Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century by Stephanie LeMenager (review)

Bad love. We all have experiences with toxic relationships, whether they be with people, places, and/or things. Although many of these interconnectivities are unique to different individuals, one that implicates each and every one of us reading this review is oil. As epitomized by the popular postapocalyptic film Mad Max: Fury Road—with the notorious character suspended from a gas-guzzling rig who plays vigorously on a flame-spewing guitar—consuming oil in both textual and material form seduces us and shapes human existence. Eco-critic Stephanie LeMenager artfully and poignantly examines the consequences of this “destructive attachment” in Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (11). Not just writing about our period of “Tough Oil” but writing “from within it,” LeMenager paints and participates in a cultural history of the sticky ties we have to hydrocarbons. She reveals how living and oil are so closely articulated that one becomes seemingly unimaginable without the other (10). LeMenager views her rhetorical project as recounting “the story of petroleum [that] has come to play a foundational role in the American imagination and therefore in the future of life on earth” (4). While she claims to not provide solutions for a future beyond fossil fuels, the author compellingly offers a starting point for imagining something other than a “national imaginary saturated in oil” (65). By example, she urges us to cultivate our own “narrative intelligence” in conversation and collaboration with others to resist the viscosity of our oily entanglements (18).

LeMenager describes her method as “commodity regionalism,” which foregrounds the regional, rather than the national, implications of oil (12). Her study of different locales is not arbitrary and exemplifies the importance of place specificity for good storytelling. Although LeMenager’s archive is derived primarily from coastal North American contexts, recognition that our environments are always already entwined, because pollution defies state and geographic borders, suggests that the resonance of Living Oil need not be confined to those living in her regions of study.

This “environmental cultural studies” book flows along a timeline that spans from World War I to the present and is, at times, deeply personal (6). LeMenager begins Living Oil by describing her relationship with her father, a proud, conservative oil man. She concludes with her experiences as a community member on the frontlines of fracking operations in southern California. Moreover, the pages between her prologue and epilogue are not devoid of personal experiences with the oil industry and other humans.

Chapter 1, “Origins, Spills,” historicizes key moments and texts of the U.S. ecology movement. In particular, LeMenager explores different media chronicling the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. She also recollects her experiences at a film screening and the failed cultivation of audience action on the part of the director. Based on this incident and her discussion of still photographs, she cautions that affective responses to media exposure do not necessarily lead to environmental activism. Also in this chapter, LeMenager discusses the oil–water nexus because “the right to an ocean commons” is increasingly threatened by the petroleum industry (48).

Chapter 2, “The Aesthetics of Petroleum,” engages a host of media, including “the paperback print book, television, and the twentieth-century Hollywood movie as expressions of the modern fossil fuel complex” (66). Invested in studying the social affect produced by our petrophilia, she responds to the query “why is oil so bad?” with a four-fold rationale that unearths our enduring love for a substance that simultaneously fuels and destroys life.

Chapter 3, “Petromelancholia,” introduces this affective neologism, described as “an unresolved grieving of conventional fossil fuel reserves, [which] has not been healed by more intensive extractive processes such as ultradeep drilling” (16). This chapter also includes the only prolonged analysis of a non-North American energy struggle: environmental injustices in the Niger Delta. LeMenager compares the African area’s fossil fuel contamination and subsidence problems with the U.S...