Time to Eat the Dogs
A Podcast About Science, History, and ExplorationOil Exploration
As I’ve said elsewhere, exploration is a term that is almost too malleable to be useful, a word that has can be almost anything you want it to be. This point was driven home as I watched this Chevron advertisement at the beginning of the PBS Newshour:
Chevron Ad: New Frontiers
Transcript:
We are explorers, humans are, endlessly curious, always looking for answers. Today there is a new frontier: the search for energy. Where is it? How do we find it? We’re trying to answer those questions in ways once unimaginable: cleaner ways, smarter ways, mapping uncharted territory five miles below the sea, long before a single mark is ever put in the ground so we drill more intelligently, more efficiently, more respectfully, finding energy in places thought impossible as people demand more energy we must look everywhere for it… to power the new explorers. This is the power of human energy.
The Chevron ad begins with images of iconic explorers, Admiral Richard Byrd and an Apollo astronaut, in regions well known to those of us living through the late 20th century, Antarctica and the Moon. These images are juxtaposed with an African man, perhaps Maasai, walking on the Sahel and a European or Euro-American man biking along the side of the road. The ad builds an argument of inclusiveness: explorers are not simply at the polar regions or out in space, they are us.
The ad now shifts its focus to speak about the search for energy, a “new frontier.” The shift is subtle. From speaking about this large, inclusive group of explorers, the ad now urges us to see exploration itself as a large, diverse project. That is, its not just about Antarctica and the Moon, but about places beneath the earth. There are no drills to be seen here. Indeed, the narrator tells us that Chevron is “mapping uncharted territory five miles below the sea, long before a single mark is ever put in the ground.” Guiding this narration is a montage of school children, jellyfish, and sea divers. There is a mother and child on a moped (petroleum helps get child to school, mom to work?). The ad ends with two students in a science class watching their teacher conducting a demonstration with bunsen burner (using natural gas?) as the narrator tells us that energy is required to “power the new explorers.”
No surprise that Chevron would put out an ad emphasizing how green its oil exploration has become. Chevron’s got a pretty spotty record, including an 18 billion dollar toxic wastewater dump in the Amazon rainforest by one of its acquired businesses, Texaco; poor control of toxic sites in Richmond, California which have lead to hundreds of accidents, along with 95 other Superfund sites tagged by the EPA as requiring clean-up.
This being said, Chevron seems to be trying to change the way it does business, increasing its funding of R&D in alternative energy sources. It’s own site claims that it has become the biggest supplier of geothermal energy in the world.
The ad is very forward-looking, but in emphasizing that we should think about resource extraction as a viable form of exploration, it harkens back to the 19th century where governments would routinely demand economic payoffs to “discovery expeditions” to unknown parts of the globe. Most of these economic arguments for exploration were shelved around the turn of the century for more symbolic, nationalistic goals, a practice which continued through the Soviet-NASA space race in the late 20th century.
So perhaps the Chevron ad signals that we are coming back full circle, moving into a new phase of exploration which is based upon multi-national commercial goals rather than unsustainable national competitions. Or perhaps its just a good way to sell more oil.
Saturday’s Big Stories
In the news for Friday and Saturday:
Chinese astronaut Zhai Zhigang opened the hatch of his Shenzhou 7 and took a brief stroll in orbit Saturday. This makes China only the third country in the world, after the United States and Russia, to have completed a space walk. More to the point, it demonstrates that China is ramping up for some of the heavy lifting required of long-term space projects (e.g. space stations and moon missions) which would require people moving outside of spacecraft for construction and repair projects.
Why are such journeys outside of spacecraft called “space walks”? It’s an interesting choice of words since there is no real walking as far as I can see. “Space crawl,” “space climb” and “space float” would all be more accurate if less pithy. We must scout out the etymology of the term. It strikes me that NASA and cold-war space enthusiasts would like “walking” because it is far more active, self-directed and dignified verb than floating and crawling. Another question, what are the Russian and Chinese terms for these ex-craft jaunts?
The New York Times Book Review features Bruce Barcott’s write up of Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver’s new book Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes. I’m only a couple chapters in, but Fallen Giants promises a comprehensive, socio-cultural look at high-altitude mountaineering in the last 150 years. Despite the vast heap of books written on the history of mountaineering, this type of project is sorely needed.
Deep Sea News has now made the move to Discovery Blogs.
In other news:
There was a presidential debate.
The world economy is in free-fall.
The Coldest Crucible: Web Simulcast
I’m at the University of Delaware this week to give some lectures related to my book, The Coldest Crucible. My Wednesday night talk will be simulcast on the web (and on Second Life, a world I have never visited). The lecture starts at 7:30 EST and goes for about an hour. I think the webcast will be archived if you have something more pressing to attend to at 7:30 like open heart surgery. For everyone else, I expect to see you there. Wish me luck!
Katherine Pandora on “Science in the Everyday World”
A little while ago, the journal Isis came out with a series of articles exploring the intersection between science and the history of science. Katherine Pandora and Karen Rader’s article “Science in the Everyday World” generated quite a bit of discussion in the science/history of science blogosphere. Pandora has written an account of the goals of this paper and responds to some of the comments made here and elsewhere.
Check it out: Petri Dish
Women Explorers
Josephine Peary
At one time returning explorers could expect a hearty welcome back home: good press, medals of honor, product endorsements, and lecture halls filled to capacity. Times have changed. Since the late nineteenth century, the press and public have been tougher on explorers, challenging their missions, their claims of discovery, and their behavior in the field.
Certainly there are still moments when the public’s knees get wobbly: the orbital flights of Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn and Armstrong’s touchdown on the moon. But even national pride cannot quite extinguish the feeling that we are watching some kind of carnival attraction, that things are not what they seem, that the dog-faced boy will reveal himself to be a carny in make-up.
The proof? It’s not just lemon-faced academics who are writing skeptically about travelers and explorers. Critics now come at the subject from all sides. Adventure writers such as Jon Krackauer psychoanalyze the ethos of the “go it alone” explorer in books like Into the Wild while explorers themselves hurl slings and arrows at each other on ExplorersWeb. Reading one of the glibby heroic biographies of Robert Peary or Elisha Kane is a bit like drinking coffee with lots of syrup: too sweet, no bite.
The Nineteenth-Century Explorer Narrative
Still there are areas where criticism remains muted or under-reported, where one can read heroic narratives of old and ignore for a while the nattering nabobs of negativism. Mostly I see this in books on women and indigenous explorers.
It’s understandable. For hundreds of years, women and native peoples were routinely written out of explorer narratives. When they managed to make it in, they were usually playing set characters that readers would understand: the women who travel in the footsteps of intrepid husbands, the noble savages and their thievish brethren, all of them children of one sort or another. No surprise that as social mores have changed, we see attempts to bring these two-dimensional characters to life. In the past twenty years, there have been scores of books on women explorers alone. The Boston Public Library’s list of “Adventurous Women: Explorers and Travelers” gives a taste of this literature. Indeed, the fact that the BPL felt compelled to create this list for its patrons says something about popular demand.
Many books on women explorers hew closely to the heroic model of biography that was popular in the nineteenth century. Of her choice of subjects for the book Women of Discovery, author Milbry Polk said:
So in the end, we chose about 84 women that covered 2,000 years of history, more than a dozen different nationalities. And their endeavors crossed a wide swath of interests from every kind of science to our geography and painting. And, honestly, we chose most of them because we really liked them.
I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with an author liking his or her subjects, as long as it doesn’t interfere with reporting the less noble aspects of the subject’s actions. Many women explorers, often white, well-educated, and upper-class, were just as racist and vain-glorious as their male counterparts (Josephine Peary comes to mind here). A number of them did not rail against “sexism,” in our parlance, but accepted the conventional attitude that men and women were inherently different. Indeed, one of the most fascinating aspects of women travelers is the degree to which they were able to turn these conventional attitudes to their own advantage. For example, Americans were transfixed by Nelly Bly’s bid to travel around the world in eighty days . . . not because she aspired to be look or act as tough as the boys but because she seemed so, well, girly.
Nellie Bly, 1890
This does not take away from the impressiveness of her accomplishments or others. Indeed, it makes the story of these women all the more interesting. More often than not, they did not buck a system of rigid gender roles…rather they used the system to make a space for themselves. Certainly this was not the exclusive strategy of women explorers. Frances Willard, Jane Addams, and other women of consequence did the same.
So I think it’s a shame that many biographies play up the idea of heroic women overcoming adversity through sheer strength of will. It’s a simplistic story that doesn’t do them justice. As a result, these books read very much like nineteenth-century biographies of their male counterparts.
Not that all work on women explorers fits into this category. In her account of Mary Kingsley, British explorer of West Africa, Alison Blunt warns of the dangers of placing women travelers on pedestals. Says Blunt:
Recent interest in white women in colonial settings has often taken the form of romantic, nostalgic imagery in literature, television, and film, notably since the 1980s…These approaches isolate and often celebrate individual “heroic” women rather than question constructions of gender… [Travel, Gender, and Imperialism: Mary Kingsley in West Africa, 5-6]
So where do we turn for good work on women and non-white explorers? Here’s a short list of favorites. Patricia Erikson’s current work on Josephine Peary promises a new, nuanced take on this controversial and complicated explorer. Dierdre Stam’s work on Matthew Henson also will provide some balance and context to the U.S.’s most famous African-American explorer. These are works in progress, so in the interim, you might want to read these:
Patricia M.E. Lorcin’s essay on women’s travel writing which offers a good overview of the field as well as some great secondary sources.
Patricia Gilmartin’s excellent essay on women and exploration in the Oxford Companion to World Exploration (which I reviewed here). Also see Gilmartin’s website for a more complete bibliography of her work.
Lisa Bloom’s controversial, pathbreaking book Gender On Ice which discusses the gender construction of Arctic narratives in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Carla Ulloa Inostroza’s excellent blog on the history of women’s travel Mujeres Viajeras
Laura Kay’s course reading list at Barnard.
If all of this gets a bit wonky for you, head over to the Victorian Women Writers Project where you can read the chronicles of Isabella Bird as she travels through the Rocky Mountains and the islands of Hawaii in the 1870s.
Also see my posts AfricaBib on women travelers and the Gertrude Bell Archive
Time to Eat the Dogs 