Essay: We Deserve it

We Deserve It
Through the lens of
Petrochemical America

Photographs: Richard Misrach
Text: Jessica Bridger
Holy Rosary Cemetery and Dow Chemical Corporation (Union Carbide Complex), Taft, Louisiana, 1998. (All photos: © Richard Misrach)
Cypress Swamp, Alligator Bayou, Prairieville, Louisiana, 1998.

Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana, 1998.
Sometimes we aren’t very good at seeing the swamp for the marsh grass. Or the gigantic petrochemical industrial network for our Tupperware and cheap gasoline. In Richard Misrach and Kate Orff’s recent book Petrochemical America we are given ample evidence of our deeply embedded love affair with oil. From cancer to imperialistic actions, these horrifying landscapes wrought in the carnage of this relationship have dire implications.

Yes, horrifying in Petrochemical America, Misrach’s moving photographs of “Cancer Alley” along the lower Mississippi in Louisiana are accompanied by Orff’s complex graphics and essays that provide a key to the depth of what we’re really seeing in the still images. It is clear that the “why” behind the images is the stuff of nightmares. At the same time it is hard not to feel like we’re cogs in a fantastic petroleum machine that we tipped into motion, relentlessly polluting, swallowing, and desecrating environments to an unprecedented degree.

It becomes very clear in this book that our moralistic valuation of virgin nature over human development obfuscates responsibility. We’re beyond that binary and into a totalized built environment, a construction of many layers and great complexity – all of our making.
Any positing that a neutral, pristine condition still exists distracts us from the totalizing scale of the problems. We have fundamentally changed our environment for better or worse, and this book records some of the darker side of this human marvel. After reading Petrochemical America it is hard not to feel like some accountability is in order, that it’s time we accept the larger implications of our relationship with oil.

Through the book, our proximity to these negative aspects of the human project is clear. The close juxtaposition of people’s lives and polluting industry is not new imagery – it has served as a warning since the industrial revolution began, but the scale presented in Petrochemical America is startling. Using Cancer Alley as a lens, Orff efficiently illustrates that this is a small slice of something so large, so complex politically, economically, and socially that it is difficult to determine the extent of the devastation.

Dow Chemical Corporation At Night, Bonnet Carré Spillway, Louisiana, 1998.
Hazardous Waste Containment Site, Dow Chemical Corporation, Mississippi River, Plaquemine, Louisiana, 1998.
Sugar Cane and Refinery, Mississippi River Corridor, Louisiana,1998.
Trailer Home and Natural Gas Tanks, Good Hope Street, Norco, Louisiana, 1998.
- Petrochemical America
  Photographs by Richard Misrach
  Ecological Atlas by Kate Orff
  Hardcover, 240 pages (plus 24-page insert), 34.3 x 27.4cm
  Aperture
  
  Kate Orff is assistant professor at Columbia University and founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture studio in Manhattan. Her work focuses on sustainable development, design for biodiversity, and community-based change. Her recent MoMA exhibition, Oyster-tecture, imagined the future of the polluted Gowanus Canal as part of a ground-up community process for an ecologically revitalized New York harbor.
  
  Richard Misrach has a long-standing personal connection with New Orleans and the surrounding region. Destroy This Memory, his latest published monograph, shows a record of hurricane-inspired graffiti left on houses and cars in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina, which won the award for Best Photobook of the Year, 2011 at PhotoEspaña. Other books include On the Beach and Violent Legacies.
That a swamp completely contaminated by Shell Oil can look so lush and beautiful is a shock. Misrach and Orff seem to want to lure us in with this terrible beauty, tracing the lines of how we got to where we are now.

Yet there is a central question that readers must answer: why? Is the information a call to arms? Is the book a toolbox for action, an index of possibility? In feeling the guilt and disgust about what we’ve done do we then feel like we’ve atoned through emotional gymnastics? In that case the book is effective. But after seeing what we’ve done, it is difficult to rouse anything resembling a call to arms: “the humans are coming, the humans are coming!” Shame on us for what we’ve done, we deserve what’s coming next. It’s up to you to do something about it.

About the book
Night Fishing, near Bonnet Carré Spillway, Louisiana, 1998.