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ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR THOMAS BEAMISH (University of
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ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
GEORGE GONZALEZ
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OIL vs. PEOPLE
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SOCIALOGUE

OIL vs. PEOPLE Featuring exclusive interviews with: Associate Professor Thomas D. Beamish (University of California-Davis) Associate Professor George Gonzalez (University of Miami) (USA)
In respectful memory of the 11 young men, from the states of Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, that died last April 20th whilst working to bring the bread to their families. May they rest in peace: Shane Roshto, 22 yeards old Adam Weise, 24 years old Roy Wyatt Kemp, 27 years old Gordon Jones, 28 years old Aaron Dale Burkeen, 37 years old Jason Anderson, 35 years old Karl Kleppinger Jr., 38 years old Stephen Curtis, 40 years old Dewey Revette, 48 years old Donald Clark, 49 years old Blair Manuel, 56 years old Also, in memory of the thousands of lives that the so called "black gold" has been costing to humanity and wildlife over the past 150 years, since the world's first commercial oil well was drilled in Poland in 1853. That was a time when oil drilling was a necessity for our industrial and technological development. However, and having passed that stage, now we have the knowledge and the technology to work on better alternatives, for, to continue obtaining the energy, that fuels our fast paced society, from this source, is to sign for a bleak future, even bleaker than the present. After yet another environmental and human disaster (let's not forget that a war is almost on its 7th and half year, a war which sprang from the dark and liquid -or gas- roots of human greed, from every side involved) it is time to see beyond political shows. It is time to unite in seek of a truth that serves to, not to blame, but to find solutions that enables us to make that other leap, a leap not only for technological development but for true human evolution. In other words, we move forward or we shall all die, along with every singing-bird, every child's smile, every mighty leon and beautiful dolphin that makes this planet worth living for.
We are honored to interview Associate Professor Thomas Beamish, expert on social and organisational response to environmental change and disaster among other areas of sociological research.  1. MDM_ Professor Beamish, thank you for your invaluable collaboration. In your book “Silent Spill: The Organization of an Industrial Crisis” you use the case of the Guadalupe Spill, which persisted unattended for 38 years as opposed to the Exxon Valdez accident, to which US press devoted 504 stories during the period of 1990-1996, as the basis upon which you demonstrate that social response is only triggered by large-scale social disruption or dramatic visible destruction. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is causing and will cause considerable and dramatic destruction. Why do we need major disasters in order to realize that we ultimately depend on the good conditions of our environment? 1. PROFESSOR_ I'm not sure I would say "need" environmental or industrial accidents or crises so much as accidents and disasters expose the customary order of things in a way ongoing habits of mind and behavior do not. That is, we live our lives primarily through habits, routines, and taken for granted assumptions. Until we confront problematic situations--whether personal, collective, or organizational in nature--we generally do not think deeply about what we are doing. We simply follow what we assume to be "true" and typically continue to do so until some kind of crisis exposes it as, well, “untrue.” The routinization of life, one might call it, is considerably amplified in formal organizations (also called “bureaucracies”) where routine, the division of labor and specialization, hierarchy, and other formalized modes of conduct make them powerful instruments to achieve things such as make profits (BP), govern (the government), distribute resources, and even respond to social and environmental crises! Yet that very power to systematize also works to blind them and us (as members of formal organizations) to changing social, technical, and environmental circumstances. There is a great deal of inertia in social organization of both the formal and informal kind. Importantly, this is not simply a passive situation. Formal organizations like governments and corporations are also, of course, very powerful too. Indeed, they are created to ‘empower’ those that control them! BP, for example, and commercial organizations like it, seek to control their environments--physical, social, political, economic. Governments were created to do so as well (of course). In the case of the Gulf Spill, players in it like the Minerals Management Service (US Government regulator of the petroleum industry) and the oil industry have defined their organizational interests (there “missions” as it were) as extracting oil/resources. They have only been secondarily concerned, at best, with the other issues related to extraction; primary among such secondary concerns that many of us now wish had been primary concerns are safety and environment. This is observable not in what they "say" they are about (for example, BP being “green” and “beyond petroleum”), but in what they do and have done over time. In their track records we can discern industry priorities: past and concurrent "accidents," their expenditures, and in their continued resistance over time to changing how they operate to account for safety and the environment rather than simply profits. Many of these ignored concerns are what are referred to in economics as "externalities;" in the case of the Heritage Platform Spill, social and environmental externalities. They are costs that BP would rather not bear; they would rather "internalize" the profits they make from oil and externalize the costs of that production process. They spend only a minute fraction of their take-home-profits (they and corporations like them) on assuring that their industrial infrastructures are safe and a overriding share on securing more oil, paying down debt (which they incur to find and extract oil), paying investors, paying management, and so forth. This shouldn't surprise anyone. They are in the business of pulling oil out of the ground. However, if we admit this is so we should, I think, create governance structures that are built to address these conditions. To do otherwise is to do what we have largely thus far done: let industry regulate itself. ^ GO TO TOP (Continue below)
2. MDM_ From your research and study, which current organizational interests shape what is considered viable and possible or unviable and impossible in terms of preventing accidents that cause environmental damage? 2. PROFESSOR_ I think I have outlined much of this in my previous answer. I will say, however, that unless and until we require industry to deal with its externalities, whether it is CO2 or spilling oil, they will continue to have an interest in externalizing the negatives (costs) and internalizing the positives(profits). 3. MDM_ In your ARTICLE “Economic Sociology in the Next Decade and Beyond” you point out that “Sociability,” in the form of norms of reciprocity, familial obligations, among other social processes, is essentially altered when the distribution of goods and services is the final objective. Genuine care for each other seems to be more prevalent when disaster hits the majority within an area, would you agree with this observation? 3. PROFESSOR_ Disasters are by definition ‘social disruptions’ that force us to take stock of how we live our lives. So, in many respects yes, this is so: when disasters hit, genuine care for one another in communities — empathy — actually increases in many cases. Actually, research on disasters and what is called “community resilience” has found that the deeper the social relational ties among persons in a community the quicker they tend to recover from disasters of all kinds. What does this mean? Well, if market relations are on one end of a fictive continuum and are ideally characterized as involving shallow relations, competition, and self-interest and genuine community reciprocity, mutual obligation, and social connection are on the opposite end of that continuum, then one would expect a community characterized by the second — deeper community relations as it were — to more quickly recover from disaster than one characterized by the former — shallower market relations.
4. MDM_ In your opinion, are societies (at a global scale) in the verge of changing dramatically their economical and political systems, pushed by the shared financial meltdown and faced with the repercussions that the degradation of our environment really have in the lives of everybody, or on the contrary, will we continue as we are for many years to come? 4. PROFESSOR_ We are definitely in a state of flux and at a moment of extreme uncertainty. Our answers over the next handful of years — on the outside the next 10 really if you believe climate models — will, quite frankly, set the course for much that will come in the rest of the century. The best science we have regarding issues of climate change, energy futures, water resources, ocean fish stocks, population growth and resources intensities and related macro trends coupled with the fragility of the global economic system does not sponsor a whole lot of optimism on my part. At least right now since I don’t see our systems — social, political, or economic —really rising to the challenge at the moment but rather procrastinating and hoping predictions and trends are wrong when the best science says they are not. And while it seems that there is great global convergence on many issues, there are equal amounts of divergence as well. Point: it is very hard to tell where things are going but inaction on a number of pressing social and environmental issues isn’t good. In short, I would like to be optimistic about what I see, but at the moment, given the systems we pay homage to and their almost total investment in the economic status quo, coupled with its continued rapid and largely unchecked social and environmental impacts, my guess is that more crises are in the offing. How we respond to these crises, with foresight or with retrenchment, will have everything to do with whether more crisis and upset is at hand or that a period of stability and prosperity will commence. My fear is the former, my hope is the later.
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