Throughout history, different civilizations – ancient Mesopotamia and China, the European Middle Ages, the indigenous peoples in North America – used oil that bubbled from rocks for various purposes: as medicine, in warfare, for fire. Drake, right, stands with friend Peter Wilson of Titusville, Pennsylvania, at the drilling site – but not the original derrick – of America's first commercial oil well of 1859 (Mather 1861). We can expect more frequent resistance to ‘boom’, too, as exploited peoples and concerned activities fight for our planet’s future.įigure 2.1 Edwin L. Yet it does so at the cost of lives, health and the environment. Where the industry ‘booms’, it generates billion-dollar profits and creates economic benefit for employees and regional governments. ‘Boom!’ would connect this historical image to the global force the oil industry has become. Leaking pipelines and toxic refineries usually are built where marginalized communities live. It meets resistance in Nigeria, the Amazonian rainforest, Standing Rock, North Dakota and elsewhere. Nations fight wars over oil and, on local scales, protests and resistance movements challenge the industry’s power. But in the intervening centuries, the oil industry has turned into a global economic juggernaut, causing rampant worldwide political, economic and racial exploitation. The two men, Edwin Drake and Peter Wilson, actually stand before the Drake Well, the first oil well, drilled on 27 August 1859 in present-day Titusville, Pennsylvania. It’s an innocuous enough image: two men standing before a wooden structure with another group of (white) men in the background.
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