Book. Human beings have certainly deployed more energy since 1900 than between the beginning of humanity and that date. This observation by the American historian John McNeill, cited in the epilogue of the collective work Living and struggling in a toxic world. Environmental violence and health in the age of oil (Seuil, 480 pages, 25.50 euros), condenses the scale of the upheaval that the last century has produced. Of all this energy, one is emblematic of the “great acceleration” what the 20th century was: oil.
The major role of this hydrocarbon has been the subject of numerous works, most often apologetic. And sometimes critical, like the emblematic Carbon Democracy. Political power in the age of oil (The Discovery, 2013, published in its original version in 2011), by political scientist Timothy Mitchell, who argues that our modern democracies have been enabled by the hegemony of oil.
But this story seen from above, glorifying without supporting the oil-prosperity equation, dissatisfies the co-directors of this volume, the historian Renaud Bécot and the political scientist Gwenola Le Naour, who brought together around twenty specialists in social and environmental history of petrochemical regions.
Giving voice to ordinary actors
To the stories mythologizing the omnipotence of the oil complex, Living and struggling in a toxic world opposes a research work based on “a less linear story and giving a voice and a role to ordinary actors” mobilized against these ravages.
In a vein that joins that of the Catalan economist Joan Martinez Alier, author of The Ecology of the poor. A study of environmental conflicts around the world (Les Petits Matins, 2014, published in its original version in 2002), the book is interested in the environmental violence produced by an industry which has imposed on the territories where it is established a “long history of productive conversion” peppered with disasters.
The study of this “petroleumization” opens up to a counter-history seen from these invisible regions: immediate economic gains camouflage a “slow violence” what is the generalized contamination of living spaces, as well as “sacrificial landscapes” shaped by petrochemicals.
Documented excess mortality
THE “petropolitics”massively encouraged by States, are analyzed through the prism of the concept of necropolitics of the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe: these political choices maintain certain social groups in living conditions “likely to hasten their death”. These social groups are never neutral, as supported by the twelve contributions of this international overview, which we regret only deals with Northern countries.
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