Issue 28 by Foto8

Christopher Anderson Capitolio Capitolio was published by RM publishers in 2009. Anderson is represented by Magnum Photos. www.magnumphotos.com Johan Bävman Sour Lake Bävman is represented by Moment Agency. www.momentagency.com www.johanbavman.se Samuel Bollendorf Made in China www.samuel-bollendorff.com Polly Braden Athabasca Tar Sands Braden’s new book, China Between, is published by Dewi Lewis. www.pollybraden.com

Bryan Denton Saudi Street Racers www.bryandenton.photoshelter.com Rena Effendi My Beautiful Baku Pipe Dreams was published by Schilt Publishing earlier this year. Effendi is represented by The Institute. www.instituteartistmanagement.com

Ed Kashi Curse of the Black Gold is published by powerHouse Books. Kashi is represented by VII. www.viiphoto.com Christian Lutz Crude Profit The book of this work, Tropical Gift, was published by Lars Mueller earlier this year. Lutz is represented by Agence Vu and Camera Press. www.agencevu.com www.camerapress.com Yann Mingard Built on Oil Mingard is represented by Panos Pictures. www.panos.co.uk Espen Rasmussen Midnight Oil Rasmussen is represented by Panos Pictures. www.panos.co.uk

Palm oil eats forests Lithium does harm And don’t live downwind Of a biomass farm. All power corrupts But nuclear completely (Sell off the MOX to Japan - but discreetly!) Capturing Carbon? A fart in a bottle. Wind is uplifting But never full throttle While lumbering turbines Insult the horizon. Solar’s expensive And can’t be relied on. Barrages? Tidal. You could Severn Bore it But if you could catch it There’s no way to store it. Fracking is poison The fumes make you ill. Sun doesn’t shine nights You might as well drill!

ThE PhoTogRAPhy BIANNUAl

If not, then what?

THE LEGACY OF OIL Cover: Christian Lutz Back Cover: poem by Maurice Geller (with apologies to Mrs Dorothy Parker)

ISSUE 28 - AUTUMN/WINTER 2010

Maurice Broomfield Legacy Maurice Broomfield Photographs is published by Foto8. www.foto8.com

Jiang He and Arthur J D Thicker than Water Jiang and Arthur are represented by Greenpeace. www.greenpeace.org

ISSUE 28 - AUTUMN/WINTER 2010

Kael Alford Bottom of ‘da Boot This work forms part of a commission for the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and will be published as a book next year. Alford is represented by Panos Pictures. www.panos.co.uk

ThE PhoTogRAPhy BIANNUAl

CONTRIBUTORS

We set ourselves quite a task when we decided six months ago to theme this entire issue, our 28th, on the subject of oil. Not only was this a more exact theme than in previous issues, we also decided to take it as far as possible, focusing more than ever on the subject and doing away with anything unrelated. While the Gulf of Mexico spill was our obvious but essential starting point, which has been expanded upon in the “Report” section, we look at the various ways in which photographers and writers have tried to get to grips with the most slippery of subjects. One of the regions of the world where oil has had the biggest impact of course is Nigeria, especially in the oil-producing Niger Delta. We bring you a photographic essay by Christian Lutz on the wealthy lifestyle it funds, as well as the already destitute lives it pollutes, a passionate polemic by Ben Amunwa from Remember SaroWiwa, as well as an interview with the region’s most incisive chronicler, Ed Kashi. Oil has long fascinated important writers, from Walter Benjamin to Ryszard Kapuscinski, and has recently become the subject for a compelling new work of fiction by Nigerian writer Helon Habila, as well as a meticulous factual investigation – that reads like a thriller – by New York Times magazine writer Peter Maass. We are delighted to bring you excerpts from these two exceptional bodies of work. We see how the legacy of oil has further affected people and land in Polly Braden’s tar sands essay from Canada, and in Kael Alford’s highly personal ode to the Louisiana coastline. In the Khazak capital, Astana, we see how oil has shaped – and paid for – a shimmering architectural citadel, while in Baku, Rena Effendi documents how her home town changed since the explosion of oil in the 1990s. The politics of oil is of course another tenebrous subject. In Venezuela, Chavez-fever has run its course according to many, with the nationalisation of the country’s vast oil reserves contributing to inequality and economic pressure from world super powers. Christopher Anderson’s work Capitolio captures this

chaotic and uncertain atmosphere in Caracas. Meanwhile, China has shown an unprecedented interest in Angola, offering financial help to rebuild after its devastating civil war in exchange for a 30 per cent chunk of all of Angolan oil. The Middle East is an obvious player in the world politics of oil from Suez to the Persian Gulf. Bryan Denton offers us a more lighthearted take by looking at the men who race their cars through the city streets of Saudi Arabia. From Ecuador, John Vidal reports on the potential for a new ethics of oil, as the country’s former oil minister puts forward a revolutionary idea: to be paid for NOT drilling. Jeremy Lovell takes us on a tour of the alternatives, revealing why it can sometimes seems that, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, you might as well drill. If you’re an avid reader of 8, you will notice our experiments with the printed page. Next year will see us not only taking our themes further but bringing them to you each time in a new, specific, and subject-led format. Finally, we’d like to dedicate this issue to the pioneering work of Maurice Broomfield, the greatest industrial photographer of the 20th century, whose work we have been so proud to be involved with in recent years. Maurice died on October 4, 2010. His legacy, and photographs, like those from the North Sea in this issue, will endure. The Editors

ThE PhoTogRAPhy BIANNUAl

If not, then what?

THE LEGACY OF OIL Cover: Christian Lutz Back Cover: poem by Maurice Geller (with apologies to Mrs Dorothy Parker)

ISSUE 28 - AUTUMN/WINTER 2010

Maurice Broomfield Legacy Maurice Broomfield Photographs is published by Foto8. www.foto8.com

Jiang He and Arthur J D Thicker than Water Jiang and Arthur are represented by Greenpeace. www.greenpeace.org

ISSUE 28 - AUTUMN/WINTER 2010

ThE PhoTogRAPhy BIANNUAl

CONTRIBUTORS

Black and White Fibre Based Lambda Printing ‘Sinatra: Frank and Friendly’ by Terry O’Neill. The Little Black Gallery, Proud Gallery and Chris Beetles Gallery, UK Autumn 2010 For global exhibitions and print sales Terry uses Metro’s unique Black and White Lambda Printing service. Using Ilford Galerie Fibre Based paper specially adapted to the Lambda printer, Terry has the freedom of digital printing with the provenance and archival benefits of photographic paper.

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Buy your ticket:

Carrousel du Louvre, Paris Spotlight on Central Europe

18-21 NOV. 2010

André Kertész - Elizabeth and I, Paris 1931 - © Ministère de la Culture - Médiathèque du Patrimoine, Dist. RMN.

panos pictures Portrait of Robert Rammeloo, from the series Fish Heads. ÂŠ STEPHAN VANFLETEREN

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Tate Britain Tate Modern National Theatre British Museum South Bank Centre National Gallery Royal Opera House Almeida Theatre Science Museum Natural History Museum National Maritime Museum These institutions have all accepted sponsorship from BP and/or Shell British cultural institutions are complicit in the branding campaigns of some of the most environmentally destructive companies in the world. The arts wouldn’t take money from big tobacco. They wouldn’t take it from the arms industry. So when will they stop accepting it from Big Oil?

Download ‘Licence To Spill’ from www.platformlondon.org/licencetospill PLATFORM is a charity that uses arts, activism and education in campaigning for social and environmental justice. Image © Jeffrey Blackler. Still from the “Crude 2010” performance by Liberate Tate in the Tate Turbine Hall, 14/09/10. (Full performance can be seen on youtube)

THE LEGACY OF OIL

contents IN PICTURES 12 MY BEAUTIFUL BAKU

64 ATHABASCA TAR SANDS

146 MADE IN CHINA

28 BUILT ON OIL

99 CRUDE PROFIT

163 SOUR LAKE

44 CAPITOLIO

124 BOTTOM OF ‘DA BOOT

176 SAUDI STREET RACERS

62 FOLLOW THE MONEY

119 INTERVIEW

180 CONSIDERING THE CHOICES

97 OIL ON WATER

158 CRUDE WORLD

117 E CONOMICS OF EXTRACTION

174 ECUADOR: OIL VS NATURE

Rena Effendi

Yann Mingard Christopher Anderson

Polly Braden

Christian Lutz Kael Alford

Samuel Bollendorf

182 LEGACY

Maurice Broomfield

Johan Bävman Bryan Denton

IN WORDS

Kevin Smith

Helon Habila Ben Amunwa

Ed Kashi

Jeremy Lovell

Peter Maass John Vidal

REPORT: SPILLS 73 AMERICA’S GREAT OIL SPILL

Michael Shaw

78 MIDNIGHT OIL

Espen Rasmussen

88 THICKER THAN WATER

Jiang He and Arthur J D

COLOPHON Founder and Publisher Jon Levy

Design Jack Hamson

HOST Gallery Director Harry Hardie

Editors Lauren Heinz Max Houghton

Contributors Ben Amunwa Helon Habila Ed Kashi Jeremy Lovell Peter Maass Michael Shaw Kevin Smith John Vidal Sally Williams

Interns Sasha Joelle Achilli Hannah Buckley Ruth Grimberg Yasmin Keel Lucy Maria Christina Panayi

Subscription Manager and Events Coordinator Anna Pfab

Distribution and Membership Central Books: +44 (0)20 8986 4854 Individual copies: £20.

Contributing Editors Sophie Batterbury Maurice Geller Ken Grant Leo Hsu Colin Jacobson Steve MacLeod Feature Writer Guy Lane

Print Stones the Printers

Annual Foto8 membership available, see www.foto8.com/members subscribe@foto8.com ISSN: 1476-6817 ISBN: 978-0-9559580-5-2 Foto8 Ltd and HOST Gallery 1-5 Honduras Street London EC1Y 0TH, UK +44 (0)20 7253 8801 www.foto8.com Copyright © 2010 Foto8 Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this magazine may be copied or reproduced without the prior written consent of the publisher or the editors.

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Balakhani village, Baku, Azerbaijan

MY BEAUTIFUL BAKU photography RENA EFFENDI INTERVIEW GUY LANE

Rena Effendi was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and the focus of the majority of her photographic work is the effects of oil on the population of the region. Her acclaimed six-year body of work Pipe Dreams followed a 1,700km pipeline through Georgia and neighbouring Turkey. With these new photographs, Effendi has sought to capture the lifechanging effects of oil in Baku itself, where she – and the industry – came of age. “Baku used to be a very quiet city, but with the signing of the oil contract in the ’90s, and the ceasefire agreement with Armenia, life started to change very rapidly. The city exploded with development – not just in the construction industry – but with the arrival of an expat culture (and Irish pubs) that came in with oil. More and more people began to depend on the oil industry for work, and we saw people streaming from the villages and other areas of Azerbaijan into the city. At the same time there was an emerging middle class – the people who worked for oil companies, and the industries that serviced the oil sector – that grew more rich and could afford to buy cars and new apartments and so on. “At that time BP was a Mecca for young people seeking financial independence; now there are many more options, but back then it was the only choice. I was 19 when I started working for them and I didn’t really have any strong feelings about the oil industry. I was just trying to find a job and I thought it would bring something new and exciting to life here. And it did. I cannot imagine life in Azerbaijan without oil, and without foreigners coming in and investing money here. It would be a completely different place because it was a disastrous time: after the break-up of the Soviet Union we were war-torn and poor. So oil stabilised the economy and our politics; it

provided opportunities for young people; it definitely had a positive impact. “But unfortunately the rapid pace of development that we saw in Baku didn’t occur outside of the urban centres. The villages still stagger along slowly. So my work focuses on the way the centre of the capital grew and developed, while pushing impoverished residents to the edges of the city. They remain trapped – partly because they don’t want to move on; partly due to government neglect – in polluted areas left over from the Soviet era. “Basically, I’m looking at the human cost, the lives of the people who don’t benefit. And there are many – the great majority in fact. We have this vast population living in poverty, and at the same time we’re building luxurious towers in Baku. We have Hummer and Porsche dealerships, and diamond shops. It doesn’t really make sense. “People often criticise me here in my country for showing the ugly side of life in Azerbaijan. But I tell them that to me this is beautiful. I use the example of Dostoyevsky who wrote about criminality and the conditions in St Petersburg’s communal housing… but he wrote in such a beautiful, expressive language that you don’t even notice the ugliness. Dickens too painted in such a grey, grey palette – but it is so beautiful that you get really enchanted by it. “Of course we can’t get away from our own personal aesthetics. Yes, my work comes out a certain way and I cannot do anything about it. Maybe my photographs will remain in people’s minds for longer than a more direct picture would. Perhaps they can make a bigger impact than just a snapshot. I think that’s the whole point: it’s for people to remember.”

Ship cemetery on Nargin Island off the Baku bay

Medicinal oil baths in Bibi-Heybat village

Wedding dress in a dump in Balakhani village

Landfill workers

Polluted shore of the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;iodineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; lake of Balakhani village

An oil puddle in Balakhani village

Oil worker, Balakhani village

Dog roses in the oil field

Boys playing outside of their homes at a refugee settlement in a construction factory

Neighbours outside their homes in a refugee settlement

Aynur at home with toy leopard, Balakhani oil village

Boy playing his drum on a heap of building material waste in the refugee settlement

Oil field in Romani village, Baku

A refugee who lives on a landfill in Baku

A couple in Kirov Park which overlooks a luxury construction project in Baku

BUILT ON OIL

PHOTOGRAPHY Yann Mingard TEXT GUY LANE

Atyrau, the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main street (previous pages) New construction in the centre of Astana

Astana’s ‘triomphe’, an exact replica of the famous ‘Visotki’ of Moscow, an archetype of Stalinesque architecture

President Nursultan Nazarbayev on the national TV channel The interior of Akorda presidential palace A chandelier in the press room of KazMunaiGaz, the state oil and gas company

People waiting for the President in the Pyramid of Peace, designed by architect Norman Foster

A view of the centre of Astana from the Akorda presidential palace. The Bayterek Tower, symbol of the city, takes pride of place

A view over Astana A meeting between President Nazarbayev and his Romanian counterpart Traian Basescu in the Akorda presidential palace Inside the Bayterek Tower. After climbing to the top of the tower, visitors are encouraged to place their hand into a golden imprint of the hand of President Nazarbayev and make a wish

Seik Rustambekov, honoured architect of the Republic of Kazakhstan and president of the International Association of Union of Architects

Khan Shatyry entertainment centre, designed by Lord Foster under construction in the centre of the city. Foster also designed the Pyramid of Peace (following pages)

No visit to Kazakhstan’s capital Astana is complete without an ascent of the city’s Bayterek Tower, designed to resemble an orb coated in golden glass sitting atop an arboreal structure of gleaming silver. The motifs derive from a Kazakh legend that tells of an egg laid by a magical bird – Samruk – in a tree of life. Tourists can proceed by lift and staircase to the highest accessible point, where a malachite plinth supports a silver disc which in turn supports a block of gold bearing the handprint of the country’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev. Admirers are invited to place their right hand on the imprint, at which point music begins to play – “My Kazakhstan”, the national anthem written by the President himself. Significantly the “egg” is perched 97 metres from the ground – its height a reference to the fact that it was in 1997 that Nazarbayev decreed the Kazakh capital be moved from the verdant, thriving Almaty in the east to the barren steppes of the north. Astana – the word means “capital” – is a city built to order, a city built from scratch, a city built on Caspian oil. In its vaunting gigantism and its founder’s self-deification it matches a description (from Mike Davis’ anthology Evil Paradises) of the typical neoliberal cityscape of recent decades: “Where the... winner-take-all ethos is unfettered by any remnant of social contract and undisturbed by any ghost of the labour movement, where the rich can walk like gods in the nightmare gardens of their deepest and most secret desires.” Though many of the city’s spaces and buildings are the work of the late Kisho Kurokawa, more recently British architect (Lord) Norman Foster has been favoured. His Pyramid of Peace and Accord is among the photographs here – an abruptly equilateral apparition, its shape decreed by the President. It appears impervious to the belittled street sweepers below. Labourers work on Foster’s Khan Shatyr too, dwarfed as they scale the 150 metre tent-like structure that houses restaurants, cinemas, spas and shops, an aquapark and mini-golf course. In the main though, workers are displaced from the city centre, and housed instead away to the north on the other side of the tracks, across Astana’s railway line. But not all dissent has been so effectively marginalised: the leader of the country’s Communist Party has claimed that “up to 70 per cent of new buildings are empty. All of the new buildings are for the government only. Someone who cares about the people would not do that.” And Nazarbayev’s former son-in-law Rakhat Aliev has made allegations of corruption, claiming that public funds had been appropriated for the city’s bombastic architectural projects: “Instead of grandeur, I saw only billions [of dollars] stolen from the people and buried in this ungrateful land.” Let them talk. For the Astana skyline leaves no doubt as to who dominates the steppes.

Construction site in the centre of the capital

photography CHRISTOPER ANDERSON TExt Max Houghton Chris Anderson spent four years in and out of Venezuela making the photographs that would culminate in the book Capitolio, from which we are proud to publish a specially designed photo essay. At the start of his project, Anderson gained access via the Ministry of Culture. On what was to become his final trip, he was arrested on suspicion of being an American spy, strip-searched, his inquisitors making it abundantly clear that it was time to leave. The work, filmic, erratic, claustrophobic, much like Caracas itself, touches upon many subjects: power, poverty, cult of personality, but flowing though it is a single dark current: oil. 44

“Oil has turned Venezuela into a Disneyland economy of fabulous wealth and crushing poverty,” says Anderson. “Oil money is inequality there, it’s the political weapon, the albatross around their neck. It’s the giver and the destroyer. “PDVSA is the national oil company, and it’s used as tool of the state to curry political favour and crush the opposition. Some good things come out of its profits, of course – clinics, welfare programmes, schools in the barrios – but it’s the only industry in town. Agriculture has been all but wiped out. Most food in fertile, lush Venezuela is imported. There’s a lack of innovation in the country, a lack of ideas or entrepreneurial spirit… a sense that there isn’t anything beyond oil.” After Chavez’s victory, the millions of people who opposed his authoritarian regime, by signing a petition to force a recall vote,

found themselves blacklisted. Many of these people were from the upper and middle classes; educated individuals – in Anderson’s words “the people who made the trains run on time” – who were then replaced by party-approved cronies, leaving a skills gap. While Chavez is loathed and loved in equal measure, the extent of his control is undeniable, despite losses in September 2010 elections. By appointing so many to state jobs, he has effectively guaranteed a vast proportion of the vote; dissenters would without doubt be removed from their posts. As well as controlling state media, Chavez fears a CIA plot to kill him, and – in a neat form of oppression – believes their tactics will include posing as a foreign journalist. “I knew my arrest was just part of the demagogic rhetoric of Chavez,” says Anderson. “It was pure theatre. They called every number in my phone, threatened me, and threatened people I was

in contact with. I knew nothing really bad would happen, because they’re smart enough to know their limitations. The day after my arrest they told me something would happen to me, but it would be made to look like an accident. I haven’t been back. “All that aside, though, my work is neither pro- nor anti-Chavez. I wanted to make something that expressed as best I could the experience of Caracas; its heavy concrete structures symbolising the decadence of oil wealth, but with something rotten within. There’s a sensuality to the place that is not just sexual, it’s physical too. The jungle is growing up through the cracks. “Ever since oil was discovered there nearly a hundred years ago, it’s been used as a weapon by the right and by the left. This is Venezuela’s legacy.”

Column

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Despite the fact that there is not a single drop of crude to be found underneath the streets of London, the city acts as one the international capitals of the oil industry. Companies operate here to take advantage of the web of financial, political and legal services that allow them to drill in many other parts of the world. Only a handful of the bigger companies have sufficient financial resources to pay for new infrastructure necessary to expand their operations. In the UK, the high street bank that has been most heavily involved in financing the hydrocarbon industry is the Royal Bank of Scotland. At first glance, high street banks’ impacts on climate change might look minor. Yet RBS’ financial products play a central role in the exploration, production and transportation of oil. While “internal” emissions from the bank’s own energy use are relatively low, the carbon emissions embedded within its financial products are staggering, to the point where a report calculated that in 2006, RBS’ “embedded” emissions were greater that the actual emissions of Scotland itself. In 2000, RBS started positioning itself as “the oil and gas bank”, providing oil corporations with the cash to build and operate drilling rigs, pipelines and oil tankers. Working closely with everything from the world’s biggest oil companies to start-up minnows, RBS structures 62

the loan agreements and provides the credit facilities that make new oil and gas extraction possible. While the RBS head office lies just outside Edinburgh, the London-based Oil and Gas Team work out of 135 Bishopsgate, towering above Liverpool Street Station. It is from these offices that the team underwrites projects and operations from West Africa to the Amazon rainforest, from the North Sea to the Middle East. The bank has also been associated with more controversial forms of oil production, notably tar sands extraction in Canada. The tar sands have been heavily criticised for their carbon intensity, as well their impacts on vast tracts of boreal forests, waterways and local indigenous communities that are increasingly unable to practice traditional fishing and hunting, and experiencing spikes in rare forms of illness as a result of the industrial pollution. [See the story by Polly Braden and Sally Williams, page 64.] In the three-year period 200709, RBS beat other UK banks in underwriting the largest amount of loans to companies operating in tar sands in Canada, to a total of more than $7.5 billion. In 2009, RBS underwrote a £1 billion debt to ConocoPhillips, an oil company that aims to expand production eightfold

from its three tar sands projects by 2015. On the same day in March 2010 when its head of Corporate Sustainability was claiming in the Guardian that “linking RBS to tar sands developments in Canada was highly misleading,” it was announced in a Canadian newspaper that the bank was opening a new office in Calgary, the heart of the country’s energy business including tar sands developments, that was to be an extension of its Houston-based oil and gas division. Of course, RBS is more famous for its spectacular nosedive in the fall of 2008. In total, the bank has received £45 billion in public money, to the point that it is 83 per cent owned by UK taxpayers. Critics have argued that the use of public money should involve a greater degree of accountability for example in the type of businesses that it finances, but this has not been the case. A front-page exposé in the Scottish Sunday Herald showed that in the first two years since the initial bail out took place, the bank had provided nearly £13 billion of finance to the oil and gas industries. The oil companies that had been financed using public money included Tullow Oil which is operating in the politically sensitive border regions between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Edinburgh-based Cairn Energy, which has recently been engaging in offshore drilling in “iceberg

Column

“With climate change and the abuse of fossil fuels becoming the defining issue of a generation, the question is how much brand damage already beleaguered banks are prepared to sustain”

alley”, a treacherous stretch of Arctic waters off the coast of Greenland. A number of questions have been raised in Parliament about the policy incoherence in promoting the need to address climate change on one hand, while allowing a publicly owned institution to pour billions into fossil fuel companies. During a Parliamentary debate on banking reform, Labour MP Andrew Smith, said that RBS was, “attempting to externalise the risks of climate change which sooner or later, will fall on taxpayers. Those are the same taxpayers who now own RBS, so those external costs are no longer carried by a third party.” In its pre-budget report of 2009, the Environmental Audit Committee recommended that, “the Treasury examine and report on how some form of environmental criteria for the investment strategies pursued by these [part publicowned] banks might be imposed, and what impacts this might have on UK sustainable development objectives.” Despite this, and an attempt by civil society groups to bring a Judicial Review over the lack of environmental criteria in RBS’ investment decisions, the Treasury is adamant that the public shares in RBS will be managed strictly on a commercial basis. The refusal reflects the Treasury’s broader lack of joined-up thinking with regards to climate change and the economy. While the massive bail out and effective nationalisation of one of the UK’s

biggest financial institutions involved a massive leap in what was politically possible at the time, using that same public ownership to affect positive change with regards to the climate has been discounted as even a remote possibility. Dealing with the threat of the climate crisis involves simultaneously reining in the massive investment into new fossil fuel production as well as ramping up the money that is going into renewable energy. It is estimated that £200 billion needs to be invested in UK energy infrastructure in the next 10-15 years if the government is going to meet its renewable energy commitments. While the coalition government appears to be backtracking on its promise to create a Green Investment Bank in order to help finance the urgently needed transition to a low-carbon economy, a report has been published that has showed how the state-controlled banks, if the political will was there, could be recruited to the GIB cause, and in doing so redefine the roles of banks to meet the needs of society rather than allowing the sector to return to the short-termist approach which contributed to the financial crisis. The pressure from within Parliament and from NGOs has also been augmented by grassroots action. In the last four years, numerous student groups in the People & Planet network have been targeting campus-based RBS branches, while in August around 800

people occupied the backyard of the RBS headquarters on the outskirts of Edinburgh to protest against its fossil fuel financing. Over the course of five days, the Camp for Climate Action orchestrated a series of high-profile interventions against the bank. With climate change and the abuse of fossil fuels becoming the defining issue of a generation, the question is how much brand damage the already beleaguered bank can sustain before it withdraws from bankrolling the unfolding climate catastrophe. Kevin Smith is a climate and finance campaigner at PLATFORM

ATHABASCA TAR SANDS 64

PHOTOGRAPHY POLLY BRADEN TExt Sally Williams

North Alberta, Canada, is sitting on a great pile of oil which is the product of ancient marine life and geological forces some 200-300 million years ago. The reserve of bitumen lies in “tar sands” under a vast wilderness of forest in the basin of the Athabasca river, 430 km north of Edmonton, the capital of the province. The original inhabitants of this area, the Cree, one of Canada’s aboriginal – or First Nations – peoples, boiled up the tarry sand to repair canoes. The Hudson’s Bay Company used it to shore up leaky roofs at a time when fur pelts, not oil, were the economic basis of the area. The Canadian government spotted its value in the 1880s, but it wasn’t until 1967 that the first oil company (now Suncor) built a mine on the banks of the Athabasca. Now the Athabasca tar sands are a global concern. A rise in oil prices and the threat of dwindling supplies has sent global corporations pouncing on Canada. Alberta has approved nearly 100 extraction projects since 2000. Shell’s Athabasca oil sands project meant cutting down forest the size of 33,702 ice rinks. John Rigney, who works for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation community, sits at his desk in his office in Fort Chipewyan. To reach him I have flown 400 km north from Fort McMurray, the small town on the banks of the Athabasca river that has become the hub of Canada’s black gold rush. As I fly over the open mines, I am surprised at how much wilderness survives intact: a mosaic of muskeg bog, shallow lakes, meandering streams, a forest of black spruce, white spruce and jack pine, aspen and poplar. But not for long. Working mines account for only one seventh of the total land that has been leased for oil sands development. An area the size of Greece could be stripped of its forest. “There will be a trillion dollars of investment in the next 25 years,” says Rigney, 60, who cuts a striking figure here, being a Scotsman with startlingly fair skin; he has lived here for 38 years with his wife (they have six children and 14 grandchildren). “And we’re downstream from all that. We expect pollution on a scale…” he stops. “The tar sands will probably make this region of the world uninhabitable in another 50 years.” On the northern shore of Lake Athabasca, Fort Chipewyan was founded more than 300 years ago by another Scotsman, Roderick Mackenzie (a cousin of the explorer Alexander Mackenzie), but First Nations people have been here since the Ice Age, nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived close to nature, ice-fishing and hunting muskrat and moose. The local Cree and Chipewyan tribes are now organised into the Mikisew Cree First Nation and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, and the Northern supermarket is their main source of food, but still people talk about being good hunters. The community has evolved to a steady 1,200, living in modest clapboard houses on a grid of streets with names such as Robert Avenue and Mackenzie Avenue. There are signs of the modern world: an ice rink, a cinema, an adult education college, a courtroom, and a café serving the local speciality, bannocks (Scottish scones), and the national favourite, poutine (chips with cheese and gravy). But the old world prevails: there is a sweat lodge – a purification sauna with ritual prayers and offerings to the spirit world; and there are dream-catchers in most homes – handmade hoops decorated with feathers and beads, traditionally believed to ward off nightmares. It is a remote place, one of the great wildernesses of the world. Fort Chipewyan has an ambiguous relationship with the oil

industry. It has brought much-needed jobs (the only other big employer here is fishing), paved streets, running water to every home, and a turkey every Christmas for every family (courtesy of Syncrude). The ice rink, gym, cinema and youth centre were all partly funded by Syncrude. And it has particularly rewarded those with an entrepreneurial inclination. One man hired out his bulldozers to the oil companies; another, his river freight boat; another started a bus service for Syncrude. But there is also a deep sense of anxiety: a study by the Alberta health services in February 2009 confirmed elevated levels of cancers in the community. Alarm bells had been raised by a local doctor in 2006, after he reported recording five cases of cholangiocarcinoma, a rare cancer of the bile duct. George Poitras, a former chief of Mikisew Cree First Nation, suspects contaminated water. “The Athabasca river flows into our community, that is how we get our drinking water. We also suspect that contamination of the water has reached the food chain in the traditional food we consume on a regular basis, whether that is ducks, fish, geese, moose or muskrat.” The report did not make the connection, only that “further investigations” were needed. But Poitras is convinced. In 2005 Poitras, as chief, initiated a legal action against the Canadian government for its lack of consultation with the Mikisew Cree on a proposed road that would cross their traditional lands. Under an 1899 treaty, the First Nations surrendered 330,000 square miles of land to the Crown, an area that now includes northern Alberta. In exchange for this, the First Nations were promised reserves and other benefits, including the right to hunt, trap and fish through the land except for “such tracts as may be required or taken up from time to time for settlement, mining, lumbering, trading or other purposes”. (Mining, yes, “but how could anyone have foreseen the proportion of treaty land that was going to be used for that purpose?” says David Schindler, a professor of ecology at the University of Alberta.) Poitras won the case and the road was diverted from the reserve to a track along its boundary. The case changed the legal landscape in Canada. Mining companies are now duty bound to consult with First Nation communities before a development is permitted (in practice, many say this is little more than a box-ticking exercise, with companies paying First Nation elders an honorarium of about $300 each to turn up to the meeting). Other Alberta First Nation groups have recently launched legal actions to defend their treaty rights against oil sands development, including the Beaver Lake Cree, Duncan’s First Nation and Horse Lake First Nation. Back in his office Rigney shows me the latest proposal: Synenco Energy, a subsidiary of Sinopec, the Chinese national oil company, wants to assemble a tar sands plant in China, Korea and Malaysia, then float the whole show across the Pacific to the Beaufort Sea and then down the Mackenzie river to Alberta. “This is big, bigger than anything,” he says, as we look at photographs of the 12,000 tonne plant and vast ships that could be coming to his back door. “We’re not against the companies,” he says. “Nobody minds a good economy. What we’re objecting to is going ahead with these unbelievably large developments without any knowledge of how it’s going to affect us in the long term. But what do a thousand or so people in Fort Chip matter? We’re just a drop in the ocean.”

REPORT

AMERICA’S GREAT OIL SPILL

In the past two years, we’ve witnessed three stories which rose above the rest for political and visual profundity, including: the election of Barack Obama; the devastating Haitian earthquake; and the massive oil blow out off America’s Gulf coast. Who could have scripted a more dramatic stage set, the unstoppable ooze playing on: the lingering frustration from the Copenhagen climate conference; public rage at largely faceless mega-corporations after the near-meltdown of the international financial system; the telegenic Obama in the heat of a raging mid-term election; still further devastation to post-Katrina New Orleans; and prideful tension between Britain, the British-based BP and Washington amid allied tension over the war in Afghanistan. Each new batch of images flowing from the Gulf, from Washington, and from BP, raised more questions and issues. How much were the images communicating the dimension of the crisis and the physical scale? How much were the visuals perpetuating the propaganda agenda of BP or the American government? How much were we seeing in terms of loss of life, impact on livelihood and health, and comparison to similar and previous spills? And, how much was a “PC” response, obscuring how seductive and beautiful these tragic pictures happened to be? As publisher of the visual politics site, BagNewsNotes, I’m interested in big pictorial events, and how the media frames those

events for consumption by the news consumer. My thesis is that news photos, far from random or documentary, are instead the product of, and guide lights for exposing the underlying commercial, political and public relations forces. To get at the framing, BNN ran dozens of posts examining the oil spill imagery, culminating in an online discussion in July bringing together editorial photographers, visual academics and other informed observers to analyse the pictures. Because the BagNewsNotes site is run like a seminar, this article attempts to embody that spirit here. To bring you into the process, I’m going to offer you a photo and ask that you first consider your own reactions before comparing them to the comments that follow it. (In the spirit of interactivity, I invite you to add your comments to the discussion thread at http://tiny.cc/ll42i, then drop me a line so I can respond to each personally.) The associations below are primarily mine, but bring in panellists that participated in the online discussion as well as analysis from BNN contributors (each is so identified). The photos we discussed were drawn from an original group of 50, then edited down to nine, most of which appear below. So, here we go. (For context, each commentary begins with the corresponding photo’s caption.) 73

READING THE PICTURES BY MICHAEL SHAW

1. Empty beach chairs rest on the sand as oil washes ashore in Orange Beach, Alabama, on Saturday, June 19. The BP oil spill, which began when the leased Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, is gushing as much as 60,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, according to the government The photo seems to have a class resonance to it in that the beach is very wide and the chairs look very expensive… one message to me is that when we have these natural catastrophes, perhaps nobody is spared, from the top of the economic food chain to the bottom. Erika Blumenfeld, artist and documentary photographer: The line of chairs and umbrellas has a controlled and rhythmic quality as opposed to the chaos and uncontrolled quality of the oil and the water and just knowing how uncontrolled that force is… there’s a comparison between these two that is important. 2. Reporter Anderson Cooper is reflected in oil-filled water during a tour of areas where oil has come ashore on May 26, 2010 in Blind Bay, Louisiana. As BP prepares to try and stop the oil leak with a “top kill” method, the Louisiana coastline is reeling from the effects of the continued gusher In July, Ben Brantley, the NYT Theatre critic, remembering Garbo, wrote: “Fame has become an existential condition: if your image isn’t reflected back at you, then how do you know you’re alive? The problem is that, people being people, 24-hour visibility will ultimately breed if not contempt, then weary familiarity.” As a media fixture who has built his celebrity on disaster journalism and the sensationalism of catastrophe, Cooper can’t help but compete for “face time” with any story. Reflecting that parasitical relationship, this media comment on the media captures Cooper as an oily character. 3. In America, the live underwater video feed of the spill was nothing but popular with the public (though less so for the government, officials often being juxtaposed with it in split-screen). Yet, in England, this type of witnessing was not so clear, given one more reminder of the pervasiveness of video 74

surveillance, as well as America’s vilifying of BP Paul Lowe, Course Director, MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, London College of Communications: This is like the ultimate citizen journalist, a completely remote digital camera because there’s no other way in which to get access to the scene… maybe they made a mistake in allowing this footage to be seen in the first place but once it’s out of the box, it’s an extraordinary visual metaphor for this uncontrollable leak. Nathan Stormer, Professor of Communication and Journalism, University of Maine: It is very disconcerting… because there’s been this endless flow and we’ve been able to observe that… but it becomes highly abstract because we can’t see what happens to all the oil that goes out of it. Jon Levy, Founder and Director, Foto8: It strikes me a bit like the Death Clock that ticked on 6th Avenue in New York City… as a constant reminder as you’re not looking at it, it’s still ticking away. I think it cuts through all the propaganda. As long as this picture is still ticking away, it doesn’t matter what people are saying, the problem hasn’t gone away. 4. A brown pelican is seen on the beach at East Grand Terre Island along the Louisiana coast on Thursday, June 30. A bird is mired in oil on the beach at East Grand Terre Island, Thursday, June 3 Loret Steinberg, Professor of Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, Rochester Institue of Technology: The pelican [above] personifies human agony. It… resonates as a phoenix which doesn’t have any chance of rising. The fact that it’s still calling and still trying to lift its wings is so horrifying to me. John Lucaites, Professor of Rhetoric and Public Culture, Indiana University: The image [below] incorporates many of the conventions of portrait photography with the point of focus slightly off-centre and with the subject both filling the frame and yet looking askance so as to put itself on display. It produces such a powerful reaction because of the sense of dignity. There is something of a regal quality to the bird’s pose as if to acknowledge that it is on view for all to see and yet to refuse to succumb to the humiliation of the muck and mire that covers and encases it. It is not a stretch to say that the bird exudes a prideful majesty that resonates with the better part of the human spirit.

Kari Goodnough/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Live underwater footage of the spill

Charlie Riedel/AP Photo

Sean Gardner/Pool via Bloomberg

Chuck Kennedy/Official White House Photo

John Moore/Getty Images

Benjamin Lowy / VII Network for GQ

Erika Blumenfeld

5. / 6. Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, surveys oil recovery operations aboard the Discover Enterprise drill ship in the Gulf, on May 28. President Barack Obama and Lafourche Parish president Charlotte Randolf inspect a tar ball as they look at the effect the BP oil spill is having on Fourchon Beach, Lousiana, May 28 Paul Lowe: If you were going to take a portrait of the CEO of BP for their annual report, the pointing off into the middle distance is a classic cliché of that corporate advertising. Even down to having the hat with the BP logo and the rig in the background. Jon Levy: In both images, Hayward and Obama, the propaganda, the set-up nature of these images, they both conspire to work against them. Tony Hayward’s trying to look all regal and in control and strong and it completely subverts what’s actually going on. It subverts the message they are trying to put out because we know that’s not the case. With the Obama one, it’s the same choreography trying to get across different message that he’s very considered, that every tiny piece of oil matters, but again that seems the wrong attitude to take with such an enormous issue. Erika Blumenfeld: It’s so important as photographers and also as viewers not to be misled by the quality of an image versus the actualities of the situation. Obviously both of the images of these two leaders are trying to convey a certain affect, for propaganda. We need to look at their policies to really get the full story. There is a tendency with these iconic images to forget policy, to forget what’s actually going on the ground that is in stark comparison with what this photograph of Obama may be trying to convey. 7. Bags of oil collected from the beach await pickup May 25, at Elmer’s Island, Louisiana. Cleanup crews had worked for days to scrub the beach and dispose of the material This picture is incredibly striking in its moodiness. It’s apocalyptic in its intensity yet more complex than that: you have the light and then the dark. Just when you feel this photo is speaking to hopelessness, the breaking of the light conveys hope. The tractor cuts in the sand to form a berm also reflects how very aggressive man is on the environment (as reminiscent of the reckless plan Governor Jindal and others were pushing to bulldoze sand into the Gulf). Then the booms look like human intestines… it’s not much of a jump to see a disaster that can literally rip your guts out. John Moore, photographer, Getty Images: This photo is symbolic of the idea that the worst was on the horizon. That this wasn’t over. That things were going to get worse before they got better. And that was certainly the case. When you fly over the spill, it’s so vast. It’s very hard to capture images. Just showing the dimensions of it was very difficult.

the horror and the beauty is sometimes what grabs people’s attention and keeps you looking at that photo a few extra seconds or coming back to it later. Paul Lowe: When we see beauty in terms of evil or distress, our reactions are very complex. We sometimes think, “Oh, that can’t be right.” We too often respond with a very kind of knee jerk that we cannot have beauty in the face of horror and, yet, clearly you can. It’s a visual trope that comes up time and time again. We can read into these dramatic, epic situations an epic, awesome beauty. I think these two things can co-exist and, in fact, beauty can be a call to action and not just admiration. 9. Citizens of Grand Isle, Louisiana publicly express their outrage about the devastating effects that the BP oil catastrophe has had on their community, families and livelihood What’s troubling about our own edit is the lack of citizens affected by the crisis. Instead, what we see, and perhaps this is a trend in photojournalism right now, is signage – be it a billboard or a protest sign – to represent human plight. Erika Blumenfeld: These signs were some of the first direct voices that we heard from people along the way… I included the flag to convey the sense of “who’s responsible?”. There is a sense here of the static. How can we move the oil? It has an uncontrolled quality. We look to our leaders to help contain the enormity of it and we’re not seeing that from our own nation or from BP. John Moore: A lot of folks rely on the oil business for their livelihood. I think a lot of people are afraid to come out and protest in a way we would expect. It’s really complicated showing people not working… a lot of folks aren’t interested in us doing it. I found a lot of people who wanted their story told, and a lot of people who didn’t. Nathan Stormer: It’s like the oil slick photo with Anderson Cooper. This photo… reflects the oil spill back onto us as a community, not just BP. But what does this say about us? . . . If the visual limitations of this story were profound – from the difficulty characterising physical scale, to incorporating the culpability of an oil-addicted public, to doing justice to those who were harmed – these photos, and many more like them, echoed loudly through the mediascape. Whether through irony (rock star reporter in a crude mirror), aesthetics (the spill as screen saver); parody (haughty arm-cocked CEO in a jumpsuit), confrontation (we’re stuck, but all hail the Stars-and-Stripes) or witnessing (did you see how the spew was spewing today at noon?), these images call out news organisations for feigning objectivity, and government and the corporate world for treating calamity in a too-bloodless, PR-perfect way.

8. Tendrils and plumes of oil have covered the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, leaving a viscous mess in the open sea. This is a close-up image of the pools of oil that stagnate on the surface I thought this image was fairly subversive given how much there is a tendency now to aestheticise the news. John Moore: It’s the same in any disaster, whether it’s environmental or human, some of the most striking images are also somehow the most beautiful as well. The dissonance between 77

PHOTOGRAPHY ESPEN RASMUSSEN TEXT GUY LANE

MIDNIGHT OIL report

At around 3 o’clock in the afternoon on July 30 2009 the freighter Full City anchored one mile or so off the coast of southern Norway. The vessel had left Newport in the UK a week earlier, having received orders to transport 11,000 tonnes of fertiliser – yet to be loaded – from Scandinavia to Puerto Quetzal in Guatemala. As the July evening faded, weather conditions in the North Sea deteriorated. Ahead lay the scenic beaches of Sastein and Langesund, the popular resorts at Krokshavn and Steinvika, the bird sanctuaries of Molen and Lille Sastein, the inlets and islands of Telemark. By 10 o’clock that night the strengthening gale force winds assailing the vessel began to veer from southeast to south west. In very rough seas, and battered by waves up to 6 metres high, the Full City swayed and pitched. Though the duty officer was initially unaware, the ship – without any cargo but carrying over 1,000 tonnes of heavy, high viscosity bunker fuel – started to drift. MV Full City was built in the mid-’90s at Japan’s Hakodate shipyard, is registered in Panama, and is operated by Beijing-based China Ocean Shipping Group Company (Cosco), one of the world’s largest multinationals. Cosco runs a fleet of several hundred merchant vessels with an annual shipping volume of hundreds of millions of tonnes, from iron ore to soy beans, across all the world’s major trade lanes. Latest figures indicate that revenue for the first half of 2010 was up 55 per cent to 45.5 billion yuan – best part of $7 billion. Shortly after midnight the master of the Full City ascertained that the ship had indeed moved from its original location. Dragging her anchor and drifting helplessly sideways the ship neared the Sastein coast. The chief engineer was commanded to start the main engine and three of the 23-strong Chinese crew went to heave anchor; the rest were ordered to their positions. Within minutes, though, the engine was halted by water bursting through the hull. At 00:23 hours the Full City had run aground on the rocks beyond Langesund. Almost immediately the winds and currents began to carry the spreading oil toward the coast...

report

THICKER THAN WATER PHOTOGRAPHY JIANG He & ArtHUr J D TEXT Leo HSU

On July 16 2010, the day after BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was finally capped, an oil transfer pipe at Dalian’s Xingang port, on the north-east coast of China, exploded as a Liberian tanker ship was offloading high-sulphur crude to a depot. The result was a series of explosions, a 15-hour fire, the release of tonnes of oil into the Yellow Sea over an area of 430 sq km, and as yet unestimated ecological damage. Clean-up efforts involved both oil-skimming boats and fishing boats, oil-eating bacteria and felt and straw mats. The oil, said one Greenpeace observer, was “half solid, half liquid… as sticky as asphalt”. Firefighters Zhang Liang and Han Xiaoxong, working from a fishing boat in swimming trunks, repeatedly entered the water to keep a floating water pump clear of debris. Trapped by the thick oil on the surface, both began to sink. By the time firefighter Zheng Zhanhong reached Han, the 25-year-old Zhang had completely submerged. Thirty thousand people lined the streets for his funeral. While initial official estimates placed the spill at 1,500 tonnes – over 450,000 gallons – Richard Steiner, an oil spill expert invited by Greenpeace to make an independent assessment, said the spill was likely closer to 60,000 tonnes, while Greenpeace believes it to be even more. The Chinese government celebrated the rapid cleanup of the spill, a recovery paid for in part by the life of Zhang Liang. And while China’s second largest crude oil depot has returned to normal operations, the aftermath of the incident continues to impact the local fishing industry, with long-term consequences as yet unknown.

Absorbent mats used in the cleanup process

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Half solid, half liquid ... as sticky as asphaltâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; All photographs these pages Arthur J D

Unconscious firefighter Han Xiaoxong (left and following pages) is brought ashore after he and Zhang Liang became trapped in oil while maintaining a water pump. Zhang died in the incident

Zheng Zhanhong and Han Xiaoxong follow the current to safety (top) Han Xiaoxong shouts to the submerged Zhang after Zheng has helped him onto the boat (middle) Fishermen say that no one told them that they needed safety equipment or any form of protection - not even face masks (bottom)

Fishermen working in the oil clean-up find it difficult to remove the

noxious oil from their bodies, even after repeated washing

OIL ON WATER

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Once upon a time they lived in paradise, he said, in a small village close to Yellow Island. They lacked for nothing, fishing and hunting and farming and watching their children growing up before them, happy. The village was close-knit, made up of cousins and uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters, and, though they were happily insulated from the rest of the world by their creeks and rivers and forests, they were not totally unaware of the changes going on all around them: the gas flares that lit up neighbouring villages all day and all night, and the cars and TVs and video players in the front rooms of their neighbours who had allowed the flares to be set up. Some of the neighbours were even bragging that the oil companies had offered to send their kids to Europe and America to become engineers, so that one day they could return and work as oil executives in Port Harcourt For the first time the close, unified community was divided – for how could they not be tempted, with the flare in the next village burning over them every night, its flame long and coiled like a snake, whispering, winking, hissing? Already the oil company men had started visiting, accompanied by important politicians from Port Harcourt, holding long conferences with Chief Malabo, the head chief, who was also Chief Ibiram’s uncle. One day, early in the morning, Chief Malabo called the whole village to a meeting. Of course he had heard the murmurs from the young people, and the

FICTION

suspicious whispers from the old people, all wondering what it was he had been discussing with the oil men and the politicians. Well, they had made an offer, they had offered to buy the whole village, and with the money – and yes, there was a lot of money, more money than any of them had ever imagined – and with the money they could relocate elsewhere and live a rich life. But Chief Malabo had said no, on behalf of the whole village he had said no. This was their ancestral land, this was where their fathers and their fathers’ fathers were buried. They’d been born here, they’d grown up here, they were happy here, and though they may not be rich, the land had been good to them, they never lacked for anything. What kind of custodians of the land would they be if they sold it off? And just look at the other villages that had taken the oil money: already the cars had broken down, and the cheap television and DVD players were all gone, and where was the rest of the money? Thrown away in Port Harcourt bar rooms, or on second wives and funeral parties, and now they were worse off than before. Their rivers were already polluted and useless for fishing, and the land grew only gas flares and pipelines. But the snake, the snake in the garden wouldn’t rest, it kept on hissing and the apple only grew larger and more alluring each day. And already far off in the surrounding waters the oil company boats were patrolling, sometimes openly sending their men to the village to take samples of 97

The land grew only gas flares and pipelines. But the snake in the garden kept on hissing and the apple grew more alluring each day. And in the surrounding waters the oil company boats were patrolling...

soil and water. The village decided to keep them away by sending out their own patrols over the surrounding rivers, in canoes, all armed with bows and arrows and clubs and a few guns. But daily Chief Malabo was feeling the pressure. As a chief he had no control over the families’ decision about what to do with their land, but as a chief his word carried weight, especially among the elders. But what of the young men who were still grumbling, and looking enviously across the water at the other villages? The canoe patrol was something of a desperate measure, and this soon became very clear. It turned out to be the excuse the oil companies and the politicians who worked for them needed to make their next move. One day the patrol came upon two oil workers piling soil samples into a speedboat. There was a brief skirmish, nothing too serious – one of the oil workers escaped with a swollen jaw, the other with a broken arm – but the next day the soldiers came. Chief Malabo was arrested, his hands tied behind his back as if he were a petty criminal, on charges of supporting the militants and plotting against the federal government and threatening to kidnap foreign oil workers. The list was long – but, the lawyer said, if the elders would consent to the oil company’s demands, sell the land... A politician, who introduced himself as their senator, came all the way from Abuja and assured them that their situation was 98

receiving national attention, it was in the papers, and he was going to fight for them to see that their chief was returned safe and sound. With him were two white men, oil executives. The villagers chased them away. Others came, but they were all liars, all working for the oil companies, trying one way or another to break the villagers’ resolve. But the villagers remained firm. Chief Malabo, whenever they went to see him, told them not to give in, not to worry about him – but they could see how he was deteriorating every day. And then they went to see him one day and were told he was dead. Here Chief Ibiram paused in his story, his voice breaking. They were given his body, which was wrapped in a raffia mat and a white cloth, and told to take him away. Just like that. The following week, even before Chief Malabo had been buried, the oil companies moved in. They came with a whole army, waving guns and looking like they meant business. They had a contract, they said, Chief Malabo had signed it in prison before he died, selling them all of his family land, and that was where they’d start drilling, and whoever wanted to join him and sell his land would be paid handsomely, but the longer the people held out, the more the value of their land would fall. Zaq shifted. – So what happened? – They sold. One by one. The rigs went up, and the gas flares, and the workers

came and set up camp in our midst, we saw our village change, right before our eyes. And that was why we decided to leave, ten families. We didn’t take their money. The money would be our curse on them, for taking our land, and for killing our chief. We left, we headed northwards, we’ve lived in five different places now, but always we’ve had to move. We are looking for a place where we can live in peace. But it is hard. So your question, are we happy here? I say how can we be happy when we are mere wanderers without a home?

CRUDE PROFIT PHOTOGRAPHY CHRISTIAN LUTZ TEXT MAX HOUGHTON

Lagos Yacht Club, New Yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Eve party (previous page). December 31, 2009 Swimming pool on a private beach club on the Lagos lagoon. November 22, 2009

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Nigerian businessmen, Victoria Island, Lagos. November 23, 2009

“We’re not going to keep on living here much longer. I know the barbed wire around my property isn’t there for nothing, but if there is a rebellion, the crowd will break through it and attack us” Taiwo, 44, Nigerian, employed by an American oil company 102

Fusion restaurant, Victoria Island, Lagos. November 20, 2009

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NNPC (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation) complex (previous pages), Abuja. February 4, 2010 Victoria Island, Lagos. November 20, 2009

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Private beach club on the Lagos lagoon. November 22, 2009

“Nigeria is a horrible country – only business is fantastic. Everything here is role playing – a game you have to end up winning, because if I’m not the first one to snap up all the land has to give, someone else will surely beat me to it” Guillaume, 30, French, employed by a French oil company, has been in Nigeria for two years 107

Everyone wants a piece of it. The oil industry in Nigeria has brought about indescribable wealth, enjoyed by the new elites of Lagos and Abudja, but has done nothing to alleviate the crushing poverty of the residents of the Niger Delta, instead making their living conditions more polluted, more squalid, more abject. Christian Lutz is interested in the invisible power structures that create this gaping inequality. Over the course of a year, Lutz made three trips to Nigeria, gaining access to expatriate businessmen in swimming pools, at their yacht clubs and private beaches, and out on the town, celebrating their vast success. In documenting what he called “this rough capitalism”, Lutz witnessed a shocking – but not uncommon – scene on the city streets: as a huge black mpv approached a police checkpoint, and, instead of slowing down, or stopping, its occupants simply threw money at the police sitting inside and drove off at high speed. A cry of “thank you, sir” was audible. Elsewhere, Lutz documented the gas flares that still dominate the night sky, as well as the communities of the Delta’s Gbaramatu Kingdom, whose kinsmen have been repeatedly attacked and some killed by JTF, the Nigerian military joint task force, in pursuit of MEND activists. In the Delta, petrodollars and petroviolence are brothers in arms, locked in a deadly embrace that shows no sign of abating.

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Gas flare, Niger Delta. January 8, 2010

â&#x20AC;&#x153;If you have some beautiful landscapes or some lovely scenes of the everyday life of the populations living in the drilling zones, my company could buy some enlargements from you to decorate the main office in Londonâ&#x20AC;? Peter, 54, head of a European oil and gas brokerage company, has been in Nigeria for four years 109

Private residence, Abuja. November 17, 2009

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not the money Bertrand earns in Nigeria that makes me happy to live here, but more the daily comfort we enjoy here: in Europe, we never could afford a nursemaid for the weekdays and a nursemaid for the weekends, a maid, a cook, a chauffeur for Bertrand and one for meâ&#x20AC;? Corinne, Belgian, wife of Bertrand who works for a European oil and gas brokerage company 110

Meat being cooked in Gbaramatu Kingdom, Inukorowa, Niger Delta. May 23, 2010

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Gbaramatu Kingdom, Benikrukru, Niger Delta. May 24, 2010

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Commemoration of the 2009 JTF (Joint Task Forces) attacks, Benikrukru. May 23, 2010

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Animals being cooked in Gbaramatu Kingdom, Azama, Niger Delta State. May 23, 2010

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Funeral ceremony in Gbaramatu Kingdom, Kunukunuma, Niger Delta. January 15, 2010

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ECONOMICS OF EXTRACTION

Outside the plane window at the Niger Delta, the oil region of Nigeria, I can see a solid bed of rainforest with wide ribbons of water the colour of coffee dregs coiling through it. I try to orientate, but I cannot see any signs of development and the only visible landmarks are the glowing gas flares that burn 24 hours a day. In this vast region, the size of Portugal, the sense of injustice is palpable, even at 10,000ft. The Delta’s problems are complex and contradictory. Village communities across the Delta live in perpetual tension with multinational oil companies. Over $700 billion worth of oil has been extracted and there is virtually nothing to show for it in the impoverished communities. Companies burn off billions of dollars worth of gas as a waste product, whilst people are living without electricity, clean water or adequate roads. As the rush to exploit Africa’s oil intensifies, the Delta is a stark illustration of the oil curse, the logical consequence of corporate exploitation, environmental destruction, political repression, poor governance and corruption. The history of oil in Nigeria is inseparable from the history of the nation itself. Nigeria started life as an idea conceived by a kind of proto-multinational corporation, the Royal Niger Company. The Company conned and robbed its way down the length of the River Niger, signing legally binding “treaties” with naive traditional leaders. After this frenzy of land-grabbing, Britain purchased the Company in 1900,

absorbing the territory into the British Empire. The word “Nigeria” was coined by Flora Shaw, wife of the colonial mastermind Lord Lugard. His theory of “indirect rule” was tried and tested there when the British selected local strongmen to suppress and control the population. Any resistance was swiftly put down with brutal military force. The creation and unification of Nigeria was a colonial affair, motivated by the economics of extraction. For centuries, Nigeria has provided the raw materials for Western capitalism and industrialisation. The same story is on an endless loop. The trans-Atlantic trade in West African slaves was succeeded by the trade in palm oil, which lubricated factories in Bradford, Manchester and Liverpool. The same ports that once packed slaves and palm oil are loading tankers of crude oil to the US and UK. Despite the regular social upheavals since independence in 1960 (including five coups and 33 years of military rule), Nigeria’s place within the global economy has remained remarkably constant. Since commercial quantities of crude oil were discovered in 1956 in the village of Oloibiri, Western oil companies, in particular Royal Dutch Shell, have poured investment into Nigeria. They are attracted by “sweet crude” – a type of oil with a low in sulphur content, cheap and easy to refine, and produced at around half the cost of the global average per barrel. Nigeria’s oil industry grew during the 1970s oil boom,

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expanding into the gigantic infrastructure that today sees over 10,000km of pipelines snaking through rural villages of the Delta. Since the early 1960s, local communities have protested against the impacts of oil production on their land, livelihoods and rights. They have also agitated for a more proportionate share of the oil revenues flowing out of their land. After decades of regular oil spills, gas flaring, underdevelopment and neglect, communities mobilised. Non-violent protest came to a climax in the 1990s, when the minority Ogoni people, whose leaders included the writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, launched the world’s largest demonstration against a multinational oil company, Shell. Ogoni activists faced the combined might of Nigeria’s military government and Shell, and succeeded in forcing Shell out of Ogoniland in 1993. Success came at a heavy price for the Ogoni, as Shell collaborated with the military government in a series of brutal crackdowns in which hundreds of people were killed, entire communities were razed and many were raped, tortured and detained. Like the punitive expeditions of the colonial era, resistance to the project of continuous extraction was met with extreme force. Colonel Okuntimo, then military commander in Ogoniland, boasted over the carnage and Shell provided financial support, food and transportation for Okuntimo’s soldiers, treating them at restaurants and even praising the soldiers 117

for their “restraint”. On November 10th 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight of his Ogoni colleagues were executed by the military government for their campaign for environmental justice. Allegations persist that Shell conspired against Saro-Wiwa and bribed witnesses to provide false testimony at a flawed trial, widely condemned as “judicial murder”. A class action lawsuit was filed against the company for complicity in human rights atrocities and crimes against humanity in Ogoni. In June 2009, Shell settled out of court, paying out $15.5 million to the families of the nine men who were executed. The military crackdown on the Ogoni collapsed the political space for non-violent activism. A variety of armed insurgents rose to fill the vacuum – galvanised by the strong feelings of outrage and bitterness on the ground. Spectacular cycles of violence between insurgents, oil facilities and the Nigerian military led to periodic spikes in the world oil prices. The conflict claimed an estimated 1,000 lives a year. Following the government’s “amnesty” programme in October 2009, many fighters have disarmed and are receiving monthly stipends from the government. Yet the communities are still seething. Young unemployed men from Bayelsa State, speaking about their issues with the oil companies said that, “When the time comes, we will stop them. They will soon find out.” The government and the oil companies are yet to address the 118

fundamental grievances in the creeks, and with elections coming in 2011 the conflict could potentially re-ignite at any moment. Today, human rights abuses and environmental devastation are rampant across the Delta. Washington, a hunter from the mainly Ijaw community of Ikarama told me, “The smell from the oil spills force the animals to run far way. I have to hunt further and further from my community. If I cannot earn my livelihood, how will my children survive?” Daily oil spills are decimating already impoverished rural communities of farmers, fishers and hunters. The impact has turned once pristine rainforest into one of the world’s worst oil-impacted ecosystems. Sabotage of pipelines is part of the problem, but is a recent phenomenon and one which Shell officials are believed to be actively profiting from. Over the last four decades most of the oil spilled is the result of the rusty, leaky pipelines laid in the 1970s. Multinationals, including Shell and Chevron have exploited the lack of regulation and oversight in Nigeria to get away with environmental devastation that would not be tolerated in Europe or the United States. Gas flaring is another scandalous form of ongoing abuse. Companies in Nigeria routinely burn the gas that comes mixed with oil, and huge plumes of black smoke and fire burn day and night across the region. As well as being a large contributor to global CO2 emissions, flaring releases a toxic cocktail of chemicals such as benzene

into the environment, causing a high rates of respiratory disorders, cancers and a health crisis for the region. Many flares are located close to human settlements. Shell has chosen to ignore a Federal High Court order that it immediately end this unlawful practice. Its promises to end flaring by a certain date continue to be made and broken, to the frustration of locals. Against these heavy odds, community activists in the Delta continue to mobilise communities to take non-violent action and to expose the unacceptable impacts of oil on the rights of communities. Groups such as Social Action, whose budget monitoring has shown absurd irregularities in the local state budgets; Environmental Rights Action, whose field reports provide a direct link to communities affected by spills and state repression; these groups have invigorated the effort to end decades of impunity and to hold multinationals accountable for their impacts. In their struggle, international support and campaigning on the Western oil majors plays a key role. The Delta crisis is a critical global issue, in which our past and our future is closely tangled. Ben Amunwa is a researcher with oil industry watchdog, PLATFORM, and runs the Remember Saro-Wiwa Project, which campaigns for accountability in the Niger Delta and beyond. www.remembersarowiwa.com

INTERVIEW ED KASHI Since oil was discovered in the Niger Delta in 1956, over $400 billion worth has been pumped out of the earth, creating huge wealth for the few and exacerbating excruciating poverty and polluted living conditions for the many. Ed Kashi turned a photographic project into the most rigorous study of the effects of oil with his book The Curse of the Black Gold, a collaboration with the writer Michael Watts as well as other voices from the Delta. Despite a four-day spell in police custody, Kashi is still working in the region

A young woman crosses over oil pipelines that run through the village of Okrika Town

Max Houghton: Your decision to document the Niger Delta came about after a trip to Iraq, is that right? Michael Watts, with whom you work extensively in the Nigeria book, describes Iraq as being forged by this dreadful trinity of oil, empire and markets. Did you consider focusing on oil in Iraq in the way you have on Nigeria in Curse of the Black Gold? Ed Kashi: When I was working in Iraq, oil was on the periphery of my interests there. I was really more interested in the daily life of Iraqis after the end of Saddam’s regime, looking at issues the Iraqi people were facing. I was also looking to explore the neighbourhoods where both my parents were born and raised. They came from Baghdad. MH: When you heard about the Gulf of Mexico spill, and the reaction to it – while they may be a different order of magnitude, are you surprised that there hasn’t been more of a public outcry about the hundreds or thousands of spills in the Niger Delta? EK: I was not surprised that virtually nobody made a cry about the Delta. Some in the media did, including CNN and the

BBC, the New York Times and others, but it seems like people today are so ensconced in their own lives and we have become fragmented as societies and overwhelmed by the volume of information we have every day, that in some ways we are unable to comprehend it all. And the Niger Delta is far away, in a place where people aren’t surprised to hear that these things happen. It’s actually quite disturbing. MH: In your new film about Bayelsa State (at the heart of the Niger Delta), things look promising in relation to anti-corruption policies. Given your experience in the region, how hopeful are you that this will come to fruition? EK: I am cautiously optimistic about Bayelsa. While working on the film, even with the imprimatur of the state governor and his officials, it was still impossible to go far from the capital, Yenagoa, due to security issues. And the ingrained corruption will take generations to overcome. But at least there are good, smart young people who are trying to work for a better future. It’s an immense uphill battle for them. 119

MH: The UN’s decision to exonerate Shell for oil pollution must have sent shock waves through Ogoniland. Were you there to document reactions? EK: I was not, but I can only imagine the reactions. Frankly, people in the Niger Delta are fed up with the oil companies and don’t expect justice anymore. That is why you have groups like MEND [the Movement for the Emancipation, the most prominent militant group]. It’s a disgrace the degree of 120

power that oil companies wield, even over organisations that are meant to be neutral and to serve the people. MH: Ryzard Kapucisnki, writing about Iran in the 1950s, said that oil “causes few social problems because it creates neither a numerous proletariat nor a sizable bourgeoisie.” Fast forward to Nigeria now, and of course that’s exactly what has happened. Can you describe your

perception of the “Gillette Syndrome” – shorthand for the dark side of energy development, as someone described it? EK: In terms of the Niger Delta, oil did not create either a proletariat or a middle class. It didn’t even create a large group of wealthy citizens. What oil did do there was destroy the infrastructure, set back development of a wider range of industries and agriculture and destroyed many of the social and communal institutions that had

existed before. Only a select few benefited from the oil revenues. MH: You gained access to MEND, communicating with Jomo Gbomo – possibly! [See Editors’ Note] Is it possible for you to say to what extent they represent the wishes (in thought if not always in deed) of many ordinary citizens of the Delta who don’t have a voice, as it is drowned out by Big Oil?

EK: MEND represents the ground swell of anger and frustration that the people of the Niger Delta feel, after not only 50 years of oil’s ill effects on their lives, but also in the wake of the murder of Ken Saro-Wiwa. His death ended the hope of a peaceful, non-violent dialogue to bring resolution for the people’s concerns. Hence the armed militants that exist now. MEND also is an expression of the political and intellectual movement that was begun by Saro-Wiwa

The carcasses of freshly killed goats (far left and bottom) are roasted in the flames of burning tyres at Trans Amadi A worker (top) tries to board the Conoil rig ‘Auntie Julie the Martyr’ MEND militants (middle) brandish their weapons in the creeks of the Niger Delta

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and is continued by human rights activists, NGOs and other concerned people from the Delta that want fairer distribution of the oil wealth, rebuilding of the infrastructure, ending the environmental calamity and reducing the poverty in that region. MH: In your experiences there, does it ever feel possible that the unresolved conflict could spill over into civil war? EK: I don’t see that as a near possibility, but there is always the remote chance of another Nigerian civil war. There are too many checks and balances now in the country and too much vested interested in keeping the status quo. Also, America and the UK would not allow this to happen if it threatened the flow of oil and gas. MH: You play down the significance of being held by Nigerian authorities for four days, but I wondered if the experience made you change the way you worked at all? EK: Well, it certainly did two things; remind me of my vulnerability in these situations, and my commitment to trying to tell these stories. In terms of my working methods, it 122

certainly has given me pause in doing certain things, so as to avoid ever being in that situation again. It was the worst experience of my life. MH: In Colin Jacobson’s review of The Curse of the Black Gold for this magazine, he praises the assiduousness of your approach, and the fact that your work, like much contemporary work, does not eschew narrative or disdain explicit communication. I’d like to know how the book came to be the weighty tome that it is, full of essays by different voices from the Delta, as well as your photo-essays, and also if you feel your work is in any way “old-fashioned photojournalism” or do you simply feel that the subject demanded the approach? EK: I chose, along with Michael Watts, to create a book of documentary work that would provide the voices of the people from the Niger Delta. I wanted my images to be the window into the story but have the people who are from there to tell you what they think is going on. I see this as a new way of telling stories, taking advantage of the access we now have to the indigenous

talents, thoughts, experiences and feelings of the subjects themselves. I see my work as modern in style and not old-fashioned photojournalism. What I don’t do is overuse Photoshop to make up for the lack of quality or content. I see my work as candid intimacy. While there are formal elements to my compositions, I also create complex, layered imagery that tries to tell stories and show the viewer a moment with context. MH: The other name in photography that is synonymous with the word “oil” is of course Edward Burtynsky. His approach is very different to yours. What do you think his photographs tell us about the subject of oil? Or do they tell us more about photographs as art? EK: Burtynsky is working with a different approach. His imagery is more about beauty, majesty, scale, a lack of intimacy and humanity. His work is about photography as documentary art. His goal is to show people the issue of oil but with a conscious effort to make money in the art market. I come at things from more of a journalistic/documentary mode. His work is meant to be seen by an elite few who

spend a lot of money to acquire his work, thereby conferring a special status on it, both as art and as historical document. His knowledge and intellectual rigour is always impressive around why he does his work. MH: You have just made a video work on Bayelsa. Does this mean the project isn’t finished? What are you working on, and what do you plan to work on in the future? EK: I certainly hope my work in the Niger Delta is not finished. I would hope to continue to be involved in that subject and place for a long time, unless it became impossible for me to work there. I continue to work on this issue through teaching, advocacy, lectures, exhibitions and interviews. My current project is in Marseilles, France, where I’m in the process of finishing a multimedia piece about Agent Orange in Vietnam and my plans for the future depend in large part on the success of current proposals that are being considered.

Editors’ Note: The question of MEND – and Jomo Gbomo – has been freshly inflamed by the Nigerian Independence Day attack on October 1, when twin car bombs in the capital Abuja killed 12 people and the militant group claimed responsibility. Or so it appeared. The issue is still wide open as we go to press. It was emails from Jomo’s address that – as so often – put MEND in the frame. As the Financial Times reported October 10: “Blowing up pipelines, kidnapping expatriates and stealing billions of dollars of crude, MEND helped cut Nigeria’s output by up to 40 per cent. Jomo’s messages were crucial to framing the efforts of a loose network of criminal syndicates, political thugs, oil thieves and genuine rebels within the delta’s struggle against poverty and pollution.” To add to the mayhem, many say Jomo Gbomo does not even exist. Or is in fact as many as five authors. One militant leader Boyloaf says Jomo is “a ghost who can be… anybody who uses the MEND e-mail account”. But “he” claims to be the authentic voice of the militant group. As for who was responsible for the Abuja bombings, President Goodluck Jonathan –

the first president ever to come from the Niger Delta – says he is certain they were not involved and that the bombers were terrorists posing as MEND. State security services meanwhile say their primary suspect is former MEND leader Henry Okah, who is under arrest in South Africa.

Deep in the Niger Delta swamps, in the Igaw village of Oporoza, armed MEND militants (left) make a show of arms in support of fallen comrades Oil-soaked workers (right) after cleaning up a spill in the swamps near Oloibiri

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Bottom of ‘da Boot

photography AND TEXT KAEL ALFORD

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When the BP oil spill washed ashore along the US Gulf of Mexico coast in April 2010, it was against a backdrop of an existing crisis on the coast of Louisiana, also largely fuelled by the oil and gas industries. I wanted to document some of the stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s remote coastal communities affected by environmental degradation, land loss, and the BP oil spill. The southeastern coast of Louisiana, from the marshy outskirts of New Orleans to the vast wetlands south of Houma, has been losing land to the sea for decades. River control structures and navigation canals, built along the Mississippi River in the 1930s, prevent the natural cycle of river flooding and meandering that once nourished and replenished the soil of these delta lands, causing the shoreline to retreat. Deep canals dredged through fragile marshes to access oil and gas pipelines close to shore, have greatly accelerated land loss by exposing wetlands to wave action and salt-water intrusion. Extraction of oil and gas deposits also speeds the sinking of coastal sediments. Wetlands provide the first line of defence against frequent hurricanes. As the land recedes, so do the marshes that absorb storm surges. Even New Orleans would have been spared much of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina if coastal wetlands were intact to absorb flooding. No levee will be strong enough to hold back the Gulf of Mexico once New Orleans is ocean front property. Louisiana loses 25-35 square miles of land, the equivalent of one football field, every 15 minutes for a total of 25,000 acres per year. The BP oil spill has added a new threat as marshes and coastal environments are infiltrated with oil and chemical dispersants. The fishing community is struggling to recover from fishing ground closures and the perception of contamination that has slowed the demand for seafood from the Gulf. Diverse groups including Native Americans of the United Houma Nation and the Biloxi-Chitimacha Choctow and Muskogee band, Cajuns, Creoles and descendants of some of the earliest European settlers, are among those most frequently displaced by land loss and storm damage along the coast. Their unique cultures and fragile environment also bear the brunt of damages from the spill. To date, little has been done to reverse the long-term devastation caused by the oil and gas industries to the coast of Louisiana. Official response tends to focus on short-term crisis management while political and funding obstructions on the state and federal levels interfere with long-term, science-based restoration, regulation and prevention. With most coastal supplies of fossil fuels depleted, oil exploration is ever further offshore in deeper and more treacherous waters raising new concerns. In the face of such challenges, many people on the Louisiana coast cling stubbornly to their homes and a disappearing land that they love. These photographs explore the relationships between the human and natural landscape, the impact of environmental degradation, and the identities and cultures of the people who struggle to maintain a way of life at the bottom of daâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; boot. 125

Addison Dardar, a retired oysterman, arranges his cast net as he fishes for shrimp off the dock near his house on Isle Jean Charles in the months after the BP oil spill. Although commercial fishing was banned after the spill, many local residents continued to catch fish, shrimp and crabs for their own consumption. The shrimp he catches less than a mile from his house are a staple of the meals he and his wife prepare. For many Native American people on the coast, self-harvested seafood is a mainstay that allows for continued self-sufficiency

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A mural on the wall of a billiard hall that is being converted to a Mexican restaurant near Golden Meadow, Louisiana. Fishing and a relationship to the sea are essential to the identity of many residents of coastal Louisiana, even as the fishing industry suffers and more deck hands, captains and workers are employed in offshore drilling. Most coastal oil fields have been long since depleted, contributing to the subsidence of coastal sediments sinking further into the Gulf of Mexico

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Kirstin Guidry stands on the prow of her grandfatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s skiff on the lawn of their house on Isle Jean Charles. The island is clinging to life after decades of severe erosion of coastal marshes that once provided a buffer against hurricanes and high tides. Only 70 or so residents remain, down from 300 at its peak A shack where three of the Dardar brothers spend their days on Isle Jean Charles drinking beer and collecting the cans in shrimping nets. The brothers speak French, the language still spoken by many members of the tribe who intermingled with European settlers long before Louisiana became a state, though their Native American ancestors spoke Choctaw

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Walton Dardar Jr stands in front of his home in Isle Jean Charles, two years before it was lifted by the floodwaters of Hurricanes Gustav and Ike, and grounded on a levee a few hundred feet from its foundations

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Dardar in front of his home after Gustav and Ike ripped it from its foundations and grounded it hundreds of feet away. Walton Jr and his elderly father were left homeless and left the community to find housing elsewhere. The house was later demolished by the parish government along with a number of homes that sustained major storm damage and had been abandoned

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Jacob Walker shows off his tattoo of Louisiana State and the phrase ‘Bottom of Da Boot’ to describe his geographical home on Isle Jean Charles. Walker works on boats that supply off shore oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico. Although the oil industry is largely responsible for damage to Louisiana’s coastline, it’s also the source of income for many residents

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A shrimp processing station in Pointe Aux Chene, Louisiana lays dormant after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill when the fishing season was closed due to oil contamination. Fishing is a mainstay for residents of the Gulf coast, many of whom rely on seafood for their own consumption as well as income

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The first monthly ‘Fais-Do-Do’, a Cajun dance, to resume in the bayou side town of Dulac after Hurricanes Gustav and Ike swamped the southeast coast of Louisiana. Music, language, food and culture on the coast have been influenced by the French settlers who made their way to the region long before the US acquired the area west of the Mississippi from France at the Louisiana purchase in 1803. The word ‘Cajun’ derives from French settlers who were expelled by the British from French ‘Arcadia’ which straddles the seaboard of Canada and the US, and settled in Louisiana in the mid-1700s

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Susie Danos in her garden where sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s planted melons, cucumbers, beans and okra in the predominately Native American community of Isle Jean Charles. After years of storm flooding, some residents fear that the soil is contaminated by residue from offshore oil drilling. The Native American tribes that lived along the coast were self sufficient at fishing and farming for generations until massive coastal erosion robbed them of much of their land. Frequent salt water intrusion kills plants and trees, like the dead oak standing in the background. Lack of fresh water for drinking, gardening and livestock has been driving Native American communities further inland since the 1940s

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A statue of Christ faces the water at the private fishing marina in Pointe Aux Chene which was leased to BP as a staging ground for its clean-up operations after the oil spill. BP employees surrounded the statue with a temporary barrier while heavy machinery operated on the grounds. The company hired local fisherman who used their own boats to skim oil from the water and deliver and lay boom in an effort to protect shorelines. Commercial fishing remained closed for several months after the spill and oyster grounds continue to be off limits to commercial use. The markets for Gulf seafood have yet to recover

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MADE IN CHINA PHOTOGRAPHY Samuel bollendorff TEXT guy lane

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‘The danger here are the landmines. We find them in our diggers. But we don’t have time to wait for the mine clearing teams. They are too slow and we have to finish the work before the end of the year or else we won’t get paid’

Huambo, Angola, devastated by the war. Roads, hydraulic networks, hospitals... the Chinese are rebuilding the city. Four years ago they numbered 2,000. Today there are up to 70,000 Chinese in the country

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BP, Total and Chevron are all here, drilling at depths of up to 5,000 metres or three hours offshore Luanda to 3,000 metres. At current world prices Angolan crude oil has become profitable

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The Chinese come from a region where the mercury drops to minus 30째C in winter. When getting on the flight they thought Angola was a country in Asia

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For the 70 per cent of Angolaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population living below the poverty line, finding gasoline by any means is valid

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;What is good for Angola is good for China because there are diamonds and oil hereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

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â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;When the earth is crumbly we use the machines but when there are too many rocks we use the Angolansâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;

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In the bay of Luanda, cargo ships wait to offload merchandise in the chaotic port surrounded by slums populated by people exiled by 27 years of civil war

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The mausoleum of Angolaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first president was built by the Soviet Union. Today it is being renovated by the Chinese

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In 2004 the IMF advised Western nations to no longer lend money to the Angolan government citing its â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;opaque accountingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. Enter China, with a line of credit for development totalling $3 billion. It has since climbed to $11 billion

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When the air conditioning broke down at the headquarters of Angola’s Ministry of Finance, officials were not best pleased to learn that spare parts were on the way... from China. The incident is of more than anecdotal interest, for it hints at the strengthened symbiotic relationship between the two countries – a relationship that has flourished since China’s Eximbank proffered a $2 billion oil-backed loan in 2004. Shortly afterwards, the Chinese petroleum major Sinopec triumphed over Total and BP in negotiations over local oil interests. China now imports more Angolan oil than any other country. Following decades of restraint and diffidence (having ingloriously backed the UNITA losers during the civil war) the Chinese presence in what many hope to be one of the planet’s largest untapped oil reserves is now unavoidable. The Eximbank loan to finance the pressing demands of postwar reconstruction was but the start, and recent estimates suggest that nearly $20 billion have been pledged since. As Samuel Bollendorff sees it, “the simplicity of the loop is implacable: to rebuild the country after 30 years of civil war, Beijing lends money to Angola – which in turn hires Chinese companies – while skimming money off the top. In exchange Angola promises China 30 per cent of its crude oil.” So, Chinese loans and know-how, and of course Angolan oil, enabled the timely pre-election announcement of vast projects – to rebuild the Luanda to Lobito highway and the Benguela and Mocamedes railways, to construct a new Luanda International airport, and to provide over 200,000 new homes across the country. Likewise the new bridges, water supply infrastructure, and electricity and telecommunications networks. By 2006 the number of low-paid, low-skilled Chinese migrant workers in the country exceeded for the first time that of the Portuguese, traditionally the country’s predominant foreign workforce. Given the players, no one would be too surprised to learn that a certain lack of transparency accompanies such dealings. The bidding process for contracts remains shrouded; the amount of Angolan companies and employees entitled to benefit is nowhere made clear; the number of Chinese in the country is unpublished;

the missing billions of oil revenue identified by Human Rights Watch remain unfound; Angola’s casual slide down the Corruption Perceptions Index continues. And whatever the improvements consequent on Chinese investment, some 70 per cent of the population live on less than $2 per day, without health care. Nearly a quarter of all children don’t make it to their fifth birthday. While many in the West are prone to blame the presence of the Chinese for such malfeasances, their accusations ignore the fact that equally serious corruption was endemic when Western companies and governments were happy to trade and invest in Angola. The possibility persists that it is the presence not of the Chinese but of oil – the devil’s excrement indeed – that constitutes the most serious threat to transparency and democracy. For it furnishes a centrally controlled source of revenue, obviating the reliance on domestic taxation and a diversified economy, thereby forestalling the development of an independent, accountable public sphere. In such circumstances of unaccountability and enrichment, we might expect to see the imbrication of personal, political and economic power. And, right on cue, in January this year President dos Santos oversaw amendments to the country’s constitution which rule out presidential elections, and allow him to remain in power until 2022.

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Column

CRUDE WORLD

One day, Vladimir Putin visits a gas station in Chelsea. No, this is not a setup for a joke. The station is at the corner of Tenth Avenue and Twentyfourth Street in Manhattan, where it draws a steady flow of yellow taxis. On September 26, 2003, this intersection attracted instead a fleet of black SUVs with tinted windows, out of which emerged Secret Service agents in dark suits whose semicovert earpieces suggested an event of unusual significance. A ribboncutting ceremony was being held at the just-renovated station, and the VIPs included Senator Charles Schumer and Vagit Alekperov, the Russian billionaire whose company, Lukoil, had bought Getty Petroleum’s chain of thirteen hundred gas stations. The pumps at this station were new, as were the paint and signs and flags, bearing the name and red-and-white colors of Lukoil. The howling of police sirens heralded Putin’s approach. When he emerged from his limousine Schumer and Alekperov attached themselves to his side and guided him to the station’s mini-market, where the president ate a Krispy Kreme donut that had a caloric value at odds with his semifamous judo fitness routine. Approaching a pod of TV cameras, Senator Schumer took the initiative, living proof of the insider joke that nothing is more risky than standing between Chuck Schumer and a microphone. With gasoline prices rising at the time, and with the Middle East becoming a geographic profanity in America, Schumer wanted to thank his new best friend. “We are welcoming Lukoil to New York because we want to see competition,” he said. “The more competition there is, particularly against OPEC, the better New York will do and the better America will do.” Schumer beamed broadly and even bowed slightly as he pumped Putin’s hand. The latter, dressed in a statesmanlike gray suit, white shirt and blue tie, smiled without warmth, which is harder than it sounds, and offered his hand in a programmed way. Known for being abrupt, Putin departed without making a public statement. His presence was his message. Alekperov articulated a scrubbed version of the view

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from the Kremlin. “American consumers are getting a new source of energy,” he declared. “The source is located on reliable Russian territory.” Russia’s resurrection at the dawn of the twenty-first century is one of the great narratives of our times. It goes like this: After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Russia was not so much a country as a black-market bazaar stretching across eleven time zones in which anything could be purchased—a favor from a minister, a murder by a cop, a kilo of uranium. Boris Yeltsin was a brave and well-meaning president, yet a drunk in charge of a collapsed economy. Then, the miracle. Oil prices began to rise and within a few years the nearly 10 million barrels a day that Russia pumped out—it was the secondlargest producer in the world, after Saudi Arabia—netted a new fortune. Instead of spiraling into the status of a nuclear-armed failed state, Russia regained its health under Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, Vladimir Putin. That’s why Putin, rather than dashing around New York to beg for aid, was instead celebrating a Russian company’s purchase of a slice of corporate America. What’s accurate about this narrative is that oil had pumped Russia full of money, turning it into an energy superpower. By 2004, Moscow counted more billionaires than New York, and middle-class Russians who could not afford a new pair of shoes in the 1990s were flying to Greece on package vacations. But where was Russia heading? The local media, remarkably independent in the Yeltsin era, were all but nationalized by Putin. The opposition, ignored or maligned on the airwaves and harassed in the streets, became irrelevant. As democracy shrank, corruption thrived, life expectancy continued to decline and the security services occupied the commanding heights of not just law enforcement but economic activity. After the inevitable easing of its oil boom, what kind of empire will Russia finally resemble, if it resembles an empire at all? I had a particular interest in this question. In college, I

studied Russian and enrolled in as many courses in Soviet and Russian history as I could find. I even attended a summer program at Leningrad State University, which was Putin’s alma mater, though he had entered the KGB by the time I arrived in his hometown in 1980. What was missing in my studies was oil. I started to fill the gap once by chance in my senior year, when I visited the Rialto theater in Berkeley, California, to watch Andrei Konchalovsky’s Siberiade, an epic about Siberia and its alteration after oil was discovered. I enjoyed the film, but understanding the Soviet Union and the Cold War did not seem to require a grasp of oil’s role. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President George H. W. Bush and an eminence of the Cold War establishment, manifested this blind spot when I asked him a few years ago about oil in Soviet history. “Let’s suppose the Soviet Union was like India, without huge energy resources,” he mused. “It might have made a huge difference. I never thought about it.” The few people who have thought about it rightly concluded that oil was crucial to the life and death of the Soviet Union, and their findings are relevant to what is unfolding in Russia today. In the late 1950s, the Soviet economy faced an energy crunch; it even had to import some fuel. Then oil was found in Siberia. Moscow could not only fill its own energy needs, it could give oil to its Communist allies and earn cash by selling some of its crude on open markets. When the 1973 embargo initiated high oil prices, Soviet output was fortuitously hitting its stride, eventually reaching 12 million barrels a day, which was more than Saudi Arabia produced. It was a regimeextending windfall for the Kremlin. I remember how Americans always marveled at the inferiority of Soviet products and the mystery of how the USSR kept its tottering command economy going. But it wasn’t so mysterious—80 per cent of the Soviet Union’s considerable hard-currency earnings came from energy sales, just as most of Russia’s export revenues now come from the same source. In Soviet times, this financial adrenaline sustained the state but created a vulnerability, because if the oil money ceased to flow, the dysfunctional corpus that was the Soviet economy would crash. “Without the discovery of Siberian oil, the Soviet Union might have collapsed decades earlier,” wroteStephen Kotkin, director of Russian and Eurasian studies at Princeton University. The Central Intelligence Agency realized in the 1980s that nuclear missiles were not the only doomsday weapon that could destroy the Soviet Union. A steep fall in oil prices might do the job without radioactive consequences. When Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd visited Washington in 1985, the price of a barrel was $30, a very high level (in those days) that was painful for consumers. President Reagan urged Fahd to lower oil prices, which could be done through higher production. Reagan’s stance was shaped largely by domestic concerns – Americans would have more money in their pockets if oil cost less. But the impact on Soviet finances was emphasized by CIA director William Casey, who met secretly with the Saudi ruler to promote the virtues of low oil prices as an economic dagger into the hearts of the godless Communists in Moscow. As it happened, King Fahd was upset with his OPEC comrades, all of whom sold more oil than allotted under their quotas. It was time to rap them on their knuckles. At the end of 1985, the Saudi monarch raised output dramatically and by the

middle of 1986 a barrel cost just $12. This occurred as Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and tried to reform the dying Soviet system. “Gorbachev’s incipient perestroika was instantly fleeced of much of its hard-currency receipts,” Kotkin noted. According to Yegor Gaidar, who oversaw the economic “shock therapy” that accelerated Russia’s transition to capitalism during the Yeltsin era, the fall in oil prices deprived the Soviet Union of $20 billion a year—“money without which the country simply could not survive.” As Casey certainly celebrated at CIA headquarters, cheap oil doomed the Soviet regime. A political generation later, it’s possible history will repeat itself. Six months after Putin’s Krispy Kreme moment, I visited the Moscow headquarters of the company that owned the presidentially inaugurated gas station in Chelsea. The tower that housed Lukoil were built to intimidate rather than please. It was impossible to see inside the glass windows, tinted in a menacing shade of zinc and grime, and the contours of the structure discouraged long-lasting gazes—the tower was a brutal dagger that jutted into the sky. But inside, on the executive floor, the offices were as expensively outfitted as any of the citadels in Houston. The desks were made of tasteful hardwoods, the track lighting cast just-so amounts of light and the Prada suits worn not just by executive vice presidents but also by their secretaries indicated a pleasure and pride in letting visitors know that sartorial choices at Lukoil were not affected by price tags. Vagit Alekperov, the president and largest single shareholder, had evidently gone to the same anticharm school as Putin. Alekperov’s laser stare could melt a glacier. His hair was a few millimeters longer than a crew cut, and with his stocky frame, he had the hard look of a high-priced thug. He spoke in a voice that often slid into a mumble, as if it was not his job to speak clearly but yours to listen closely. Most people chose to listen closely, because his company presided over more oil than Exxon and employed 150,000 people. Alekperov’s personal fortune was in the billions of dollars, so subordinates scurried in a manner that evoked a royal and fear-inspired court. The oil world is known for rough characters—Texas wildcatters are as tough as the prairie and proud of it—but Alekperov made his American cohorts look like sissies. At the start of his career, in the 1970s, Alekperov lived on primitive offshore rigs in the Caspian Sea that routinely suffered blowouts and erupted into flames. An explosion once threw him into stormy waters; he had to swim for his life. In the late 1970s he was sent to Siberia, where, the story goes, a pipeline ruptured and repairmen refused to get near it, fearing an explosion. Alekperov sat on the pipe so his reluctant workers would gain some confidence. His do-what-it-takes attitude also applies to ethics. When negotiations stalled over access to Kazakhstan’s Tengiz field, Alekperov gave the Kazakh president a $19 million executive jet. Asked by a reporter whether any strings were attached, Alekperov replied, “Nothing is free.” Lukoil won a chunk of the Kazakh project. Because crude oil and political power are umbilically connected in Russia, Alekperov was nonetheless answerable to a higher authority. I learned this within moments of entering his office.

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With an expansive view of Moscow, Alekperov’s quarters were furnished in a severe, Germano-Scandinavian fashion, the floors and walls covered in a polished cut of blond wood, and the couches and chairs upholstered in red leather. A large relief map of the world hung on one wall, with small lights marking the places where Lukoil had investments. (The map had many lights.) On the wall behind Alekperov’s titanium-and-glass desk, on which there was not a stray paper, hung an ornate carving of Russia’s coat of arms, which features a doubleheaded eagle. Owing to the map and the official seal, the office felt like the work space of a general or a politician, and this impression was confirmed by the sole picture on Alekperov’s desk. The color photograph did not show his wife or teenage son. It showed Vladimir Putin. If the coat of arms had been replaced with a hammer and sickle, and the photo of Putin swapped with Brezhnev’s, I could have imagined myself back in the USSR, and so could Alekperov, who was the Soviet Union’s last energy minister. Now, instead of laboring on behalf of Marxism-Leninism, Alekperov worked for Russia, Inc. The name was different, but the new institution functioned in a similar way to the old one. Alekperov understood that in Russia, as in the Soviet Union, the Kremlin was the center of economic as well as political power. The Kremlin’s wishes were to be obeyed, not questioned. “Politics are close to me, but there are different ways of participating in politics,” he told me, speaking carefully. “I don’t have personal ambitions. I have only one task connected with politics: to help the country and the company.” He nodded affirmatively when asked whether he regularly met Putin. He said, in a tone of unusual reverence, “I treat him with great respect.” On Tverskaya, the historic boulevard that spills into Red Square, I waded through money. Designer boutiques lined the street and were tucked into the lobbies of five-star hotels that charged nearly any price they desired. The road was a conga line of late-model BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes, some with bulletproof doors and windows that were necessary precautions against assassination. Murders for hire still happened all the time, due to lethal rivalries for control of Russia’s wealth that had begun in the 1990s. Draped in the must-have accessories of the nouveaux riches—Gucci, Hermès and Tiffany—the men and women who descended from these gleaming and armored sedans could have been on Rodeo Drive for all the cosmetic surgery and distance from ordinary life they projected. There seemed to be sushi bars every few yards, in a city that just a few years earlier, during my last visit, had had the dismal ambience of a soup kitchen running low on soup. Now it was so different, thanks to hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenues flowing into the wallets of an elite that had already run out of sensible ways to spend its wealth. America’s gilded age had nothing on this. Roman Abramovich, an oil multibillionaire, acquired for personal use not only a $100 million Boeing 767 and several yachts costing more than $100 million apiece, but a British soccer club that passed into his hands for $230 million. He explained his investment strategy as “I love this sport... Why don’t I get my own team?” I entered the glittering lobby of the Marriott Hotel on Tverskaya to meet one of the few people sounding an alarm.

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Andrei Illarionov was an improbable candidate to shout out that the emperor had no clothes (or too much oil), because he was Putin’s senior economic adviser. Married to an American, Illarionov was a passionate fan of Ayn Rand, who wrote Atlas Shrugged and other celebrations of the blessings of free markets and the evils of government regulation. (Illarionov had presented Putin with a collection of Rand’s works.) Though Moscow did not lack for laissez-faire economists who treasured Thatcher as much as Pushkin, Illarionov was the best and the drollest. His jowls and thick voice gave him the look and sound of Rodney Dangerfield with an economics PhD. He was an anomaly in a regime led by a former KGB agent whose doctoral thesis was titled “The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations.” We found an out-of-the-way couch in the lobby and got down to business: a soliloquy by Illarionov about the ruination of Russia’s future. The problem consisted of the way oil and gas revenues were being used by Putin to enlarge his personal power and that of the government. Illarionov noted that the police had recently arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil billionaire who backed the opposition; Khodorkovsky’s company, Yukos, was being seized by the government. Illarionov, who had begun to openly criticize the regime in which he served, described the Yukos takeover as “the swindle of the year.” He accused Putin of creating a “corporate state” that stifled individual initiative and the growth of a diversified private sector. When the injections of petroadrenaline plateaued, as they would one day, Russia would have little else to keep its economy going, Illarionov argued. The president’s economic adviser was, it turned out, a dissenter. Illarionov was late for a dinner at Prague, an ornate restaurant a few miles away, so we jumped into his government-issued Audi and continued talking as his driver weaved through the gridlock. Thanks to its new affluence, which put vast numbers of cars on the roads, Moscow at rush hour was far worse than Manhattan. Despite Putin’s law-andorder reputation, the streets were like Chicago’s of the Capone era. A few days earlier, a business executive had been killed near the Marriott, along with his driver and bodyguard, when a motorcyclist put a bomb on the roof of his armored Volvo. What was remarkable about this assassination was that in the previous year this executive had survived an assassination attempt on the very same street. Where the Mafia’s violence didn’t reach, the police state’s arm was felt. I dined at a posh restaurant one evening with a banker who needed, midcourse, to make a business call. He faced a problem because he knew his cell phone was bugged and he assumed mine was, too. So he borrowed a phone from another diner, a total stranger. The diner offered his phone without a blink; he no doubt asked the same favor of strangers, too. (It would not matter if the stranger’s phone was bugged, because the eavesdroppers would have no idea who was making the call.) It was a merry-go-round of precaution, and for the city’s monied elite, this was completely normal. Prudence is not unusual in business circles, but these gestures stemmed from fear rather than competition. By the time we arrived at Prague, Illarionov was arguing that oil allowed Putin and other strongmen to claim

responsibility for a tide of prosperity that only coincided with their rule. This amounted to a lesser version of the resource curse, because Putin and Hugo Chávez were not enemies of their people in the fashion of Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang or Angola’s José Eduardo dos Santos, who for motives of greed, fear or general inhumanity were hoarding their nations’ wealth and killing or imprisoning those who disagreed. Critics could say what they wanted of Chávez, but he cared about Venezuela and was not torturing opposition leaders. Putin reportedly amassed a personal fortune while in office but was a nationalist who wanted Russia to be strong. The noncataclysmic condition of their nations was also due to the existence of middle classes that acted as brakes on the worst excesses of dictatorship. This does not mean Putin and Chávez were making the right decisions. Illarionov’s attention was fixed on the Aladdin-like powers that oil imparted to these men. “There is a paradox,” he said as we walked into the restaurant, where a banquet had begun for a group of Western economists to whom Illarionov was a rock star, or as close as the world of Hayek and Friedman gets to heart-throbbing adulation. “What do you use this power for? Do you use it to reduce the size of the government, to break monopolies, to make the country more competitive and liberal? Or do you use this power to just preserve your own power?” Since Putin had come to office, the state had acquired control of NTV, an influential, privately owned television station that broadcast nationally. Most of the independent newspapers had been acquired by firms loyal to the state. Russia was becoming the third-most-dangerous country for independent journalists, ranking behind only Iraq and Colombia in the number of murdered reporters. Opinion polls showed Putin’s popularity as quite high, but it would be hard to be unpopular when the media laud you every day and oil prices as well as your production of oil are rising fast. It did not matter whether the emperor had any clothes—whether, in other words, the country’s economy was becoming softer rather than stronger. What mattered, at this exuberant moment, was whether the emperor had money to dole out and a subservient press to take note of his largesse. Illarionov posed his doubts at a time, in 2004, when it was possible to believe that Putin might still listen to smart advice that did not come from his colleagues in the security services. I wanted to ask Illarionov for a final prediction of the way things would turn out, but the doors to the banquet hall had just been opened. Illarionov was swallowed by the din of a celebration that was far from over. “Power” is a vague word. It can mean gasoline or knowledge or the authority to order an execution. Oil is unique because it can be transformed into so many types of power—it can make lights burn and planes fly; it can turn wildcatters into millionaires and nations into superpowers. This is a problem as well as an attribute, because when power is measured in the hundreds of billions of barrels, and when it can be controlled by one man or one institution, it can be too much of a good thing. In Russia, as elsewhere, if the state does not control oil, oil can control the state. It’s a dilemma: What is better, for oil to be in the hands of companies that become immensely

powerful or for the government to own everything and become the center of all things? Illarionov’s freemarket argument was sympathetic, but his Randian alternative—oil in the hands of the Russian private sector—was in this case a cause for concern. This was not a theoretical issue, because Putin was at that moment cracking down on Russia’s wealthiest oil baron. In this story, there are no heroes or villains, just problems that few countries resolve. At the outset of 2003 Mikhail Khodorkovsky was the largest shareholder of Yukos and the wealthiest oilman in Russia— even richer than Alekperov. Unlike Alekperov, who could not respond quickly enough to the Kremlin’s wishes, Khodorkovsky had his own ideas. Khodorkovsky’s motives were not entirely noble—he was upset by Putin’s desire to collect more corporate taxes and reduce the clout of oligarchs like himself. After acquiring a chunk of Russia’s oil reserves, Khodorkovsky was now using his wealth to fund a chunk of the opposition. But Putin was gutting the courts, the media and the opposition, so Khodorkovsky was also genuinely concerned about Russia’s democracy. He had amassed a fortune in his earlythirties by taking risks that went his way, so his challenge to Putin was just the latest gamble that he expected to turn out well. Khodorkovsky was also challenging Putin in another way: he had opened talks with Exxon to sell a large slice of Yukos to the American firm. This was a provocation, because Putin did not want an American oil company to own the largest Russian oil company. Putin’s concern was understandable. When a Chinese firm tried to buy Unocal, an American oil company, the outcry in Congress was immediate; the sale did not go through. So it wasn’t a great surprise that when Khodorkovsky’s private jet landed at a Siberian airstrip one day, paramilitary officers stormed aboard and arrested him. Hauled back to Moscow, Khodorkovsky was accused of tax evasion and fraud. In court appearances, he sat in a cage. My visit to Moscow coincided with his trial, so I met his lawyer, Anton Drel, at one of the mansions that had not yet been seized from the jailed billionaire. As we sipped tea under stained-glass windows that seemed right for a cathedral rather than a home, Drel described the trial as an emblem of Russia’s undemocratic course. Even Drel’s office had been raided several times. His jailhouse consultations with Khodorkovsky were assumed to be bugged. Drel and his client silently exchanged notes that they scribbled over after reading. “Like in the movies,” Drel said. The case was hopeless, partly because Khodorkovsky, like any businessman of that era, deserved to be convicted— though for other crimes. Under the post-Communist rule of Boris Yeltsin, lawlessness pervaded business transactions as the government sought to break apart the Communistera state-dominated economy. Instead of having transparent privatizations, state assets were stolen or stripped by managers and entrepreneurs who had the nerve or connections or assassins to get what they sought. The new generation of billionaires became more powerful than the state, whose belongings they carted away like a museum’s unprotected valuables. Yegor Gaidar, an architect of this economic shock therapy, acknowledged when we talked in Moscow that the fire sale of state assets, particularly oil and gas holdings, created

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a class of oligarchs who ruled the economy and the state. “To some degree they regarded themselves as the real government of Russia, and to some degree they were the real government,” Gaidar said. “They could easily dismiss ministers and nominate people who would be loyal to them.” The chaos of the early Yeltsin years had begun to abate by the time Putin came to power in 2000; the government was regaining its clout. Putin put the reaccumulation of state power into overdrive. Instead of independent businessmen running away with the gems of the economy, allies of the Kremlin did so. Putin’s message to the Yeltsin-era oligarchs, transmitted in a variety of ways, including the prosecution of Khodorkovsky, was as sharp as a winter gust in St. Petersburg: even if you own every share and every paper clip of your company, you must follow my orders or lose everything. Vagit Alekperov had gotten the message: that is why, when I sat in his office, Putin’s eyes also bore down on me. Khodorkovsky is serving his jail sentence in Siberia, and the oil fields he once controlled are in the possession of a stateowned firm. The merging of oil power and state power was so thorough that in 2008, when Putin was obliged to hand over the office of the president after his second term—he sidestepped into the post of prime minister—he selected Dmitry Medvedev, whom several years earlier he had selected as the board chairman of Gazprom, the vast stateowned oil and gas firm. The renaissance narrative pivots around the idea that oil and Putin were responsible for Russia’s economic rise. Annual growth exceeded 6 per cent during his presidency, and oncebankrupt Russia even set up sovereign wealth funds to save some of the oil bounty for future generations. But there is an alternative narrative, which is that Russia’s economy should have performed even better than it did, that oil and Putin were a hindrance. And this alternative narrative was proven correct as Russia’s economy, which seemed so fat and invincible when oil prices were skyrocketing, staggered under the blow of fallen oil prices in late 2008. As Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Russia experts, have noted, between 1999 and 2006 Russia’s growth rate, impressive in isolation, was only ninth fastest among the fifteen post-Soviet states. When the Soviet Union fell apart, its successor states went into an economic free fall that halted after each government initiated emergency reforms, as all did. Russia, like every other country in the former Soviet Union, was experiencing economic growth before Putin came to power. “Putin arrived on the scene at a good time in Russia’s economic cycle, and got even luckier as oil prices rose worldwide,” McFaul wrote with Stoner-Weiss. They noted that Russia’s standings in corruption and public health surveys worsened under Putin. Russia’s fate rested once again upon a fickle resource sector that had functioned, in the Soviet era, as a trap door; once oil prices receded from nearly $150 a barrel, as they would, the country would find itself with a crippled economy and a brittle autocracy. “The strengthening of institutions of accountability—a real opposition party, genuinely independent media, a court system not beholden to Kremlin control—would have helped tame corruption and secure property rights and would thereby have encouraged more investment and growth,”

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McFaul and Stoner-Weiss wrote. Not long afterward, when oil prices fell below $100 a barrel, the Russian stock market plummeted along with the value of the ruble, and the oncemighty government surplus, along with one of the sovereign wealth funds, were greatly depleted to support the faltering economy. Russia’s megarich took a cold bath, with Moscow dropping below New York as the billionaire capital of the world. Even Putin’s popularity began to shrink. A rash of street protests broke out—and were quashed. As Russia suffers the blows of falling prices and declining output, McFaul and Stoner-Weiss worried that it could become another Angola, led by hard men who care more about controlling crude-oil money than providing good governance. An extreme outcome of that sort is not certain, thankfully, but McFaul, who in 2009 was appointed to President Obama’s National Security Council, was not alone in seeing an unfortunate future. His conclusion was shared by Andrei Illarionov. A year after our encounter, which ended at the Prague restaurant, Illarionov turned on Putin and resigned. “The state has become, essentially, a corporate enterprise that the nominal owners, Russian citizens, no longer control,” he wrote. “There are other countries like this: Libya and Venezuela, Angola and Chad, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Russia is one of them now. It is a historical dead end.” Excerpted from Crude World by Peter Maass. Copyright © 2010. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher

SOUR LAKE PHOTOGRAPHY JOHAN BAVMAN TEXT LEO HSU

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The Trans-Ecuadorian Pipeline System (Sistema Oleducto Trans-Ecuatoriano, or SOTE) runs 550 km from Amazon forests near the Colombian border to Esmeraldas on the Pacific coast. If the pipeline were a river, the Lago Agrio oil fields would be its headlands: oil is pumped from the ground by some 300 wells and carried by small pipes to the crude oil processing facilities where they join the main pipeline. It’s a frontierland where, it is said, both Colombian guerillas and paramilitaries take their holidays. Lago Agrio sits by the Aguarico (“Rich Water”) River but it takes its name from Sour Lake in south-east Texas where Texaco was founded in 1903. Holding exploratory rights from the Ecuadorian government, Texaco began prospecting for oil in the Lago Agrio region in 1964 and gave the town, grown out of workers’ camps, its name. The well Lago Agrio No.1 struck oil in 1967 and Texaco operated the oil field over the next 25 years until it was taken over by Petroecuador.

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Texaco itself was taken over by Chevron in 2001; since 2003 Chevron has found itself the defendant in a dramatic but drawn out case over remediation for damages going back to Texaco’s mismanagement of the oil field. Plaintiffs say that Texaco’s reckless practices in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in contaminated soil, polluted water and high incidences of disease. Oil continues to occupy contradictory roles in Lago Agrio’s daily life, providing jobs even as it potentially threatens the health of its communities and their environment. Johan Bävman’s photographs were made along a roughly 100 km stretch of the SOTE around Lago Agrio, long before the pipe goes underground near Quito. The pipeline shows its age; it is rusty and overgrown, hot heavy metal in the humid jungle, and it does not so much interrupt the landscape as transform it. But it is still working, and as it pushes oil out of the jungle to the ocean, it is a stark physical reminder that Lago Agrio’s future is bound to oil, for better and for worse.

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ECUADOR: OIL VS NATURE

Where the foothills of the Andes meet the vast Amazonian rainforest in eastern Ecuador there is a small town called Shell. It’s a pockmarked, termite-eaten, one-street place which doubles as a missionary centre and a regional airstrip, but it was here in 1937 that the mighty Shell oil company based a crack oil-prospecting team. The prize was the vast deposits of crude oil believed then – and known now – to lie beneath some of the densest forests in the world. The trouble was that the company’s one million hectare exploration concession, rented for a few thousand dollars a year, was full of hostile Indian tribes. Several oilmen were killed and, after constant attacks, Shell was forced to abandon its base in 1949. The town was taken over by evangelists but they, too, came to grief; in 1956 five young Americans were speared after entering Huaorani territory. Their bodies were thrown into the Curaray river and Shell is now a missionary centre and a place of pilgrimage for people who believe Indians must be saved and the forest developed. On any day, several small planes fly in, full of Americans in search of souls to save. Since Shell left, other oil companies have been to Ecuador and extracted more than 4.5 billion barrels of oil from the forest. This has gained Ecuador 174

nearly $130 billion, but the price has been environmental devastation, massive pollution of the waterways, the invasion of the forest by settlers and the extinction of at least two uncontacted tribes. Many of the Indian communities who have been co-opted to do menial work for the oil companies are degraded and squalid. I was there in September and there is seemingly no end to the tragedy. Nearly 800 km to the east of Shell, near the Peruvian border, an estimated 960 million barrels of oil reserves have been found below Yasuni national park, the most diverse bit of forest in the most diverse part of the whole world. Because of Yasuni’s physical location right on the equator and at the junction of the forest and the mountains, the park has probably more species per hectare than anywhere else on earth. Just a short journey down any of the rivers reveals astonishing numbers of birds, mammals, amphibians and reptiles. Fish literally jump into your boat; there are clouds of insects and crocodiles line the route, their little red eyes like cats’ eyes at night. This is nature in wondrous abundance. There are more kinds of frogs and toads in Yasuni than are native to the United States and Canada combined; more insect species on one tree than in all the US; more birds than in all Europe. One 6 sq km patch

– chosen almost at random – has been found to have 47 amphibian and reptile species, 550 bird, and 200 mammal species living there. Another patch of land breaks all the world records for bats and insects. More trees grow in a single hectare of rainforest in Yasuni than in all north America. A single hectare of rainforest may contain as many as 100,000 unique insect species. And, as well as all the wildlife, just where the oil is are known to live at least two groups of Tagaeri and Taromenane people, relatives of the Huaorani Indians who tried to stop Shell more than 70 years ago. In Britain, or anywhere else, there would be much hand-wringing but little debate about the future of the Yasuni oil. It represents nearly 20 per cent of all Ecuador’s reserves, so the government could be expected to send in an oil company and pledge to use the $7 billion it would earn from the oil to pay for schools and hospitals, roads. There would be deep regret at the inevitable pollution and the destruction of the forest but the politicians would regretfully give the go-ahead. Hard economics would, as always, take precedence over nature. This is, after all, a developing country. But this is Ecuador where there has been a political revolution in the last decade and a new, optimistic concept of nature has emerged as indigenous

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“We will leave the oil in the ground and save the forest and the people if you the world make a financial contribution”

peoples, social movements and ecologists have worked together to right the injustices of the past. Out of the storm of ideas that has been thrown up about how society should organise itself, Nature has been granted full constitutional rights. All living entities in the country – animals, people, plants – now have a right to life. And almost unbelievably, it was the oil minister, Alberto Acosta, who came up with the most revolutionary idea. The old oil man, who is a trained economist, has long links to the indigenous peoples and suggested that instead of drilling Yasuni, Ecuador should approach the world with a deal. We will leave the oil in the ground and save the forest and the people if you the world make a financial contribution. If countries and individuals put up just half the “value” of the 960 million barrels of oil – around $3.6 billion – in Yasuni then Ecuador would guarantee to leave it there. The money earned from the world would then go to protecting Yasuni and Ecuador’s other national parks and to education and hospitals. Acosta’s thinking sounds new, but was actually a very practical economic response to the global phenomenon known as the “oil curse”. The fact is that oil-rich developing countries invariably stay poor, foster corruption, encourage dictators and trash the environment. From Nigeria to Sudan, and Equatorial Guinea to Gabon, oil has actually

stopped development and distorted the economies of every country that has found oil. Some of Acosta’s peers thought him crazy and the president Rafel Correa was deeply uneasy. But he explained that the true value of the oil in Yasuni had to include the pollution that would inevitably wreck the forest, the 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide that would be released if burned in cars or by industry, and the inevitable, incalculable, cost of the extinction of the two tribes. Acosta has left government now but the revolutionary plan to earn money by not exploiting a resource has the backing of more than 90 per cent of the Ecuadorian people and been endorsed by the government. A UN trust fund has been set up to administer the money and if a down payment of $100 million is made by next October, the forest and the indigenous groups are safe. If not... well, the forest gets it, the oil comes out and the indigenous peoples will almost certainly die. As the Venezuelan Juan Pablo Alfonso, one of the founders of the oil producers’ “club” OPEC – the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries – said: “You will see: oil will bring us ruin… oil is the devil’s excrement.” John Vidal is Environment Editor of the Guardian

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SAUDI STREET RACERS photography bryan denton TExt LEO HSU

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Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a kind of romance: orange sodium vapour streetlights flatter the fibreglass, metal, and glass bodies of the cars, giving them a soft smoothness. Halogen and LED headlamps cut through the darkness, and like the adrenalined heats, punctuate the social life that has grown around the cruises. Cars race down city streets and highways reaching 160 km/h or more through the early hours of the morning, and in Bryan Dentonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pictures you can practically hear the sound of tyres pealing and engines revving at the start of a race. Other motorists know to stay out of the way of street racers, staying to the right of the road. Police will come and disperse the racers and the men watching them; like players in a floating craps game, they already know where to reassemble, a parking lot or another road nearby. For as long as there have been fast cars, there have been young men fascinated by their speed and power. Global youth car culture brings together the influences of classic Japanese auto racing (where drifting, or sending a car into a controlled skid, originated), low rider, F1 and NASCAR subcultures, and the obsessive modification of consumer models for maximum power and effect. Drift competitions are held around the world. In Saudi Arabia, while 40,000 people attended a desert drag racing event presided over by Prince Faisal bin Bandar bin Abdul Aziz, governor of Al-Qassim province, it will only have been the men who have had the opportunity to realise the pleasures of driving: it is illegal for women to drive on public roads. In these pictures the nights feel endless, perhaps it feels that way, too, for the young men that race with such abandon. The nights, as boundless as Saudiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s flat terrain, invite cars to race again and again every night, all night.

Column

considering the choices

The end of the Age of Oil has been predicted for years – by some in hope and by others in fear. Crude has created vast wealth directly and indirectly, literally oiling the wheels of global commerce, spreading heat, light and comfort for multiple millions of people since its first commercial exploitation some 150 years ago. On the other hand, it has also caused wars, untold numbers of deaths through soil, water and air pollution, massive ecological destruction and is now undoubtedly a serious contributor to man-made climate change. The lifestyle that refined crude oil in all its many forms has allowed, particularly in the rich developed world – although no longer exclusively – resource depletion such that by some estimates if everyone lived at the same high level the world could only support one-quarter of its 6 billion people. Put another way, it would need four Earths to sustain the current one. Renewables, we are told, are the silver bullet that will solve all humankind’s troubles at a stroke – or at least almost all the troubles and with maybe a handful of strokes. Oil is a finite resource as well as a serious pollutant, so it makes sense to make serious efforts to reduce global consumption currently running at 85 million barrels a day and forecast to rise sharply as economies recover from the recession and countries like China and India expand rapidly as they bid to lift their peoples out of poverty. 180

Renewables, on the other hand, are just that. They harness the endless energy of the sea, sun, wind, water, plants, even the Earth’s own heat to provide a truly democratic supply of heat and power. But a peek under the packaging shows that it may not be quite that straightforward. Wind power is the world’s favourite source of new generation low carbon energy. Installed capacity this year is predicted to reach 200 gigawatts globally as another 40 GW are added to the 2009 total, and the Global Wind Energy Council says such is the appetite for the mature technology that this could hit 1,000 GW in the next decade. But it is also divisive. Not only does the wind not always blow, making electricity output highly variable and therefore unreliable as a so-called baseload power source, but average wind turbine output is generally put at only around one-third of rated capacity. Wind farms are also seen by many as eyesores. A recent visitor to the UK’s giant, coal-guzzling Drax power station whose cooling towers dominate the skyline found that local residents directed their wrath not there but at a small wind farm that has recently been installed nearby. While solar thermal panels have generally become accepted and manage to operate even with cloud cover, the same cannot be said to be true of solar photovoltaic panels which are far more expensive and only effective at

producing electricity when the sun shines – a bit of a problem for consumers who want lights and entertainment after dark. Even though solar PV technology has been improving by leaps and bounds in recent years, the average efficiency of the panels at converting solar light to electric power is less than 20 per cent. The world’s largest solar PV farm has just opened in Ontario, rated at 80 MW of capacity. The owners say it could power 12,800 local homes. The catch is that is covers 380 hectares. That makes about 33 hectares of panels per home. One of the troubles afflicting both wind and solar power is that electricity is notoriously difficult to store, meaning that surplus generation in high winds or sunny days is just that, surplus. Some can be stored in batteries, and the technology there is making giant strides. But Lithium-ion batteries that power laptop computers, and will power the coming generation of electric vehicles, are still not very good energy stores and they need Lithium – one of the minerals known as Rare Earth, for the simple reason they are scarce and only found in a few locations around the world. Wave power does not face the same constraints as the sea is always in motion. But the technology is in its infancy and the sea is a notoriously harsh environment in which to operate – ask any sailor. So the long-term reliability of these machines has yet to be established with any confidence. Tidal barrages, on the other hand, are a proven technology – the world’s first and

Column

“Britain’s Committee On Radioactive Waste Management considered but finally rejected a proposal to put nuclear waste in rockets and fire it blindly into space...”

biggest tidal power station has been operating at La Rance on the northern coast of France since 1966. But this technology, too, has significant drawbacks. Unless combined with lagoons to hold back water for later use, tidal barrages can only generate on the ebb tide, and then in massive power surges. There is also the question of associated ecological damage and the obvious fact that such barrages are confined to coastal areas – generally estuaries which act as natural bottlenecks – with big tidal ranges. More classic hydropower is also limited in location and can have massive local environmental and even social consequences. China’s Three Gorges project, which will eventually have a capacity of 22.5 GW, flooded a vast area and displaced 1.3 million people. Another option is biofuels – although the first generation of these was blamed for a spike in world food prices as productive farmland was switched from food to fuel. At the same time, vast areas of rain forest were cleared for palm oil production. Many calculate that the resulting release of carbon gases held in the soil was vastly higher than the carbon saved by displacing hydrocarbons in fuels. Russel Mills, global director of energy and climate change at Dow Chemicals, told a carbon conference in London recently that a proper and far more beneficial second generation of biofuels was still years off. A much vaunted option is to keep burning the world’s vast reserves of coal

and well as less carbon-intensive oil and gas but simply capture the resulting emissions and bury them forever. But, like nuclear waste, that is simply pushing the problem out of site rather than actually solving it. And if the emissions cannot be buried where they occur because there are no suitable salt water aquifers or depleted oil wells to hand, then they must be taken to where they can and the further they must be carried the higher the associated transport emissions. Paradoxically, one of the reasons the Middle Eastern oil states are so keen to promote carbon capture and storage – after all they have plenty of holes in the ground to use – is that a very effective way of enhancing production from old oil wells is to pump carbon dioxide down them to push the oil up. Shale gas, long known about but only relatively recently surging to prominence as new technologies have been developed to commercially exploit it, has also suddenly changed the world’s energy map as vast reserves are discovered in the United States. Far less polluting than coal, it nevertheless still emits carbon when burned. At the same time, the fracturing techniques being used to extract it are being blamed for massive ecological and environmental degradation. Nuclear power, after more than two decades in decline after the disaster at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986, is having a renaissance with large numbers of reactors being built or planned. But no one is predicting nuclear cars,

although nuclear can be used to produce the electricity needed to recharge the batteries of the one billion electric vehicles the International Energy Agency predicts will be on the road by 2050. But its highly toxic waste remains an issue that proponents barely mention and everyone seems at a loss of how to handle. During its deliberations which ended with a recommendation to bury it as deeply as possible, Britain’s Committee On Radioactive Waste Management considered but finally rejected a proposal to put the waste in rockets and fire it blindly into space. In short, renewables will play an increasingly important part in all lives, but technical, resource, environmental, usage and acceptance limitations will all act as natural limiters. If the world’s major car manufacturers have their way, the internal combustion engine will be with us for many more years and, despite the fact that great advances are still to be made in efficiency, that means the Age of Oil still has some way to run. Jeremy Lovell writes on energy and climate for a number of publications and has worked as a trainer for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

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LEGACY

PHOTOGRAPHY MAURICE BROOMFIELD

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Maurice Broomfield photographed the North Sea oil rig Orion in March 1967 from a supply boat, while returning to the rig after taking more distant views of the gas flare reflections on the sea. He visited the site four times between November 1966 and September 1967, the last time to photograph seismic testing. Broomfield was the greatest industrial photographer of the 20th century. We are proud to publish these pictures in commemoration of his life and photographic legacy.

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Maurice Broomfield, February 2, 1916â&#x20AC;&#x201C;October 4, 2010

ThE PhoTogRAPhy BIANNUAl

If not, then what?

THE LEGACY OF OIL Cover: Christian Lutz Back Cover: poem by Maurice Geller (with apologies to Mrs Dorothy Parker)

ISSUE 28 - AUTUMN/WINTER 2010

Maurice Broomfield Legacy Maurice Broomfield Photographs is published by Foto8. www.foto8.com

Jiang He and Arthur J D Thicker than Water Jiang and Arthur are represented by Greenpeace. www.greenpeace.org

ISSUE 28 - AUTUMN/WINTER 2010

ThE PhoTogRAPhy BIANNUAl

CONTRIBUTORS

ThE PhoTogRAPhy BIANNUAl

If not, then what?

THE LEGACY OF OIL Cover: Christian Lutz Back Cover: poem by Maurice Geller (with apologies to Mrs Dorothy Parker)

ISSUE 28 - AUTUMN/WINTER 2010

Maurice Broomfield Legacy Maurice Broomfield Photographs is published by Foto8. www.foto8.com

Jiang He and Arthur J D Thicker than Water Jiang and Arthur are represented by Greenpeace. www.greenpeace.org

ISSUE 28 - AUTUMN/WINTER 2010

ThE PhoTogRAPhy BIANNUAl

CONTRIBUTORS