Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond

by Christina Dunbar-Hester

Can the stories of bananas, whales, sea birds, and otters teach us to reconsider the seaport as a place of ecological violence, tied to oil, capital, and trade?

San Pedro Bay, which contains the contiguous Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is a significant site for petroleum shipping and refining as well as one of the largest container shipping ports in the world—some forty percent of containerized imports to the United States pass through this so-called America’s Port. It is also ecologically rich. Built atop a land- and waterscape of vital importance to wildlife, the heavily industrialized Los Angeles Harbor contains estuarial wetlands, the LA River mouth, and a marine ecology where colder and warmer Pacific Ocean waters meet. In this compelling interdisciplinary investigation, award-winning author Christina Dunbar-Hester explores the complex relationships among commerce, empire, environment, and the nonhuman life forms of San Pedro Bay over the last fifty years—a period coinciding with the era of modern environmental regulation in the United States. The LA port complex is not simply a local site, Dunbar-Hester argues, but a node in a network that enables the continued expansion of capitalism, propelling trade as it drives the extraction of natural resources, labor violations, pollution, and other harms. Focusing specifically on cetaceans, bananas, sea birds, and otters whose lives are intertwined with the vitality of the port complex itself, Oil Beach reveals how logistics infrastructure threatens ecologies as it circulates goods and capital—and helps us to consider a future where the accumulation of life and the accumulation of capital are not in violent tension.

Genres: Science, Environment

252 pages, Paperback

First published January 17, 2023

About the author

Christina Dunbar-Hester is associate professor of communication in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism.

Reviews

[Athena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oil Beach is a remarkable example of how STS (science & technology studies) can engage with what is wondrous about the world while offering rigorous sociopolitical critique. The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are a global nexus for oil production and trade. Christina Dunbar-Hester employs the concept of infrastructural vitalism to explore how LA port and shipping infrastructure is constructed as the living heart of the city's role in the global economy even as it destroys, suppresses, and commodifies organic life. In addition to readers who are working in the field or interested in the topic, I think scholars or writers with wide-ranging intellectual curiosity who are wondering how to make their interests connect fluidly in a single book will find Oil Beach valuable.

This short interview with the author gives a glimpse of what to expect.

[Kai · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taught in my international studies senior seminar. I found it to be a really compelling and well-researched history and contemporary portrait of how paradoxical practices of wildlife rehabilitation and care are circumscribed by the Ports of LA and Long Beach, and their economic, logistic, and military priorities. Dunbar-Hester has an eye for the absurdity of these situations, in which Dawn dish soap touts its ability to clean oiled birds, or the US Navy employs marine mammals to understand their bioacoustic abilities only to pollute their habitats. a very quick read, and the concept of "infrastructural vitalism" (the prioritization of the "life" of infrastructure over biological life) and "circumscription of care" to be broadly applicable beyond this case.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a 20-year resident of Long Beach, I enjoyed learning about the development and tradeoffs associated with the ports of LA and Long Beach. Easy read and informative. I knocked off a few stars for the muscles I pulled rolling my eyes at the woketastic framework. Prof Dunbar-Hester gives a masterclass in virtue signaling in her asides, footnotes and parentheticals so there is no doubt she's dotted every i in her checklist. What's ironic about her framing is that she is a tenure-track professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at USC. Teaching the children of the titans of SoCal industry (in a school named after a 20th century communications mogul), she throws out pearls such as "The forces that conspire to gather the breath and promote the 'health' of the port complex do so at the behest of capital managers and business leaders, local politicians and, of course, agents of the US empire, maximizing profit through resource extraction, labor exploitation, and colonial land (and water) relations." I could hypothesize about the good professor leaving her comfy job at one of the most expensive universities in America to teach less well-off kids down the road at Cal State Dominguez Hills, but I won't hold my breath. She has a cozy platform to bite the hand that feeds her and USC probably gets some virtue signaling by accepting the implicit criticism.