The Dictionary of Human Geography (139 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
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oceans
Even though the decline of sea travel and diminishing dependence on self supplied food sources has removed the maritime world from the realm of landlubbers? everyday experience, the sea remains a crucial domain for the essential wherewithal that sustains humanity. Three perspectives have dominated most studies of human marine interactions: the ocean as a resource provider, the ocean as transport surface, and the ocean as a surface for moving troops and projecting military power. Embedded in each of these analytical perspectives is a certain conception of ocean space and ocean governance. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The value of the oceans to mankind has pol itical, social, economic, ecological and cultural dimensions. Marine industries include fisher ies, mining, non conventional energy indus tries, fresh water production, coastal services, environmental services, trade, tourism, sub marine telecommunications and fibre optic cable, safety and salvage, naval defence and ocean related education, training and research. The economic importance of the oceans is immense. According to the Inde pendent World Commission on the Oceans, ?one recent study suggests that the sum total of marine industries for which data are avail able, amounts to approximately US$ 1 trillion out of a total global GDP of US$ 23 trillion? (IWCO, 1998, p. 102). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ecological services provided by various mar ine and coastal ecosystems of the Earth inc lude the regulation of gaseous exchange with the atmosphere (e.g. the balance between car bon dioxide and oxygen, maintenance of ozone for ultraviolet radiation protection), cli mate regulation, disturbance regulation (e.g. storm protection, flood control), water supply, cycling of nutrients, waste treatment, food production and raw materials supply. The value of these too is immense. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Climate change is also projected to have effects such as global sea level rise and inten sifying global warming. According to a re cent Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report (ACIA, 2004), the Arctic climate is warming rapidly, at almost twice the rate as the rest of the world in the past two decades. At least half the summer sea ice in the Arctic is projected to melt by the end of this century, along with a significant portion of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Climatic variations will have a large impact on marine environments and marine related activities, including rising sea levels, changes in ocean salinity (which could strongly affect regional climate), the decline or extinction of marine species due to habitat loss, expanding marine shipping and the enhancement of some major Arctic fisheries together with the decline of others. (NEW PARAGRAPH) On 26 December 2004, the Indian Ocean tsunami devastated coastal communities. In its reports on the environmental impact of the Tsunami in Sri Lanka and Maldives, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP, 2006) has noted that coastal areas where coral reefs, mangrove forests and nat ural vegetation had been removed suffered the greatest damage. Fishing communities were the worst hit. The challenges include not only the restoration of the livelihood of fisher men and raising the income of coastal com munities above pre tsunami levels, but also capacity building to improve skills of boat builders, enforcement of standards to reduce potential risks to fishermen, and the revival of the tsunami hit aquaculture industry. sch (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) ACIA (2004); IWCO (1998); Steinberg (2001); UNEP (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
oil
Petroleum, it is sometimes said, is the economic bedrock of our hydrocarbon civiliza tion. The fuel of modernity, oil is an arche typal global commodity, the repository of unimaginable wealth (?black gold?) and part of the largest business on Earth (see capitaL ism). More than anything else, petroleum is a sort of lie: it reveals the profound mystifica tion, the paradoxes and that contradictoriness that surround naturaL resources in our mod ern world (Coronil, 1997). (NEW PARAGRAPH) If oil is a natural resource arguably the most global, the most strategic and among the most valuable what exactly is natural about it? It is a flammable liquid that occurs as a product of geophysical and biological pro cesses of great historical depth. A by product of pre human geological history, oil is depos ited in subterranean formations and consists principally of a mixture of hydrocarbons with traces of nitrogenous and sulphurous com pounds. In practice, of course, the compos ition of what passes as petroleum varies quite considerably, as one might anticipate in view of the heterogeneous circumstances associated with its 600 million year history of sedimenta tion and organic decomposition. Oil?s natural properties, one might say, are unstable and variegated (see nature). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Petroleum is customarily extracted through drilled wells, pumped along pipelines and refi ned into different ?fractions? or components. The science and practice by which oil is exp lored, located, pumped and fractionated has, in the past 150 years, deepened and proliferated to the point at which it is now part of a massive engineering and technical iNfrastructure. The oil industry is now dominated by the ?majors?, a cluster of transnational and highly diversified energy companies (see transnationaL corpor ations). It is sometimes said that oil drilling was invented by E.L. Drake, when he sunk his now infamous 69 foot well in Pennsylvania in 1859. But several hundred years before the birth of Christ, the Chinese were sinking 3500 ft wells to exploit petroleum for a multiplicity of pur poses. Surface oil deposits had been used as asphalt and as a sealant by Sumerians 3,000 years before the Chinese. In other words, oil?s natural resource use spans a vast swathe of human history. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Currently, oil and related gas exploitation covers two thirds of global energy needs: according to the International Energy Agency, by 2030 the figure will have fallen only mar ginally. Industrialized countries of the OECD account for almost two thirds of world oil demand. Global demand for oil is about 80 million barrels per day (compared to 47 mil lion in 1970). The USA consumes by far and away the largest quantities of petroleum (roughly 25 per cent) and is extremely depen dent on oil imports (largely from the middLe east, Canada and Mexico, and increasingly aFrica). The geology of oil and gas has a dis tinctive geography: two thirds of known oil reserves reside in the Middle East (which is overwhelmingly Muslim, a fact that has assumed particular significance in the context of 9/11 and the US occupation of Iraq). Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait alone account for almost 500 billion barrels of reserves. Over three quarters of all known reserves of petrol eum are found in eight oil exporting countries. The centrality of the USA in the global oil acquisition strategy a fact sealed by the spe cial relationship between the USA and Saudi Arabia, made in 1945 has meant that the geopoLitics of oil have been a central plank in US foreign policy over the past 80 years. The US addiction to cheap oil which is to say to the automobile turned, in the postwar period, on imperiaList relations with three key suppliers: Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and Iran. By 2001, this policy had proven to be a catastrophic failure even if the US consumer had benefited from oil prices at the gas station that bore no relation to actual costs of produc tion (which necessarily would have to include the massive expenditures on the military and the costs of global climate change and other ?externalities?). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The structure of the oil industry is charac terized by a recent (post 1970) reorganization (Yeoman, 2004). The global oil and gas indus try is dominated by five transnational oil com panies (ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP and TotalElfFina) with combined revenues over $1 trillion, and a number of massive national oil companies (owned by oil producing states). The assertive petro nationaLism of the 1970s saw national oil companies account for an increasingly large proportion of oil re serves, while transnational companies increas ingly moved downstream to control refining and petrochemical sectors. Many of the world?s most important oil producers are petro states, marked by an extreme depend ence (measured as a proportion of exports or GDP) derived from oil and gas. Rentier econ omies of this sort are plagued by what has been called the ?resource curse? (Auty, 2001): massive corruption, conflict, poor social achievement, authoritarian politics and low economic growth (see Karl, 1999: see also rent). Oil states, transnational companies, na tional oil companies, international financial institutions and various sorts of military and security forces combine to produce an ?oil complex? (Watts, 2005), which operates as a powerful system for dispossession and primi tive accumulation. Industrialized oil import ers have been only too happy to build warm and friendly relations with corrupt petro states, turning a blind eye to human rights violations and failed development, provided that the oil continues to flow. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Petroleum is the quintessential modern nat ural resource. It is present in and produced by nature, and a material source of wealth that occurs in a natural state. But this is a contra dictory and non sensible claim on its face. Oil is natural insofar as it resides in its Jurassic bedrock. But it is not immediately accessible or useful: it presupposes human knowledge and practice (drilling, exploring, refining). Oil?s wealth is not conferred solely by natural process, but rests upon an appraisal a state of knowledge and practice that is social, tech nological and historical. Petroleum is pro foundly of nature it is typically subterranean and has peculiar biophysical properties. And yet its naturalism is expressed and understood in quite determinate ways: how differently would the first century bce Chinese bureau crat and the twentieth century hard rock geologist have described petroleum?s natural properties! Petroleum?s ?resourcefulness? is not natural at all. Its expressive form as wealth the defining property of a resource presup poses acts of transformation, distribution and use which, incidentally, were very different for sixteenth century North American Indians than for a twenty first century Louisiana petrochemical industry. Petroleum as a nat ural resource rests, then, on particular mean ings of natural (e.g. theories of biophysics), and particular renderings of resource (e.g. the ories of wealth predicated on scarcity and nat ural limits). (NEW PARAGRAPH) But there is another realm in which natural resources must operate; namely, the social imaginary in other words, how oil is rooted in the imagination of people living in the spe cific historical and social circumstances of its use and deployment (see geographical iMaginAries). Oil as a natural resource carries it own mythos, also shaped by pLace and time. From the vantage point of the oil importing North Atlantic economies, oil stands in a specific relationship to the mosque and the Arab world. For oil producing states, petrol eum provides the idiom for nation building and the financial wherewithal for modern de velopment (think, for example, of the petrolic ambition of a great modernizer such as Shah Palavi in Iran). Oil is inextricably bound up with unimaginable personal power (Rockefel ler, Nobel, Rothschild, the Sultan of Brunei), untrammelled corporate hegemony (?the Seven Sisters?) and a history of spectacular imperial violence and war. Did not the long and dark tentacles of oil appear in the catastrophic demise of the twin Trade Towers in New York? Was not Osama bin Laden a product of oil as much as of Wahabbi Islam? Was not the Ayatollah Khomeini?s revolution in 1979 fuelled by oil inspired resentments and griev ances? Need one mention Enron? Oil and Islam, war and violence, corruption and power, wealth and spectacle, scarcity and cri sis are, in our times, seemingly all of a piece. (NEW PARAGRAPH) In contemporary America or Europe, oil is a particular type of commodity used, exchanged and fetishized in quite precise ways. It is a bundle of natural (biophysical), productive, cultural and economic relations. It is al together appropriate to recall that petroleum is popularly referred to as ?black gold?. But, after all, gold isn?t black. And neither are many forms of oil. They are colourless. mw (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Clarke (2007); Juhasz (2008); Klare (2008). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
ontology
The study and description of ?being?, or that which can be said to exist in the world (cf. epistemology). Although ontology has many definitions and approaches in phiLosophy and in geography, it tends to be formulated by considering interactions bet ween the world as it is and ideas or concep tions about the world. Western thought has been greatly influenced by the classical, formal ontology of essences, exemplified by Plato?s Ideals (where objects in the world are imper fect copies of ideal forms) and Aristotle?s categories (where all such forms emerge inductively out of the stuff of the world). Concern with ontology in the natural sciences and the human sciences typically focuses less on the general conditions of existence than on the objects, relations and concepts serving as the foci of their specific disciplines. In this vein, the main ontological hobbyhorses in human geography have included the character of the relations between society and nature, and concepts of pLace and space. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Ontological repositionings within human geography over recent decades have largely been a response to the scientific ontology of high modernism, the belief that the world is transparently knowable to the knowledgeable observer. This approach, best exemplified by spatial science, is articulated through the philosophy of positivism and its derivatives: given enough information about objects and events in the world, it is possible to derive a series of scientific laws that account for or explain them. Such positions are predicated on the ontological assumption that the uni verse is a closed system whose movements are determined by a finite (albeit complex) set of causal forces and, further, that the ob jects making up the world are discrete, stable and categorizable (Dixon and Jones, 1998). This reading also holds that both the general laws pertaining to causal forces and the es sences or forms that demarcate discrete ob jects are themselves real and objective parts of the world ?out there?, awaiting discovery. (NEW PARAGRAPH) BEhAVIOURAL GEOGRAPhY and hUMANISTIC GEOGRAPhY, though sometimes falling back into versions of positivism, provided a critical response to these objectivist claims by gradually incorporating insights from non positivist philosophies including PhENOMEN ology, and by paying particular attention to the importance of variations in perspective pro duced through the experience, perception and lifeworld of the individual. Here, ontology is a matter of ?being in the world?, wherein the world reveals itself through the phenomena of experience. As such, the OBjECTlviTY ofpositiv ism is replaced by an experiential subjectivism. This difference has often framed the distinction between space and place (Entrikin, 1991). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The hints of perspectivalism within human istic geography in particular found fuller fruition within feminist GEOGRAPhiES, which critiqued spatial science for masking a mascu linist epistemology under the name of ontol ogy (see masculinism). While rarely making explicit ontological statements, the partial and situated standpoints of feminist theory (cf. situated kNOWLEDGE) were not inconsist ent with a Leibnitzian ontology of proliferated, situated difference. Perhaps most import antly, this resulted in the ontological notion of relational space (Massey, 2005), a conceptu alization of co productive spatiality emerging with the mobile and mutable interactions be tween space and the human suBjECT. Such entanglements point to dialectics (Harvey, 1996), an ontology of internal relations rather than external relations. In contrast to positivism, therefore, dialectical thought re fuses discrete objects and events as things ?in themselves?, and with this denies the separ ation of phenomena from experience, theory and politics. An ally in this mode of thought is the philosophy of critical realism, an ontology of levels aimed at understanding the causal powers of necessary and contingent social relations (Sayer, 2000). (NEW PARAGRAPH) With the advance of post structuralism in human geography, ontology and its cousin metaphysics were increasingly critiqued as a series of epistemological constructs mired in cultural, political and, most importantly, linguistic and discursive imaginaries. Thus, the ontological distinctions formed in key geographical binaries such as nature culture, order chaos, time space and individual society could, under this epistemological cri tique, be called out as false dichotomies that reflect more the Western bias of either/or ness than any serious reflection on the social con struction of such categories. While the post structuralists never denied that there was a real ?out there? in the world, they denied that it was possible to know it through some form of dir ect, pure experience (Deutsche, 1991). By this point, ontology itself became a target: the ?real? world, it was argued, was shut out from the observer by virtue of the very knowledges that constitute the ?observer? as such, as well as by the culturally inflected modes of repre sentation at hand to describe it. In a similar vein, human geographers influenced by post structuralist renderings of PSYChOANALYTic ThEORY, particularly those arising out of the work of Lacan and zizek, drew from sugges tions that immersion in language and symbols makes access to the ?Real? impossible. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Despite the aversion to ontology during the epistemological turn of the 1990s, however, interest in the topic has re emerged in human geography in large measure through the grow ing popularity of the works of Gilles Deleuze. Drawing largely upon Baruch Spinoza, Deleuze (1994) creates a ?flat? ontology of ?pure difference? by theorizing becoming, multiplicity and differentiation as ontologic ally antecedent to the traditional foundations of being, categoricality and sameness, thereby rejecting long held conceptual centrepieces. Here, being, models, structures and categories are not the stuff of ontology proper, but are rather the results of the way that thought deals with difference and continuous differen tiation (i.e. by producing orders of similitude). Deleuzean ontology is not a search for transcendental objects, structures and forms (NEW PARAGRAPH) making up the world, but an immanent material self organization that allows for the possibility of new types of things to come into the world. This work has been highly influential for recent theoretical experimenta tions in human geography, providing perhaps the fundamental ontological support for non representational theory (Deleuze him self had been treating the non representational ontologically since the 1960s) and for ela borations of actor network theory (for re theorizations of human nature relation ships). kwo/jpj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cloke and Johnston (2005); Dixon and Jones (1998); Massey (2005); Sayer (2000); Tuan (NEW PARAGRAPH) (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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