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In Saturday’s New York Times, Justin Gillis spoke with several scholars – including Cambridge authors Don Worster (co-editor of our Environmental History series) and Ted Steinberg – on the subject of where the Gulf Oil Spill places on a hierarchy of environmental disasters. Could it really be the worst yet? The consensus seems to be that there is no definitive answer. The depth of our assessment appears to correlate more to a disaster's impact on the lives and livelihood of those affected, and less to the environmental ramifications of the event. Read more over at the NYT for a fascinating take on the “shades and complexities” of natural and man-made environmental disasters. While on the subject, here’s an excerpt from Myrna Santiago’s award-winning The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1938 - discussing the disastrous social and environmental consequences of oil extraction. This detailed case study finds unique overlaps between labor and environmental concerns, taking a snapshot of history through the lens of the 1938 expropriation debate in Mexico. Santiago argues that oil production generated major historical and environmental transformations in systems of land use which, in turn, revolutionized the social organization of the country.
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