Toxic and Intoxicating Oil: Discovery, Resistance, and Justice in Aotearoa New Zealand

By Patricia Widener

When oil and gas exploration was expanding across Aotearoa New Zealand, Patricia Widener was there interviewing affected residents and environmental and climate activists, and attending community meetings and anti-drilling rallies. Exploration was occurring on an unprecedented scale when oil disasters dwelled in recent memory, socioecological worries were high, campaigns for climate action were becoming global, and transitioning toward a low carbon society seemed possible. Yet unlike other communities who have experienced either an oil spill, or hydraulic fracturing, or offshore exploration, or climate fears, or disputes over unresolved Indigenous claims, New Zealanders were facing each one almost simultaneously. Collectively, these grievances created the foundation for an organized civil society to construct and then magnify a comprehensive critical oil narrative--in dialogue, practice, and aspiration. Community advocates and socioecological activists mobilized for their health and well-being, for their neighborhoods and beaches, for Planet Earth and Planet Ocean, and for terrestrial and aquatic species and ecosystems. They rallied against toxic, climate-altering pollution; the extraction of fossil fuels; a myriad of historic and contemporary inequities; and for local, just, and sustainable communities, ecologies, economies, and/or energy sources. In this allied ethnography, quotes are used extensively to convey the tenor of some of the country’s most passionate and committed people. By analyzing the intersections of a social movement and the political economy of oil, Widener reveals a nuanced story of oil resistance and promotion at a time when many anti-drilling activists believed themselves to be on the front lines of the industry’s inevitable decline.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Mar 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781978805057

Patricia Widener

Associate Professor, Department of Sociology

Book preview

Toxic and Intoxicating Oil

Nature, Society, and Culture

Scott Frickel, Series Editor

A sophisticated and wide-ranging sociological literature analyzing nature-society-culture interactions has blossomed in recent decades. This book series provides a platform for showcasing the best of that scholarship: carefully crafted empirical studies of socio-environmental change and the effects such change has on ecosystems, social institutions, historical processes, and cultural practices.

The series aims for topical and theoretical breadth. Anchored in sociological analyses of the environment, Nature, Society, and Culture is home to studies employing a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives and investigating the pressing socio-environmental questions of our time—from environmental inequality and risk, to the science and politics of climate change and serial disaster, to the environmental causes and consequences of urbanization and war making, and beyond.

Available titles in the Nature, Society, and Culture series:

Diane C. Bates, Superstorm Sandy: The Inevitable Destruction and Reconstruction of the Jersey Shore

Elizabeth Cherry, For the Birds: Protecting Wildlife through the Naturalist Gaze

Cody Ferguson, This Is Our Land: Grassroots Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth Century

Aya H. Kimura and Abby Kinchy, Science by the People: Participation, Power, and the Politics of Environmental Knowledge

Anthony B. Ladd, ed., Fractured Communities: Risk, Impacts, and Protest against Hydraulic Fracking in U.S. Shale Regions

Stefano B. Longo, Rebecca Clausen, and Brett Clark, The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture

Stephanie A. Malin, The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice

Kari Marie Norgaard, Salmon and Acorns Feed Our People: Colonialism, Nature, and Social Action

J. P. Sapinski, Holly Jean Buck, and Andreas Malm, eds., Has It Come to This? The Promises and Perils of Geoengineering on the Brink

Chelsea Schelly, Dwelling in Resistance: Living with Alternative Technologies in America

Diane Sicotte, From Workshop to Waste Magnet: Environmental Inequality in the Philadelphia Region

Sainath Suryanarayanan and Daniel Lee Kleinman, Vanishing Bees: Science, Politics, and Honeybee Health

Patricia Widener, Toxic and Intoxicating Oil: Discovery, Resistance, and Justice in Aotearoa New Zealand

Toxic and Intoxicating Oil

Discovery, Resistance, and Justice in Aotearoa New Zealand

PATRICIA WIDENER

Rutgers University Press

New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Widener, Patricia, 1966–author.

Title: Toxic and intoxicating oil : discovery, resistance, and justice in Aotearoa New Zealand / Patricia Widener.

Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020027639 | ISBN 9781978805033 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978805040 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978805057 (epub) | ISBN 9781978814103 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978814110 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Petroleum industry and trade—New Zealand. | Petroleum industry and trade—Environmental aspects—New Zealand. | Petroleum—Prospecting—New Zealand.

Classification: LCC HD9578.N45 W53 2021 | DDC 338.2/7280993—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020027639

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

All photos by the author

Copyright © 2021 by Patricia Widener

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

www.rutgersuniversitypress.org

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to everyone who struggles against entities that seem more politically and economically powerful, and to those who labor for a healthier earth and ocean—for each other, future generations, and all other living beings and their requisite habitats.

Contents

1 Which Way Aotearoa New Zealand?

2 An Allied Ethnography

3 Dominant and Critical Oil Narratives

4 Oil at the Bottom of the World

5 License to Criticize: From Disasters to Resistance

6 Marine Justice: Defending the Seas, Claiming the Coastline

7 Mobilizing the Middle: Ka Nui! No Mining, No Drilling, No Fracking, Enough!

8 Tainting a Clean, Green Image

9 Reviving Climate Activism

10 Disrupting Oil for Transformative Justice

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Toxic and Intoxicating Oil

1

Which Way Aotearoa New Zealand?

How can we be this beautiful, clean, green country when we are wanting to explore for oil? It doesn’t make any sense.

Aotearoa New Zealand is a nation of contradictions.¹ For decades it promoted itself to itself and international audiences as a clean, green nation. This image developed in part as a result of its effective antinuclear campaign in the 1970s and 1980s and a 100% Pure nature-based tourism campaign in the 1990s and 2000s. Eventually, many New Zealanders who grew up under these initiatives embraced them as a national tenet and global distinction.² Then, starting around 2005, the government led a transition toward large-scale oil and gas exploration and extraction, upending the nation’s own clean, green master frame and identity.

Projections indicated that if oil were found and extracted, the country could more than double its small oil production by 2030.³ Simultaneously, proextraction enthusiasts were marketing the nation as a proverbial Texas or Saudi Arabia of the South Pacific,⁴ eliciting both anticipation and deep apprehension of the country’s oil and gas (O&G) potential. Both onshore and offshore blocks were being offered for bids, and both were receiving proposals from well-known and little-known multinational corporations. If all of the proposed offshore blocks produced oil (or natural gas to a lesser extent), New Zealand could become an island nation nearly encircled by rigs, platforms, and transport and supply ships. If all of the land opened to hydraulic fracturing were accessed, Aotearoa’s rural landscape and communities could become pockmarked with industrial equipment and sliced by industry roadways, much like the fields of Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Texas. A foreboding among antidrilling activists was evident: New Zealand really is the ends of the earth, the final frontier. Come and grab the last scraps of oil.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2013 and 2014, I studied these incongruities through the competing claims of the proponents and opponents of O&G extraction. The former mobilized for some version of national wealth and employment, while the latter mobilized for some version of climate, environmental, and socioecological justice. Yet unlike other communities affected by hydraulic fracturing, or offshore exploration, or an oil disaster, or climate inaction, or unresolved Indigenous demands, New Zealanders were facing all five interlocking issues almost simultaneously. Consequently, my inquiry became an observation of despites during the Anthropocene. Despite known oil disasters at sea (both off the coast of Aotearoa in 2011 and in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010), New Zealand pursued offshore, deepwater exploration. Despite global concerns about hydraulic fracturing near farmlands and waterways, the government permitted industry access to rural lands and communities. Despite Māori cultural, traditional, land, and water rights, multinational corporations chased admittance. Despite climate change and the cultivation of a clean, green image, political leaders stood with corporations in positioning New Zealand as one of the next major export-oriented O&G frontiers. The outward incompatibilities raised the question, Which way New Zealand?⁵

Kia Ora: Welcome to the Bottom of the World

Before presenting the national transition and resistance to O&G exploration, a short introduction to Aotearoa, the Land of the Long White Cloud, is warranted. Located near Australia and Antarctica, New Zealand is an island nation of 4.4 million people and two spoken languages. It sits along the Pacific Rim of fire, so the land quakes, volcanoes erupt, steam rises from land vents, and underground pools of water boil to the surface. O&G expansions across this volatile natural environment troubled industry opponents.

New Zealanders also locate themselves at the bottom of the world, which translated into a banana shortage for a few days in 2014 because of a ship’s mechanical failure and challenging weather conditions in the Philippines.⁶ More dangerously, the distance meant that it could take days or weeks to receive disaster response equipment in the event of an oil spill, as demonstrated during the Rena cargo wreck in 2011.

New Zealanders also possess mildly ecocentric views⁷ and perceive themselves as living in a pure haven, a perfect little bubble, and in harmony with nature.⁸ Before the advance of the O&G industry, Rod Oram, a business journalist and commentator, located Aotearoa in the world economy as the acceptable face of globalisation. People trust us.… We have no hidden agendas. We aren’t trying to nick their oil fields … we’re just trying to sell them some more milk powder … or science!⁹ In short, New Zealand exported raw, primary resources, trained a highly skilled, educated population, and behaved benevolently on the global stage.

The mirage of their clean, green narrative was also well documented. As Oram warned, Our lip-service to date has given us air, land and water which are unconscionably polluted for a country so thinly populated.… Our clean, green image is a myth waiting to be exposed.¹⁰ Joe Bennett, another observer of the country’s dichotomies, put Aotearoa in a global context as well when writing, It sits in the South Pacific but until recently it traded almost exclusively with Great Britain. It sent soldiers to Vietnam but it has banned American warships. It promotes itself as a virgin paradise, but it has destroyed 90 percent of its native bush.¹¹

In other words, the reality is messier than the constructed caricature of being a clean, green nation, whose landscape is the setting of Middle-earth of The Lord of the Rings fame. New Zealanders perceived themselves and were perceived by others as relatively environmentally conscious people, though their actual environmental stewardship was less than exemplary and their trajectory was shifting toward large-scale O&G extraction. Offering a more updated assessment, an environmental activist told me, Unfortunately, like Canada and the U.S. and Great Britain and everywhere else, we are still, at the government level, focused very much on getting every drop out.

Becoming Another Oil Story

Since the mid- to late 1800s, New Zealand has produced relatively small amounts of O&G in the province of Taranaki.¹² However, new technologies, depleted or already claimed reserves elsewhere, and steady worldwide demand led the industry and supportive state leaders to promote Aotearoa as one of the next major frontiers. My research began a few years into the national agenda to expand exploration and extraction by extending block offers and allocating permits beyond Taranaki and in frontier rural landscapes and deep waters offshore.

Without overstating the situation, the number of project proposals beyond the traditional province of extraction had the potential to change New Zealand profoundly—in terms of its self-perception, political and economic operations, ecological stewardship, democratic standards, and greenhouse gas contributions. To each potential impact, civil society responded. Concerned citizens, community advocates, environmental and climate activists, and social movement organizers debated and resisted watching their country become the next O&G frontier.

When interviews and observations were conducted, many New Zealanders were discovering the multiple processes and products associated with oil, despite generations and lifestyles fueled by its production and consumption. They were discovering what frontline communities, including those in their own oil-producing province, had known for a long time: that long-running conflicts and contamination follow in the industry’s footsteps. They found that the industry appeared to be politically protected, economically profitable for some, culturally accepted in traditional O&G regions, and increasingly resisted by the newly affected and a growing number of climate activists. Such realizations often occur at the points of disasters, novel technological changes, or frontier expansions, but are rarely sustained.

Having not been exposed to the industry (with the exception of local experiences in Taranaki), Aotearoa appeared late to question or resist oil exploration and extraction. It was, however, in rhythm with the global, youth-led climate action campaigns. In many ways, New Zealand mirrored other wealthy, democratic nations in how oil only became a personal problem among the economically and socially secure middle class of a country when prices spiked, disasters happened nearby, or communities or ecosystems were disrupted through technological changes or frontier expansions. In the absence of these events, a lifetime of consumption had failed to become bothersome, until the climate crisis and the emergence of young climate activists. As a generalizable case, Aotearoa informs collective action and political economy perspectives in centering colonial histories, national identity, disaster, extractive industries, and climate change as linked conflicts during national deliberations on whether to expand O&G extraction.

Within two decades, Aotearoa transitioned from small-scale O&G production to carbon neutrality goals, then to large-scale exploration and extraction plans, and then to a hybrid policy plan of expanded extraction for export alongside domestic carbon neutrality goals. These switchbacks started with Prime Minster Helen Clark (1999–2008) of the center-left Labour Party, who had appointed a climate change minister within the Ministry for the Environment and had proposed becoming the world’s first carbon-neutral nation. At the end of her tenure, the United Nations recognized her as a Champion of the Earth. Despite Clark’s environmental credentials, early export-oriented expansion plans began under her leadership and expanded further when she was succeeded by Prime Minister John Key (2008–2016) of the center-right National Party. Key launched the eight-step Petroleum Action Plan to commit the country to oil extraction and increase its export capacity. Data for this analysis were collected in 2013 and 2014 around the peak of the expansion phase and when tensions were high. Then, in 2017, Jacinda Ardern of the Labour Party became the country’s youngest prime minister, and she committed the nation to zero carbon emissions by 2050 and declared a thirty-year moratorium on new offshore O&G permits, conceding the many permits granted under Key. Around the same time, increased global production through hydraulic fracturing eased industry pressures on frontier communities.

The national shift to O&G illustrated what those who study oil had been stating for some time: the presence of oil is distinct and disruptive. The product has the capacity to be both toxic and intoxicating, usurping standard community protections and ecological reason. The degrees vary by the relative status and organizational capacity of a population and by the relative influence and access people or corporations have with political leaders and regulatory agencies. Frequently, the product dominates economic decisions, while the process of extraction razes communities and ecosystems. Both the product and the process upend what people think of themselves and their political system. A democracy may not be democratic about oil. An ecologically sustainable economy may become unstable in its presence. A nation’s touted clean, green image may be exchanged for the industry’s promises. A country of high environmental standards may offer exemptions to multinational corporations. Safety and precaution may be subverted for risky ventures. Citizen opposition may succeed only in miniscule amounts, privileged locations, or temporary timeframes. An operation that is rejected in one place may be courted in another. A successful campaign of resistance today may not be successful in twenty years. Nevertheless, antidrilling activists and affected residents worldwide continue to mobilize in some capacity for some version of justice.

To study O&G in a nation not known for its production became an investigation into dueling narratives.¹³ One side reflected the power, manipulation, and allure of oil, as displayed in the industry’s attempt to rewrite regulations, obscure public understandings, and cajole community acquiescence. The other side represented civil society mobilizing in affected communities, grassroots groups, and environmental and climate organizations that were contesting standard industry operations, state-led advocacy for extraction, and the public’s acceptance or indifference. The reason I studied O&G in Aotearoa is explained fittingly by an antidrilling activist: New Zealand is a microcosm of what the world is facing, which is our energy choice, which is the pressure and the power, which is the democratic process, which is: What are you going to sacrifice to get that short-term profit?

A Social Analysis of Oil Advocacy and Resistance

The heart of this ethnography is a critique of the dominant oil paradigm and an outline and elevation of a more socially and ecologically just critical oil paradigm. New Zealand’s resistance to becoming an O&G frontier occurred during a time when oil spills dwelled in recent memory, socioecological worries were high, campaigns for climate action were global, and transitioning toward a low-carbon society seemed possible. The everyday and contentious life of oil was revealed through competing and comingling narratives among rival and aligned groups.

As a case study, Aotearoa was exceptional in how multiple O&G operations and impacts coincided there almost simultaneously or within a few years of each other. Each event, activity, conflict, or fear—whether an oil spill, hydraulic fracturing, offshore exploration, or climate change—was lived or embodied not in isolation of the others but in relation to them, creating the foundation for an emergent and comprehensive critical oil perspective. Analyzing the intersections of the state, industry, and civil society across these factors revealed a much more nuanced and evolving story of O&G promotion and resistance during the prolonged era of extraction and looming climate crisis.

Each chapter contributes to the theoretical approaches of collective action, political economy, and systemic justice and injustice; and rather than isolating Māori experience from the New Zealand experience, I integrate Māori’s histories and responses into each chapter and at each point of conflict. In the form of vignettes, chapter 2 recounts the pleasures, quandaries, and trepidations associated with qualitative research. I met some of the most passionate and committed people, benefited from dual institutional ethics reviews, encountered the risk of surveillance and the impotence of privacy protection protocols, and practiced time banking as a labor exchange. Each endeavor reflected an effort to conduct an allied ethnography and engage in mutually beneficial conversations.

Chapter 3 organizes the global history of petroleum into three eras and outlines how dominant and critical oil paradigms represent two worldviews that were colliding at the time of this study. To understand oil’s power and distinction necessitates stepping beyond the pump and traveling with this product across time and place from the first seismic test to extraction, from transportation to refining, and from petrochemical production to waste disposal. As such, petroleum is witnessed as a global product, economic force, and political influencer that is at times intimate (as in one’s food consumption), exotic (when extracted in remote locations), distal (when governed by multinational corporations), and corrupting (when intertwined with local or national politics).

Each subsequent chapter demonstrates how many New Zealanders discovered the problems of petroleum, and why their ensuing responses became a battle of claims and counterclaims. Chapter 4 describes how early exploration coincided with Māori-British land disputes, and how the industry’s long-running capture of local regulation and cultural practices in the traditional O&G hub of Taranaki subverted independent and thorough impact assessments and on-site monitoring. This essential backstory is important to understanding how industry promotions left residents unable or unwilling to question or challenge standard yet risky industry operations. As new technologies enabled the spread of industry beyond Taranaki, frontier residents and activists began confronting O&G operations and state-industry alliances for the first time. The chapter organizes the national polemic (which way Aotearoa?) around the Māori word taonga (treasure or resource). In doing so, it assesses the national debate of whether to open the natural environment to extraction (thereby interpreting natural resources as capital taonga) or to protect the land, marine environment, and heritage sites (as natural or cultural taonga). The chapter concludes by itemizing how legislation was rewritten beginning in 2012 to accommodate multinational corporations and advance exploration and extraction within and beyond Taranaki, thus underscoring how regulatory capture facilitates industry expansions despite public resistance.

Chapter 5 then considers how past oil disasters at sea influence public perceptions of offshore drilling. Specifically, how did coastal residents and anti-oil activists experience and construct the 2011 Rena tanker spill in New Zealand and the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in relation to offshore exploration? I found that these two oil disasters served as shock motivators for coastal communities and now-or-never focusing events for environmental groups. Both disasters gave license to coastal residents and antidrilling activists to criticize government preparedness and safety standards and to underscore the risks of oil and offshore exploration in particular. The O&G proposals were originating when these disasters were still sharp in people’s memories, and by linking them, activists reasoned that if the state had failed to manage a small, nearshore spill as they believed it had with the Rena wreck, then it was incapable of responding to a multimonth deluge offshore. Moreover, the sweat equity and experiential knowledge of cleanup volunteers during Rena and the antidrilling camp’s refusal to decouple these disasters from offshore exploration strengthened the arguments of coastal communities throughout New Zealand in rejecting offshore O&G activities.

Through the lens of marine or saltwater sociology, chapter 6 plunges into the campaigns that were launched to protect seaside communities and aquatic environments. For an island people who looked toward the sea for identity and sustenance, the idea and potential risks of offshore exploration were unthinkable. In tacking offshore and extending terrestrial concepts out to sea, the chapter identifies how coastal residents were embedded within the surrounding marine environment in a way that reflected their cultural affinity, intimacy, and sense of belonging with the ocean. Likewise, some coastal residents possessed a distinct submersible knowledge and allegiance with the marine environment far beyond what the state or industry had shown itself to possess. Among not in my ocean (NIMO) activists, the first paddle dropped was a Māori-Greenpeace flotilla that mobilized against Petrobras, a Brazilian oil company. It resonated culturally and historically, and offered the hallmarks of a people accustomed to life at or near the sea and moving closer toward a shared identity as New Zealanders, an island and coastal people. The ocean served as an extension of themselves, regardless of ethnicity or time of arrival, and the conduit in which to confront the state and multinational corporations. However, and given the vastness of the ocean, partitions were drawn between maritime zones of sacrifice and protection. One permitted extraction, while the other portioned off niches for marine parks or reserves. What ensued across multiple communities were urgent calls for marine justice, an aspirational and motivational frame and offshoot in the company of global demands for climate, food, and environmental justice.¹⁴

Antidrilling activists protest outside the New Zealand Petroleum Summit in Wellington.

In addition to offshore exploration, New Zealand was also promoting the use of hydraulic fracturing near rural and farming communities both within and beyond Taranaki Province. The first half of chapter 7 presents rhetorical and literal conversations between first-fracked communities in the United States and Taranaki and fracking-vulnerable communities beyond Taranaki to highlight the significance of global and cross-national dialogue on this specific technology and its associated public grievances and documented injuries. While rupturing local landscapes and communities, fracking also fused a global camaraderie of affected, English-speaking people. The second half of the chapter analyzes how the previously comfortable and consuming working- and middle-class residents discovered their marginalization relative to the industry or product in terms of political voice and representation despite their material and social well-being. In their newfound awareness, they began to scrutinize the industry’s standard operating procedures in Taranaki and eventually adopted a critical attitude toward normal or accepted practices of extraction.¹⁵ Yet unlike the national effort to resist offshore exploration, the onshore antifracking campaigns were located primarily in affected and vulnerable rural communities.

The next chapter steps away from specific site fights and antidrilling campaigns and into the national tensions of promoting clean, green storylines while committing to fossil fuels. Even though many people expressed environmental stewardship as a meaningful maxim (and myth to market tourism and exports), many others were noticeably hostile toward greenies. The chapter analyzes the contradictions of their imagined ideal and the reality of extractive industries as understood through the country’s economic standing, political shifting, employment opportunities, and generational desires. For the generation or two that grew up with the clean, green image, the motto was believed to be possible and blocking O&G was one avenue toward its attainment. Similarly, Māori practice kaitiakitanga, a generational and socioecological guardianship, stewardship, and responsibility to the natural environment and to each other that recognizes the import of the environment and the standing of ancestors and descendants.¹⁶ Based on their descriptions of why they mobilized, I suggest the concept of Aotearoa justice, or a union of the clean, green identity and socioecological aspirations and the multigenerational Māori practices that attempt to sustain the well-being of cultures, traditions, all living beings, and their social and ecological habitats. In practice, Aotearoa justice would obligate state and corporate interests to defer to the rights of all living beings and affected communities for their protection and the safeguarding of social and natural environments for current and future generations.

Chapter 9 addresses the global climate crisis, and the young activists who had previously floundered among louder, older skeptics. Some had been debated into silence, others were stymied by public disinterest, while still others struggled to clarify national impacts for themselves and a lay audience. The industry’s arrival beyond Taranaki reenergized this cadre of keenly aware and globally connected teens and young adults, who now had corporate brand names or a tangible oil rig on which to hang their activism. The chapter captures the rise (leading up to the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit), the fall (due to the success of deniers and silencers), and the revival of young climate activists who were now able to identify and defend their own front lines against O&G corporations. Becoming an O&G frontier was equivalent to pouring starter fluid on a daunted and dwindling flame. For those under thirty-five, a transition toward fossil fuels was perceived as a generational affront and indisputable threat to their futures. Yet climate change remained a prickly national subject, so they rarely used the words climate change. Instead, their vociferous public opposition to O&G exploration was in private a climate action to save the planet and each other.

In chapter 10, I draw on the transformative works of David Pellow’s critical environmental justice studies and David Hess’s energy democracy to analyze the significance of New Zealanders deliberating and resisting O&G expansions in an era of oil disasters and climate change.¹⁷ Comparing communities and antidrilling campaigns within a national context reveals additional degrees of structural and environmental privilege and sacrifice, while pointing to the tools for achieving greater degrees of justice for more living beings. It is only through a comparative analysis that the privilege of the marine environment and coastal communities over rural landscapes and communities in national campaigns is shown. Likewise, the frontiers garnered more protection than Taranaki, the traditional province of O&G extraction. A comparative study of industry expansions also points to how the securities of the middle class were becoming undone as more influential interests revealed the sacrificial position of the middle to the middle, whether in rural communities or coastal towns.

Focusing on petroleum reveals the toxic and intoxicating web of a single substance that reaches across time, from its fossil origins to its intergenerational and atmospheric impacts; and across space, from its location deep underground or underwater to its ability to injure the human body and affect the climate; and across place, from the many affected rural and coastal communities to their national and international allies.

The next nine chapters track a population confronted by the behemoth that is the O&G industry. The global distribution of structural and ecological privilege and violence suggests that even successful campaigns may only achieve modifications in one place or region, and that the stoppage of a project somewhere fails to impede the expansion of extraction or consumption elsewhere. Despite tremendous effort by civil societies organized locally, nationally, or transnationally, the industry often achieves access and reveals how citizens even in wealthy nations find themselves peripheral to its power and political influence. The industry’s spread has the capacity to moderate cultures, tire resistance, and defeat people—but not always, as seen in the cross-cultural and cross-generational campaigns of resistance and transformation in New Zealand.

To convey the public tenor, quotes from residents, community advocates, and environmental and climate activists are used extensively, and they begin and end each chapter. The scale of O&G projects, proposed during a time of disaster and climate change, was unprecedented. In explaining why New Zealanders mobilized against becoming the next O&G frontier, an activist at a Wellington rally told the assembled protesters,

They want to drill deeper than ever before in our oceans, and risk our precious marine and coastal environments and economies. They want to frack on land and risk poisoning our water from fracking. The government has opened up more than a hundred thousand kilometers for oil drilling off our coast—all this in an era when we know we have to move away from fossil fuels and greenhouse gases to remove the worst effects of climate change. So we are not just here today to stand up for our own coasts, but we are here today to join in spirit and in solidarity with thousands and millions of people around the world who are fighting on their own front lines of climate change.

2

An Allied Ethnography

I do fear them [the state] going in and taking my computer.

To understand how the residents and environmental and climate activists of an emerging oil and gas (O&G) frontier argued through the contradictions of exploration and extraction in a clean, green nation, I conducted an allied ethnography. In point and praxis, this study was guided by several people-centered researchers, including Phil Brown, David Pellow, and Jackie Smith. Brown conducts fieldwork tinged with a pro-community ethos, deep empathy, and a sense of responsibility to balance the resource inequity by allying with affected people; while Smith questions why any researcher would want to remain neutral given the enormous inequalities of our day.¹ For Pellow, critical advocacy research encourages allied researchers to participate in social change efforts while also stepping back and employing a reflexive analysis.² Yet despite how I interpreted my work, my stance as an ally against the uneven distribution of oil’s benefits and burdens was never assumed, and was at times doubted by community advocates and antidrilling campaigners.

The voices of passionate, engaged citizens permeate this immersive and allied ethnography.³ Through personal vignettes and to the many accounts of qualitative fieldwork, this chapter elaborates on the import and limits of ethics reviews, the risk of online surveillance and the ease of online introductions and investigations, and the methodological turn of engaging in time banks or labor exchanges. Throughout, I argue for the recognition and practice of mutually beneficial conversations and solidarities, as recognized by others in identifying co-created knowledge through the research process⁴ and experiencing the unstructured interview as a conversation with a purpose and opportunity for participant direction.⁵ Both parties meet for multiple personal or professional reasons and through dialogue advance their understandings of their own purposes and the purposes of others beyond and greater than their individual goals or the conversation itself.

This study is a multisited one conducted between 2013 and 2014 in eleven regions on both the North and South Islands. The longest stay was for three to four weeks in Auckland (the largest city), Dunedin (a university town), Kaikoura (a whale-watching tourism community), Mount Maunganui (near where the Rena cargo tanker ran aground), Taranaki (the region of traditional O&G extraction), and Wellington (the capital). I conducted sixty-six in-depth, semistructured interviews ranging from one to four hours. Participants included representatives of professional environmental and climate organizations; community-based grassroots and coastal groups; Māori