Ghostscapes are damaged landscapes where traces of concealed violence nonetheless haunt the margins of the visible. They appear as haunted geographies and accusatory apparitions on the landscape itself: the bone lands of famine and genocide; half-buried munitions; eerie ecologies such as ghost forests and skeleton trees; abandoned wastelands or military borderlands. Take the […] crimson black smears of oil mixed with Corexit that stretched to every horizon during the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.
On April 20, 2010, the BP Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in the Macondo Prospect; a crimson and gray apocalypse pitching and sinking […]. The disaster unleashed more than ten million gallons of oil across the Gulf of Mexico […]. It also became the largest cover-up of an environmental disaster in US history.
The forever war had come ashore and the Gulf became a ghostscape. A calamity of untold magnitude unfolded and alongside it a strange militarization emerged, as the language for managing the crisis became the language of war. War talk fired from the media, the Coastguard, and local officials alike. State Governor Bobby Jindal: “We need to see this is a war. A war to save Louisiana.” Billy Nungesser, President of the Plaquemines Parish: “We will persevere to win this war.” Political consultant James Carville: “This is literally a war.” And General Russel L. Honoré: “We need to act like this is World War III. Treat this like it’s an invasion. We’ve got to find the oil and kill it.”
Visit the BP website in 2010 and you would see the word “kill” appear with ritualistic incantation. Kill the well. Kill the leak. Kill the oil. Culminating in the “kill shot,” the weird slurry of car tires and golf-balls that BP initially fired at the leak to “kill” it. As if by throwing the sacrificial detritus of our oil-soaked leisure activities into the maw of the oil-god, BP could stop it spewing death. […]
All this talk of war ghosts the fact that militarization is the largest single cause of environmental destruction in the world. The US military is the largest single polluter on the planet. The Department of Defense is the largest single consumer of oil in the world. And the Pentagon is BP’s largest client. But the hinge that connects the environmental catastrophe of militarization and the militarization of environmental catastrophe has been ghosted. With the conjoined collusion of BP, the US Coastguard, the National Guard, and the Obama Administration, the Gulf disaster fell into a great, administered forgetting.
Shortly after the blowout in June, an extraordinary ruling was passed. No one could go within sixty feet of oil-damaged areas effective across five states. No one could go within sixty feet of barrier islands, oiled marshes, birds, boom, public beaches, clean-up boats, or clinics, and independent fly-overs were forbidden. BP workers were forbidden to talk to any media. Scientists had to sign non-disclosure agreements. And if anyone violated the ruling, they faced $40,000 fines or felony charges. […]
What many don’t know, is that the militarization of the Gulf catastrophe was also a soft launch of what the Pentagon calls “a revolution in warfare”: using climate emergency to justify perpetual war. Climate change has become the Pentagon’s new, improved “hostile.” […]
Climate chaos is now seen as both a threat multiplier and a huge opportunity for the military. Admiral Thomas J. Lopez puts it bluntly: “Climate change will provide the conditions that will extend the war on terror.” Climate disaster is a new paradigm for suppressing media coverage of war, for new Special Ops and Dark programs, for legitimizing assassinations and drone warfare, and for criminalizing environmental activism […].
The inhabitants of Isle de Jean Charles, mostly Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, have been called the first federally funded “climate refugees” in the US. […] In 2016 , the State of Louisiana won a $48 million federal grant to relocate them to a suburban settlement further inland […]. Their proposed settlement is a sugar cane farm—a ghost of the colonial system that ravaged Native cultures in the first place. Colonial déjà vu. […]
The islanders’ Choctaw forebears fled the brutal land theft of the 1830 Indian Removal Act, a colonial cataclysm […]. Then in the 1920s, the oil companies came. […]
In early 2017, the peaceful Standing Rock protests against the Keystone Pipeline were brutally dismantled by militarized police. A few weeks later, an oil pipeline was slated to cross tribal land in Oklahoma. Oklahoma has thirty-nine Native Nations, most of whom were forcibly moved there during the Trail of Tears. A coalition to protest the pipeline quickly emerged. The following week, Bill 1123 was introduced in the Oklahoma State Senate. The Critical Infrastructure Protection Act “would impose punishments of up to 10 years in prison and $100,000 in fines – and up to $1 million in penalties for any organization ‘found to be a conspirator’ in violating the new law.” Defined by the bill, “critical infrastructure” broadly refers to oil, gas, chemical, or coal equipment or facilities […]. Even stepping on a pipeline easement can incur a year in prison. The Critical Infrastructure Protection Act soon became the blueprint for a raft of radically repressive bills that have since been quietly introduced in thirty-one states across the country. […]
Anne McClintock. “Monster: A Fugue in Fire and Ice.” e-flux. June 2020.
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