those living alongside the oil industry. At the same time, harm is often slippery, its presence difficult to confirm or discern. How do we know harm when we see it? Is it enough to bring our nose to a bucket of well water or squish oily mud between our fingers? What of corporeal memories, when a pang in the gut or a tightening of the lungs reminds us of moments of sickness and loss registered only in the flesh? Is harm’s origin in the inheritance of contaminated property?”
Fiske points out that there is neither expert nor public consensus about the nature or degree of damage caused when hydrocarbons and the chemicals used in oil production enter bodies and the natural environment, or about the ways in which oil operations affect political, social, and community dynamics.
This requires us to think beyond what have become legalistically definitive, contractually limited parameters of what is harmful and what is not—those, for example, thrashed out in lawsuits against the rapacious US oil majors conveniently “confounded by narrow, often technocratic understandings of evidence, toxicity, and responsibility”—and hence to consider harm in a much broader sense.
The author asks us to consider harm as a set of relationships that go beyond the present and material dimensions of contamination as it is discussed in courtrooms or scientific fora to include its impact upon individual lives, communities and political and economic relations.
Technocratic explanations of harm produce narrow understandings of responsibility for environmental pollution, she suggests, which are an insufficient basis for acting on the wide scope of harm that has occurred across a large region for generations.
Fiske writes: “A relational approach to harm calls for a reckoning with past unremediated contamination while pushing for broad forms of accountability that extend beyond legal and regulatory understandings of where harm begins and ends.”
Reckoning with Harm is an honest effort to show how present standards and expectations used to understand and verify harm cannot meaningfully articulate the profound changes visited upon societies by extractive industries.
It aims to show that the popular assumption in responses to environmental catastrophe that contamination is self-evident—as epitomised by “La Mano Sucia de Chevron” campaign launched under the former president Rafael Correa to hold Chevron accountable for decades of damage in the Amazon region—confronts far more nuanced truths.
By taking a relational approach, Fiske also inculpates the Ecuadorean state for harmful past and present extractive operations alongside the US oil majors such as Chevron and Texaco which have left so much destruction in their wake.
She writes of Correa’s famous “mano sucia” gesture: “His staged act of intentional exposure revealed not only his own compromised relations with oil as a president who was advancing an extractive agenda with PetroEcuador but also his own distance from daily life alongside oil extraction.
“I was struck by the irony of the leader of an extractive state denouncing the history of oil operations by Texaco, as though the operations had not occurred within a consortium with the Ecuadorian state, and as though today’s operations were not a significant environmental threat for which he also bore responsibility.”
Fiske offers a way of understanding the harm caused by oil pollution beyond solely a consideration of explanations for how chemicals act in the world, which inevitably exclude the concerns and lifestyles of those who live with their daily consequences, the beneficiaries, and the politics of distributive environmental justice.
Her book is a worthwhile contribution that draws attention to the complex chain of accountability involved in the creation of polluted landscapes over time, and in turn another way to consider the role of polluting sectors such as oil in an industrial, capitalist, globalised economy.
The author writes: “Refiguring harm as primarily relational is a vital project for addressing the effects of oil extraction and contemplating how to build a different future within a toxic world.”
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Categories: Ecuador, South America