GOVERNING DISASTER: The Political Life of the Environment during the BP Oil Spill

Abstract

This article presents an embedded analysis of how scientists and federal officials scrambled to get a handle on the deepwater blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Taking the environment as a compelling ethnographic question, it shows how the oil spill and the environment are not given objects that then collide during a disaster, as is commonly assumed in “disaster studies.” Rather, crude oil and the environment are unstable fields instantiated and made politically operable in relationship to one another. The BP Oil Spill went from a sprawling mess into a manageable problem by being lodged within a refined deployment of the environment. The ocean was, in a way, transformed into a scientific laboratory within which the true size and scope of diffuse hydrocarbons could finally be mastered. Such placement not only objectified the oil spill, it also quietly defined what knowledge of the disaster and what relations to it could have credibility. The revised environment fully contained the disaster, insulating the biological reach of this oil spill from human considerations and rendering personal accounts of sickness implausible and illegible. Techniques of sequestering and inspecting the oil spill came to underwrite a new regime of disconnection between the disaster and the public.

Chronicle of a disaster foretold: scientific risk assessment, public participation, and the politics of imperilment in Bristol Bay, Alaska

“…Studies show how participatory forums are disrupted and delegitimated as frustrated opponents of resource development schemes refuse to engage, staging protests outside public hearings (F. Li ); as actors on the margins take up technoscientific tools or roles to pursue their own ‘counter’‐projects (Hébert & Brock under review; Holifield ; Reno ); and as plans simply fall flat when unruly subjects fail to heed attempts to remake them into participatory players (Welker ). Contestations seem to bubble up amid inclusionary efforts to pin down environmental impacts (see, e.g., Bond ; Cepek ; Himley ; Holifield ; Howe ; F. Li ; Mathews ; Reno ; Vaughn ). Given the persistent ways in which constraints upon participation are subject to overflows like these, tensions over knowledge and authority are likely to be manifest even within the most tightly organized public forums, and perhaps only more so.…”

“…While the precise calculations that ground these scenarios speak to the probabilistic exercise of risk‐assessment science, they crescendo into almost cinematic narratives of an imperilled future . On one level, the Watershed Assessment participates in the familiar quantitative depiction of disaster as a ‘disembodied scientific object measured against an implemented baseline’ (Bond : 709). On another, it presents a departure from this baseline with the kind of dramaturgical flair that recalls the disaster scenarios that Andrew Lakoff terms ‘imaginative enactments’ (2008: 402).…”

Measuring vapor intrusion: from source science politics to a transdisciplinary approach

“…Both environmental and social science researchers grapple with the challenges and politics of risk production and “toxic uncertainty” (Auyero and Swistun 2009, 2007). We would argue that VI cases are, like all toxics disasters, “productive events” (Bond 2013) insofar as they present new exposure science and community engagement challenges. The escalating attention on VI in the regulatory community has, however, created a sense of urgency.…”

“…The escalating attention on VI in the regulatory community has, however, created a sense of urgency. There is an “epistemic urgency of [VI] disasters; that is, how [VI] disasters demand to be thought and the social consequences of how they are thought” (Bond 2013:707). For example, regulatory reactions to known or possible TCE exposures shapes the “epistemic urgency” of VI.…”

Disaster response and recovery: Aid and social change

“…Understanding disaster as “ part of the larger patterns and practices of societies viewed geographically and historically” (Bolin and Stanford :27, authors’ original italics), research attention is increasingly trained on the social and historical processes that expose certain groups of people to higher chance of risk and harm (see Faas, this issue; Hoffman and Oliver‐Smith ; Oliver‐Smith ; Oliver‐Smith and Hoffman ). Consequently, research on disaster response and recovery has long focused on the extent to which relief, recovery, and reconstruction efforts reduce or create the conditions and relationships that endanger people's lives and properties in the first place, including a region's environmental and technological susceptibility (Bond ; Button ); socially and politically created patterns of vulnerability (Bankoff et al. 2004; Bolin and Stanford ); localized experience and perceptions of risk and disaster (Lauer ; Mercer et al.…”