Can the stories of bananas, whales, sea birds, and otters teach us to reconsider the seaport as a place of ecological violence, tied to oil, capital, and trade?
San Pedro Bay, which contains the contiguous Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is a significant site for petroleum shipping and refining as well as one of the largest container shipping ports in the world-some forty percent of containerized imports to the United States pass through this so-called America's Port. It is also ecologically rich. Built atop a land- and waterscape of vital importance to wildlife, the heavily industrialized Los Angeles Harbor contains estuarial wetlands, the LA River mouth, and a marine ecology where colder and warmer Pacific Ocean waters meet. In this compelling interdisciplinary investigation, award-winning author Christina Dunbar-Hester explores the complex relationships among commerce, empire, environment, and the nonhuman life forms of San Pedro Bay over the last fifty years-a period coinciding with the era of modern environmental regulation in the United States. The LA port complex is not simply a local site, Dunbar-Hester argues, but a node in a network that enables the continued expansion of capitalism, propelling trade as it drives the extraction of natural resources, labor violations, pollution, and other harms. Focusing specifically on cetaceans, bananas, sea birds, and otters whose lives are intertwined with the vitality of the port complex itself, Oil Beach reveals how logistics infrastructure threatens ecologies as it circulates goods and capital-and helps us to consider a future where the accumulation of life and the accumulation of capital are not in violent tension.
Christina Dunbar-Hester is a science and technology studies scholar and associate professor in the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. She is the author of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism, winner of the McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Technology Research, and Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures, winner of the Information Science Book of the Year Award from the Association for Information Science and Technology.
Title: Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond
Author: Dunbar-Hester, Christina
ISBN: 9780226819716
Binding:
Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
Publication Date: 2023-01-24
Number of Pages: 272
Weight: 0.3801 kg
Dunbar-Hester walks us through Southern California's complicated coastal landscape to show how this region has been built as a place where 'multitudinous life is juxtaposed with patterned violence.' It is an invaluable lesson at a moment when we are grappling with solutions to rectify the deadly spaces that have been built in pursuit of profit and military power. As Oil Beach shows, looking at the world through a multispecies lens is necessary if we are to repair what have become destructive ecological relationships and values. -- Juan De Lara, author of Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Southern California
Oil Beach accomplishes that rarest of feats: it transforms the way the world looks, bringing into view the hidden logic that structures the very ground beneath our feet. The story of the LA ports is hugely consequential and, in Dunbar-Hester's hands, it's also exhilarating, encompassing both the broad sweep of change and the small details that give meaning to our landscape. It's unusual to find an academic book that's hard to put down, but Dunbar-Hester's smart, sometimes funny, and always eloquent voice is truly singular. -- Miriam Posner, University of California, Los Angeles
Having thoroughly researched the environmental impact of these ports, Dunbar-Hester makes the case that San Pedro Bay has become a sacrifice zone to oil distribution and expanding global trade, with some environmental mitigation considered a cost of doing business. * Library Journal *