Dissertation Defense: Natascha Otoya
Candidate: Natascha de Vasconcellos Otoya
Major: History
Advisor: John McNeill, Ph.D.
Oil in Bahia: From Early Cretaceous to the Anthropocene
This is an environmental history of the first oil fields in Brazil, located around the Bay of All Saints, in the Recôncavo Baiano. The search for oil entails many layers of history, coming together through human action. In this dissertation each of these layers is a chapter. The first layer is geological. It involves the massive timescales of geology, going back 145 million years to uncover oil’s own history. In a different timescale, the second layer is the ecology of the Recôncavo Baiano. It went from lush Atlantic Forest, to sprawling sugar cane plantations over the course of three hundred years, with the help of several human and non-human actors. The third layer of the story are humans transforming the landscape after finding oil. Modern humans pierced through hundreds of meters of accumulated matter looking for oil around the Bay of All Saints, turning it into petroscapes. Humans finding oil were essential in this story – but we were not alone. Accompanying humans was the ‘portmanteau biota’ of pathogens that infected people in and around the fields. They form the fourth layer. Finally, the fifth is the materiality layer. It is the very world we created using oil. Having struck oil in 1939, Brazil was on the cusp of the Great Acceleration. This is by no means merely background to this story. The search for fossil fuels was driven by global movements of capitalism and industrialization. What happened to specific people and environments involved in such global movements brings the focus to a local scale. Framing it in the context of the Anthropocene, takes it back to a planetary scale. The Bay of All Saints took shape during the opening of the South Atlantic Ocean, its rift movement allowing for the perfect geological conditions to form and accumulate oil over 145 million years. Today, its inner beaches are lined with massive petrochemical infrastructure of fields, refineries, ports, pipelines, storage tanks and spheres. This is a short narrative of that long and layered story.