Oil Beach

"""California has long been a byword for the clash between the environment and capitalism. Science and technology studies scholar Dunbar-Hester investigates Long Beach near Los Angeles: a hub for petroleum shipping and refining, and a world-leading container-shipping port, but also a wetland area full of wildlife. Focusing on cetaceans, bananas, sea birds, and otters, her informed interdisciplinary study considers how to avoid toxic tension between biodiversity and capital accumulation."" * Nature * ""Fascinating. . . . While Oil Beach comes in at just 250 pages or so, about a third of which is notes, Dunbar-Hester manages to pack in everything from oil drilling platforms disguised as palm-filled islands, to the ethics of cleaning oil-soaked birds with petroleum-derived products at oil-company funded facilities, to the effects of mechanization on banana shipping, and US Navy experiments on living on the seafloor—including having a dolphin deliver mail."" * Halifax Examiner * ""Having thoroughly researched the environmental impact of these ports, Dunbar-Hester makes the case that San Pedro Bay has become a sacrifice zone to oil distribution and expanding global trade, with some environmental mitigation considered a cost of doing business."" * Library Journal * “Dunbar-Hester walks us through Southern California’s complicated coastal landscape to show how this region has been built as a place where ‘multitudinous life is juxtaposed with patterned violence.’ It is an invaluable lesson at a moment when we are grappling with solutions to rectify the deadly spaces that have been built in pursuit of profit and military power. As Oil Beach shows, looking at the world through a multispecies lens is necessary if we are to repair what have become destructive ecological relationships and values.” -- Juan De Lara, author of ""Inland Shift: Race, Space, and Capital in Southern California"" “Oil Beach accomplishes that rarest of feats: it transforms the way the world looks, bringing into view the hidden logic that structures the very ground beneath our feet. The story of the LA ports is hugely consequential and, in Dunbar-Hester’s hands, it’s also exhilarating, encompassing both the broad sweep of change and the small details that give meaning to our landscape. It’s unusual to find an academic book that’s hard to put down, but Dunbar-Hester’s smart, sometimes funny, and always eloquent voice is truly singular.” -- Miriam Posner, University of California, Los Angeles"