This essay illustrates how petroleum, the oil industry, and oil corporations manifest and are manifested across publicly visible and accessible platforms, or visual opportunity spaces, in promotion, ...conflict, consumption, and warning. The product, industry operations, and brand name corporations are represented as essential entities, benevolent neighbours, educators, or entertainment providers; as problematic or disruptive; or as hazardous. Yet when comparing everyday observations, corporate-sponsored images of goodwill are not equally countered by images of resistance or government-mandated public health warnings. Positive images blanket public opportunity spaces in ways that lead to the normalisation of the industry's presence and of the consumption and production of petroleum, while critical or cautious visual narratives are minimised to sporadic or event-based protest activities or minuscule and routinised warnings. A comparative analysis sheds light on the imbalance of visual indicators of promotion, criticism, and vigilance. Oil corporations or the industry dominate and are permitted to dominate access to visual spaces in volume, duration, and positive or gratifying sensations that are not equally countered by civil society's challenges or concerns, or by notices of climate change or human or ecological health risks.
Residents of Southeast Florida face many climate-related impacts, so to understand how climate change is framed and acted upon in the region, we conducted a two-part study of community organisers and ...residents. First, the first author participated in an 11-week, community-based workshop on climate advocacy, leadership, justice, and resilience to identify how a climate action initiative framed climate change and fostered community leaders and allies. We found "place" and "justice" to be two prominent frames. After the 11-week training, seven of the 18 attendees (or 39 percent) were then interviewed on their understanding and application of the training. Participants expressed a deeper appreciation of the local risks on both coastal and inland communities, and discovered how spatial disparities in residence (between higher-income, coastal communities and lower-income, inland communities) led to climate injustice and climate gentrification. Their understanding was further substantiated by their direct experience with Hurricane Irma. Yet the more privileged participants resisted the organisers' overarching goal to foster community-based climate justice engagement. Several of the participants their relative privilege and inexperience with social injustice as deterrents. While it was understood that everyone in the region would be affected and that there were social and economic differences in terms of impact and vulnerability, the privileged participants perceived these disparities as too daunting to become a climate justice leader or ally.
To advance marine and coastal sociologies, this paper presents how Aotearoa New Zealand, an island nation without a history, culture, or reputation of deepwater oil production, responded to offshore ...exploration. Using a case study approach and qualitative data collection methods, this study finds that the culture and knowledge of coastal communities challenge the political economy of oil extraction. To the literature on coastal cultures, this study identifies how some coastal communities reside in embedded seascapes with the marine environment. For them, the sea informs, gives meaning, and orientates their identity, sense of place, and politics. To the literature on marine literacy, this study contributes how some communities may possess submersible knowledge of the marine environment without ever having walked its seafloor. This knowledge is developed and fortified through traditional stories, practical experience, lay ecological study, and scientific research. To the political economy of the ocean, this study suggests that maritime zones are designated for sacrifice and privilege, or a hybrid of the two. From these findings, this paper outlines a framework for marine justice as a paradigm and potential movement, even though its achievement may not be realized.
•The oil and gas industry was (and then was not) expanding in Aotearoa New Zealand.•Residents with knowledge of hydraulic fracturing informed frontier communities of their experiences to support ...local campaigns of resistance.•The public “discovered” and contested the industry practice of landfarming to dispose of or process industry waste.•National pressure on industry operations in the traditional oil and gas province, or a civic boomerang effect, began after industry expansions.
Aotearoa New Zealand is a little-known oil and gas producer with a long history of conventional, small-volume extraction in the province of Taranaki. The development of unconventional technologies coupled with political and economic interest in expanding extraction positioned communities and landscapes with no previous history into becoming emergent, extractive frontiers. Data from interviews, observations, and publicly available documents were collected and analyzed to study how fracking vulnerable communities responded to oil and gas proposals for exploration. This study found that residents of the first-fracked communities of Taranaki became national experts, informants, and translators for the fracking vulnerable regions. This study also found that first-fracked communities in English-speaking nations served, whether knowingly or not, as an additional well of publicly accessible insight whether they experienced earthquakes in Oklahoma, mobilized resistance in England, or locked their gates in Australia. This global exchange revealed a globalization of citizen knowledge for vulnerable communities to challenge becoming the next frontier. Finally, this study found that a civic boomerang occurred, in which residents of the frontiers who were opposed to hydraulic fracturing discovered the problems of extraction and turned a more critical lens on the industry’s workaday practices in the province of Taranaki.
Oil Injustice examines the mobilization efforts of four communities with different oil histories in response to the construction of an oil pipeline. Using multiple sites in Ecuador as case studies, ...Patricia Widener examines the efforts of grassroots groups, non-governmental organizations, activist mayors, and transnational advocates that mobilized to redefine the country's oil path and to represent the voice of many local communities and organizations that sought to offer an alternative to the nation's oil dependency and to the use of its oil wealth. These groups generated divergent and at times rival reactions to the pipeline, though at their core, the multiple campaigns developed from a shared history and awareness of a number of marginalized communities and degraded environments in areas most important to the oil process. Widener shows that global environmental justice demands are bound within a capitalist political system, where community activists, national NGOs and their international allies are forced to seek local change rather than attempt to defeat a disabling and unequal system.
This article examines the relevance of environmental justice (EJ) and climate change debates as points of articulation and mobilisation among community groups responding to a proposed refinery. It ...then compares media coverage of the refinery project, a bi-national pipeline and other energy and climate-related news events. The analytical frame joins the EJ paradigm with citizen mobilisation on issues of climate change and energy projects that emit greenhouse gases and that discourage development of renewable sources. Data were collected and analysed from websites, public message boards and media documents. Findings indicate that a community-based anti-refinery campaign combined local EJ struggles with climate activism, while challenging fossil fuel dependencies and calling for renewable regional energy. A climate justice community formed - yet their voices were in their blogs and websites, not in local or national media.
The primary intent of this research note is to begin a conversation on how the perception of online surveillance impacts citizen organizing and the research process. In particular, this research note ...recognizes the inability of researchers to guarantee confidentiality and identity protections to research participants. These comments are based on the e-fears and risks identified by some citizen-activists and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Aotearoa New Zealand mobilizing against new oil extraction proposals. One campaign formed to resist deep offshore seismic testing, exploration and drilling; another focused on onshore hydraulic fracturing. This research included 66 qualitative interviews, participant observation, and attendance at 44 events from 2013 to 2014 in 23 towns or cities. This research note is not based on the original intent of my research (to study oil resistance in a time of climate change and oil disasters), but on the unexpected comments expressed by some participants, which then led to more targeted questioning toward the end of my fieldwork.
This research note links the covert and overt chilling effects of cyber-surveillance on activist campaigns and on the social research of social movement actors in campaigns of resistance. Based on ...fieldwork in Aotearoa New Zealand during campaigns of resistance against offshore and onshore oil and gas proposals, this note explores how surveillance fears impact the public gatherings and information-sharing of citizen-activists and how the researcher may fail to ensure participant confidence and confidentiality, thereby becoming the researched and documented as well. The actions and commitments of both parties, the citizen-activist and the researcher of grassroots and social movements, may be strengthened or impeded by the degree of expected, though rarely verified, political and economic surveillance.
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