There Will Be Birds: Images of Oil Disasters in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
2012; Oxford University Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jahist/jar651
ISSN1945-2314
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
ResumoBetween 1967 and 1977, with a string of marine oil spills, national newspapers and magazines expanded their century-old repertoire of oil disaster images beyond gushers and fires to include photographs of oil-soaked birds and other wildlife, crippled, dying, or dead.These images of oil's wild victims marked something new.They contested older visual narratives of oil as abundant and powerful, the source of American economic and national dominance. 1The oil-soaked bird or mammal, paired with the oft-seen image of volunteers bathing the animal, suggested a range of new stories.These included oil as a threatening evil and the individual American oil consumer (affluent, white) as guilty, through demand for oil, of victimizing innocents.Those images also created narratives of guilt-ridden consumers as rescuers, seeking salvation from oily sin through efforts to save the helpless.Finally, through these images, stories were able to project the fate of oilsoaked birds and mammals onto oil consumers: wounded, powerless victims of technology and oil dependence."Not only was it man's fault that they suffered," a 1977 Boston Globe editorial stated of rescued auks and loons, "but we can look at their sad plight and see in it our own fate."Just as Paul Thomas Anderson's 2007 film of California oil business, There Will Be Blood, made murder the inevitable product of oil wealth, so too, by the late 1970s, had media images of oil disasters settled on a single trope. 2 Americans' new oil stories reflected key historical developments of the post-World War II era: a broad shift in middle-class values from the primacy of industrial growth and economic gain to a focus on consumption of environmental amenities at home and at play, including fresh air, clean water, and open space in local, state, and national parks; the resulting rise of modern middle-class environmentalism, characterized by widespread concern about pollution as a threat to human health, wildlife populations, and residential
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