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A bibliography of post-graduate theses concerning Oil, subdivided into Historical and Modern Studies, and exploring the topics as follows: Seabed Exploitation; Offshore Operations; the North Sea; and Other Locations.

Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, improvements to urban landscapes, their profitability, and populations were made across Great Britain. Some took the form of new commercial facilities, such as docks and warehouses, while others served the physical and psychological needs of residents and took the form of walks, public parks, cemeteries, and hospitals. Chapter three traces the ways in which such improvements influenced the changing form and representation of British provincial towns. Contrary to received historical wisdom that presumes many such improvements were conceived as antidotes to urbanization, this chapter will demonstrate how green spaces, docks, chimneys, and colleges were designed and represented as equal and intrinsic components of the urban realm.

With the great immigrant waves at the end of the nineteenth century New York's population swelled, but with no sewage treatment, all human wastes entered the Harbor's waters in raw form, overwhelming its ecology. In some places raw sewage was as much as ten feet thick. This ecological and human health crisis led to slow actions and improvements in controlling pollution, but none more so than the Clean Water Act of 1972. One irony is that the foul waters protected the Harbor's piers from marine borers, which became a problem as water quality rebounded. However, dead end systems such as Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek still suffer substantial water quality degradation.

This chapter shows how Cao Xueqin used food and beverages to mark boundaries between the pure and the profane in the Jia clan mansions. The division between purity and profanity in the novel stands as the core of the moral and spiritual problems it explores. Previous research has explored the roles of sex, age, space and art, for example, in signalling shifts in the stability of the distinction between purity and profanity. This paper extends that framework to examine the role that food and drink play in the pollution of the protected world of Daguan yuan (Prospect Garden). It argues that Cao Xueqin provided readers with keys presaging the dismantling of the garden and the decline of the Jia family in his use of food and drink and in the discussion about their exchange and consumption.

In this chapter Jussi Parikka discusses air pollution and waste as media, data and environmental art created in the contemporary smart city. The way these, otherwise unwanted, elements are sensed and perceived unveil the political subjectivity in an urban context and as data feedback from various readings, understandings and governance of the city. This sort of a materiality is one that is about folds between architectures, data and the chemistry of the air -a sort of a media ecology of multiple materialities. The creative power of smog that intertwines old computational infrastructures of urban pollution and new infrastructures such as monitors, programming and data storage is explained. The chapter focuses on urban environments as defined by the emergence of new forms of measurement of the city -and its airborne pollution - through smog sensors. The smart, modern city as defined through its unwanted elements, in this case, pollution and waste, are further discussed.

The chapter discusses the resource balance between the demand and availability of water – a critical resource for agriculture and livelihood security – in global as well as Indian context. The data and discussion of basin wise balances of surface and ground water indicate widely varying severity of ecological limitations of water resources over regions due to uneven spatial and temporal distribution of precipitation in India. It critically discusses all the important options of water resource development – like large storage development, inter-river linking, micro water shed development, and ground water conservation. It further reviews the ground water revolution of India augmenting agrarian productivity as well as its attendant problem of conflicts over the rights of its use, and policy issues relating to water institutions for equitable sharing of the scarce resource. It further discusses the sources of qualitative degradation of the resource, its valuation and control including government policies and actions.

Chapter 2 examines the emergence of China’s “cancer villages”—village-sized clusters of high cancer incidence—and their significance. It overviews how media accounts discursively shaped their social, political and epistemological nature. It develops a typology of cancer villagers based on a close analysis of a selected number of cases examined in recent qualitative research (Chen et al 2013). These relatively high-profile, politically active cases provide a useful background against which to compare the less visibly active case studies examined in later chapters. They illustrate a broader range of activist practices, but they also show that such strategies are often ineffective. Ultimately, these examples suggest that “cancer villages” are not an epidemiologically uncontested label but rather a cultural, social, economic and political phenomenon. Further, they prove that scientific evidence is not the most important element in gaining redress. Rather, it is socio-economic contexts, the persistence of the local population’s complaints and their ability to threaten social stability which largely determines the ways in which polluting firms and the local government may respond. This point is further supported by the book’s three case studies, in which scientific evidence plays a relatively minor role in villagers’ reckonings about environmental health effects and in their demands for redress.

The first thing to know when starting to climb a hill is where the summit lies. The second is that there are no completely painless ways to get there. Failing to know those things may lead one up a deceptively easy path that never reaches the top but meanders off into a dead-end, frustrating the climber and wasting energy. The currently popular slogan of “sustainable development” threatens to become such a road. Though appealing at first view, it appeals particularly to people who are disheartened by the long, arduous hike they see ahead of them or who don’t really have a clear notion of what the principal goal of environmental politics ought to be. After much milling about in a confused, contentious mood, they have discovered what looks like a broad easy path where all kinds of people can walk along together, and they hurry toward it, unaware that it may be going in the wrong direction. When contemporary environmentalism first emerged in the 1960s and ′70s, and before its goals became obscured by political compromising and diffusion, the destination was more obvious and the route more clear. The goal was to save the living world around us, millions of species of plants and animals, including humans, from destruction by our technology, population, and appetites. The only way to do that, it was easy enough to see, was to think the radical thought that there must be limits to growth in three areas—limits to population, limits to technology, and limits to appetite and greed. Underlying that insight was a growing awareness that the progressive, secular, and materialist philosophy on which modern life rests, indeed on which Western civilization has rested for the past three hundred years, is deeply flawed and ultimately destructive to ourselves and the whole fabric of life on the planet. The only true, certain way to the environmental goal, therefore, was to challenge that philosophy at its foundation and find a new one based on material simplicity and spiritual richness—to find other ends to life than production and consumption.

The chapter focuses on the analysis of energy resource balance and the ecological limits on energy resources with special reference to the oil crisis in both the global and the Indian context. It discusses the roles of fossil fuels, nuclear energy, hydro resources, renewables like biomass, bioliquids and other aboitic renewables particularly wind and solar energy resources in providing the energy security for India with some sectorwise details as well as their implications in respect of environmental degradation over the full life cycle of their respective uses. The chapter further discusses the economic effects of the ecological limits as expressed in the forms of resource scarcity and environmental pollution. It then reviews the trend of past energy and carbon efficiency of India and the projections of the same in future as per the study of the expert group of the planning commission and discusses their policy implications

For fifty years, paper towns along Lake Superior boomed: Marathon, Terrace Bay, Thunder Bay, Ontonagon, Munising. But the human and environmental costs of intensive pulp production began to emerge soon after World War II. Anishinaabe communities were displaced from forests, suffering intense poverty and social displacement. First Nations communities in Grassy Narrows, Ontario, suffered mercury poisoning from the chlor-alkali plants needed for paper bleaching. Dioxin and PCBs created poison legacies that still confound the region. The paper and pulp industry brought three decades of economic growth that benefited many—but certainly not all—of the people living in the Lake Superior basin. Yet the pollution legacies from that boom era have persisted far longer than the economic benefits.

By the late 1950s, the taconite boom that Reserve Mining Company stimulated was having a profound effect on the region’s economy, just as the pulp and paper boom had stimulated the Canadian economy along Lake Superior. Towns thrived; new cars filled the parking lots where well-paid union workers toiled in the taconite facilities. Schools improved, funded by abundant tax receipts. Harms to the lake from the taconite boom were subtle and hard to pin down whereas the benefits were clear to see: jobs for miners and economic development for the region. Throughout the 1950s, as evidence accumulated that taconite was causing pollution problems, state agencies continued to insist that the industry was harmless. Only after scientists found that asbestos had been mobilized from taconite disposal into the drinking water and bodies of urban residents distant from the disposal site did the federal and state governments question the risks from taconite.

By the 1960s, the failures of research and cooperative pragmatism to control Great Lakes pollution were becoming painfully evident. In 1972 Canada and the United States signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. The agreement was groundbreaking in its focus on cleaning up existing pollution and preventing new pollutants, but the International Joint Commission has no authority to force the two nations to implement recommendations. Therefore, when Canada or the United States refuses to abide by the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement (in its various revisions), very little happens in response—besides calls for more research.

This chapter reports on observations of racism and racial framing in interaction made by college students at several universities on the east coast and in the midwest. The students represent many backgrounds and racial identities. But in the US they are all forced to identify in terms of the Black/White racial binary. Asian American students, who are identified as neither, face a constant perception that they are not American, while West Indian and African students are forced into a Black American category unfamiliar to them. This is not only a problem for minorities. White students are virtually surrounded by racism they cannot escape. It happens in their dorm rooms, in the cafeteria, classrooms, the library and walking across campus. We refer to this as “Race Pollution.” In addition to observations of Black/White racism in the US, we present observations of racism against Asians and Asian Americans that illustrate the tacit assumptions about being “foreign” that are at work. We also explore some of the complications of Latinx/Hispanic and West Indian/African identities, and consider how racism toward Latinx /Hispanic Americans, refugees, and immigrants is positioned not only against the Black/ White binary, but also against an old seventeenth-century Anglo/Spanish antagonism.

After RGGI’s implementation in 2008, a series of political set backs led some to declare cap and trade “dead.” This chapter rejects the asserted demise of cap and trade, arguing that the public benefit model for climate policies offers the best hope for political progress. The chapter reviews post-2008 climate policies, noting thatdespite a few prominent failures,cap and trade with auction has become the most common approach to addressing climate change. In addition, the chapter documents how three policies—the EU ETS, California’s cap and trade program, and RGGI—used the public benefit frame to resist political challenges and strengthen their emissions goals. The chapter then describes additional potential applications for the public benefit model, including carbon tax policies and the new Clean Power Plan regulations promulgated by the U.S. EPA in 2015. As uses of the public benefit frame expand, the chapter notes, a key question for the future will be what types of policy designs will be perceived as “fitting” with the norms that constitute the frame. Finally, the chapter discusses how normative framing could improve the ability to understand and predict other sudden policy changes beyond the topic of climate change.