Bearing Witness
“In the winner’s circle of the global energy game, both oil and its casualties slip beneath what can be clearly represented or felt.”
Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil
During the summer of 2019, I spent days walking around the Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) complex trying to fathom its size and scope. Even in its midst, I struggled to look around and comprehend: this is the oil industry. It takes a deliberate effort to comprehend and internalize the numbers we are told possess great meaning, and given the extreme dimensions of the systems that support the world as we know it, it’s no mystery why most of us have stopped trying. It’s difficult to take a designation as simple as ‘153 years old,’ for example, and think: Ok. 153 years ago was 1866. This refinery has been operating day-and-night since Andrew Johnson sat in the White House.
In an age of unprecedented energy transition, historian Carola Hein has said that connecting what we see to what we know is more important than ever, especially in the context of oil. “The first step in reimagining the future,” she writes, “is truly seeing the extent of oil’s effect on our everyday landscapes and understanding the ways in which collective mindscapes shape the physical environment.” As Philadelphia residents bear witness to another - and perhaps the final - inflection point in the history of the refinery, it is time to bear witness to the extent of its effect. And by bearing witness, I do not mean experience. The communities surrounding Philadelphia’s refinery have suffered under the toxic impact of its existence for over a century. The last thing I want to do is suggest that the refinery perpetrates its ills discreetly. For many Philadelphians, the facility’s noise and air pollution are inescapable facts of life.
By bearing witness, I mean connecting visual, aural, and olfactory experience of the refinery’s industrial trappings (pipelines, stills, stacks, oil-trains, etc.) with the complex systems of production, transportation, and consumption that those trappings support. In other words, it means fusing perception with comprehension and, in turn, applying the appropriate lens to see what Carola Hein has coined the ‘global petroleumscape.’
In the following exhibit, I am going to guide you through my revelation to PES and its situation within the global petroleumscape. In the process, I hope to offer a number of approaches for sensing and comprehending the refinery’s role in the long and ongoing story of oil.
While I would recommend exploring the exhibit as I have arranged it, it ultimately doesn’t matter in what order you choose to view the sub-sections. If nothing else, I highly suggest that you save VII for end.
Enjoy.