The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938

"This is different from most of the books on my list, because it is more narrowly focussed, geographically and chronologically: forty years or so of the Mexican oil industry along the Gulf of Mexico coast, in a region called La Huasteca. So, it’s much smaller in scope than any of the others. What I admire about it is, first, the detailed deep-dive research. Kate Brown did some of that as well, and I know how hard that is. Second, she was the first environmental historian who brought labor history into the same lens as environmental history. Her work is about how the Mexican oil industry affected the rainforest of La Huasteca. I said Mexican oil industry, but I should note it was foreign-owned, mainly US-owned. The book ends in 1938 with the nationalization of Mexico’s oil industry. Prior to that it was mostly run by Americans. At any rate, she combines the study of what this meant for the local environment—which, as you can imagine, was far from benign; there were lots of blowouts, spills, splashes, and fires—with a study of the experience of the labor force. La Huasteca was not a thickly populated region. The oil drilling operations needed labor, and people flowed in from various parts of Mexico and lived in temporary encampments or barracks, you could say, like oil workers just about everywhere early in the 20th century. They suffered a variety of health problems, from exposure to toxins to burns. Getting at the experience of this labor force was something she did well before just about anyone else. There are lots of other people now who are trying to meld labor history and environmental history. In some ways, it’s a natural pairing. But Myrna Santiago was a pioneer in this regard. The obvious reason is that the world in the 21st century is poised on the brink of the unknown with respect to environmental change. We don’t know where we stand. There’s a possibility we are in the early stages of gigantic sea changes in biodiversity and climate, which may or may not happen. But there is now a non-negligible probability that this is our immediate future. To have any kind of appreciation of the dilemmas that we currently face, with respect to the environment, we need long-term perspectives. Some of these are history in the realm of decades and centuries, the classic chronological scope of environmental histories. But some of the perspectives that are useful are much longer; they belong to Earth history as much as environmental history. I think education in both of these spheres is highly desirable at the moment, just as I think historical perspective on every issue of the day is valuable, whether that’s matters of war and peace or matters of reproduction politics. To assess and understand the forces at play in the present you need to understand the momentum, the direction the trajectories involved. The stakes are very high right now when it comes to the environment."