- 2 – “No explanation is offered – no identification, no mention of whose private property the stinking lake is and who the authorized personnel might be. The “lake” is without history.”
- The idea that landscapes have a history unless its purposes elided. How does one erase the history of a landscape?
- 3 – The fundamental aim of environmental history is to locate human actions not only within their social, political, and economic spheres, but also within a network of ecological relationships. That is, just as human beings interact with one another, they interact with the environment and the entire gamut of organisms and phenomena within it, what we typically call ‘nature.’”
- 4 – “The main argument this book makes is that fossil fuel extraction entailed the creation of an entirely new ecology, what I call the ecology of oil. By that I mean that the oil industry generated a specific set of changes. These were rapid and radical, roughly sequential but also overlapping, summarized under three categories: shifts in local land tenure patterns, changes in local land use, and transformations in local social structures and composition. Ensconced in these three overarching processes were a series of other changes and effects: the displacement and marginalization of aboriginal populations; unprecedented and often destructive alterations in the landscape; the formation of new social groups, cultures, and economic regimes; and the creation of pronounced differences in the human experience of nature based on newly manufactured social distinctions. All relationships in this ecological network were hierarchical by design: humans lorded over nature on principle, but distinctions among men depended on economic regimes and ideological constructs.”
- 6 – “The labor hierarchy, moreover, also influenced the experience of each group in nature. The top echelons reshaped the environment to fit not only production needs, but also their own sense of aesthetics and pleasure. The oilmen, in other words, played with and in the environment. Foreign white working-class men and Mexicans by contrast knew nature through work. Their experience of the environment was tied to the labor they performed outdoors every day. However, that interaction was mediated by color/nationality: foreign workers were exposed to the dangers of explosions and fires, but they were spared from other occupational hazards and from disease. Those at the bottom of the labor ladder, Mexican workers, felt the full impact of the inhospitability of the tropical forest toward humans, the occupational dangers of working with highly flammable and noxious natural substances, and the whole gamut of diseases that thrived in those environmental and social conditions.”
- 1,2
- 38 – “The Mexican elite thus imagined a different ecology altogether in the tropical rainforest, the ecology of the cultivated garden. The cultivated garden implied a different relationship between humans and nature from the one that the indigenous population practiced. Instead of humans adapting to their environment so they coevolved, the elite proposed an alternative relationship where man controlled nature and worked to reshape all its elements for his own purposes.”
- 1,2
- 49 – whole issue about Liberal capitalist plans to convert communally owned land to privately owned land in order to catapult the campesino and indigenous populations “forward” in progress, into “modernity” — the reconfiguration of the spatial conception of land transports one in time
- 3
- 58 – “they managed to protect the rainforest, to coexist and evolve with it, its flora, and its fauna, not in harmony, but at least reciprocally” – this phrase “not in harmony, but at least reciprocally”, is repeated throughout
- 4
- 101 – “It took nature millions of years to evolve into rainforest, mangroves, swamps, and sand dunes in northern Veracruz. It took indigenous peoples of the Huasteca millennia to adapt to and coevolve with the environment nature created. It took American and British petroleum companies less than four decades to uproot the ecosystems of northern Veracruz and replace them with an industrial landscape.”
- Idea that a landscape, properly and purely constructed by nature, or in harmony with nature, takes a very long time to create, but takes very little time to destroy
- 3,4
- “Discovery and development of the known oil fields in Mexico were the achievement of British and American pioneers, who came into this region at a time when it was a little-known, pest-infested, tropical wilderness… In the face of almost insuperable obstacles, they made remarkably rapid progress. In less than 10 years Mexico had begun to attract world-wide attention as an oil producer.”
- Relationship between these time disparities and capitalism ecologically sound development takes longer than is acceptable from a capitalist ROI perspective, but ecologically disruptive development happens at the scale of profitable expectation.
- 121(+/-) basically all of chapter 3, the changes made to the landscape by the ecology of oil, the cascading changes pinballing between rural/urban environs, e.g., dredging the river to make it more passable for oil transports, then using the dredge as fill to expand the size of the city’s land; e.g. #2 the rain, wind, and waves altering the infrastructure with rust and stress, and the vegetation recolonizing the sand dunes
- 2
- 130 – “Fixed infrastructure of the sort the oil companies needed fared poorly in the dynamic and unstable landscape of the Huasteca, to the detriment of both the industry and the land.”
- 139 – “‘Paradise’ had become ‘hell’.” The declensionism of “the fall” from paradise to hell, but also exhibiting caution about the declensionist narrative, ascribing “paradise” and “hell” to contemporaneous observers of that paradise and hell
- 1, 4
- 145-46 – allegories of white oilmen, nature as feminine, underground as womb, they as masculine; or, the oil well gushers as mythological beasts, and they as the gods that slay them — the indegenous response, the one motivating indigenous resistance, was to see such phenomena as cautionary tales
- 1
- 147 – “Although evidence supports the notion that certain locations and individual species eventually recovered, the widespread deforestation and urbanization that accompanied oil production degraded or eliminated swamps, mangroves, and forests across northern Veracruz.”
- 4 – declensionism tempered by acknowledgement of some recovery
- 165+ the racialized housing arrangements at the oil camps, compare to the labor camps at dam sites (watering the revolution) and at the lumber sites (instituting nature)
- 179 – “The social changes the oil companies generated in the Huasteca were as drastic as the changes they exercised on the landscape. Moreover, the two processes were intertwined in such a way that the social hierarchies deeply influenced and often determined the experiences between humans and nature as well. . . . The social divisions and labor hierarchies the companies implemented thus reached the environmental realm. The spheres where this divergence was most pronounced were in lifestyle, health, and safety.”
- 2
- 182+ – “Thus, the top layers of the oil hierarchy forged a relationship with the natural world of the Huasteca based on their willingness and capacity to mold it into something familiar. From extraction to recreation, at work and at play, the oil barons’ lifestyle demonstrated how thoroughly they commodified nature. Even as they found “paradise” in the tropical forest of the Huasteca, the oil men not only bought, sold, leased, and exploited it; they also treated the flora and fauna therein as objects subject to possession, to be collected, tamed, transferred as gifts, killed for sport, or dismantled for their recreation (and re-creation).”
- 1, 2, the relationship of the white and mexican laborers to nature follows
- 258 – conservation as the rule of the day in early 20th century environmentalism
- 261 – “The implications for the oil industry were enormous. By reinserting the nation into the property equation, the revolutionary leadership undid the absoluteness of private ownership of nature. It voided the notion that nature was but a commodity that could be negotiated as a simple matter of contracts between individual private parties. The state not only decided who could own property, but also reserved the right to regulate all contractual negotiations involving the transfer of property and to reverse them altogether under specific circumstances. That meant that the changes in land tenure patterns central to the ecology of oil that had been taking place in the Huasteca since igoo were neither final nor secure once the Constitution became effective on May 1, 1917.”
- 1
- 272 – ecology of oil as a “wasteland”
- 343 – “oil produced its own ecology” — freakology of human/non-nonhuman landscapes
- 344 – ecology of oil buttressed by ecology of ideas — control of nature and control of man (? what about control of nature to control man and control man to control nature?)
- 2
- Co-control and co-resistance
- Knowledge politics and labor: how did different groups and individuals know nature through their labor (a la Richard White)? How did different actors develop knowledge and skills and what kinds of contests emerged among them over how to intervene in non-human nature? Who gets to decide what landscapes and waterscapes are produced? What were the consequences of these contests for nature itself?
- Human-non-human-nature relationship: how do people produce nature? what role does non-human nature play in these stories? Is it an actor, acted upon, co-production?
- Relationship between time and space.
- Declensionism: early environmental histories were often declensionist narratives, often about deforestation. How have these environmental historians of Latin America attempted to move beyond declensionism since the 1990s?