UC Berkeley Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics
UC Berkeley Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics Title Petro-Violence: Some Thoughts on Community, Extraction, and Political Ecology Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zh116zd Author Watts, Michael J. Publication Date 1999-09-24 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California - - , , Michael J. Watts L. Carper/R. Reen, 1999 , , -: , , Michael J. Watts Professor of Geography Director, Institute of International Studies University of California, Berkeley Oil, more than any other commodity, illustrates both the importance and the mystification of natural resources in the modern world. Fernando Coronil, The Magical State, 1997, p. 49 I want to offer some thoughts on the violence that so often attends the extraction of oil [and neces- sarily on the ecological devastation which is its handmaiden]; what I’ll call for the purposes of this workshop petro-violence. My purpose is not to offer, obviously, a sort of commodity determinism— petroleum is more violent than coal, or oil extraction breeds Muslim radicalism (Iran) while copper breeds evangelical cronyism (Zambia)—but to take seriously the idea that the biophysical properties of Nature, of a natural resource, matter in both palpable and analytical ways. It is both difficult and artificial to distill out the narrowly defined biological and geophysical properties of “crude” or “raw” petroleum from the social relations (institutional practices, ideological associations and meanings, forms of extraction, production and use) of petroleum, a commodity not only saturated in the mythos of the rise of the West but also indisputably one of the most fundamental building blocks of twenti- eth century industrial capitalism (“hydrocarbon capitalism”).
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