Can
the stories of bananas, whales, sea birds, and otters teach us to
reconsider the seaport as a place of ecological violence, tied to
oil, capital, and trade?
San Pedro Bay, which contains the contiguous Ports of Los Angeles
and Long Beach, is a significant site for petroleum shipping and
refining as well as one of the largest container shipping ports in
the world—some forty percent of containerized imports to the United
States pass through this so-called America’s Port. It is also
ecologically rich. Built atop a land- and waterscape of vital
importance to wildlife, the heavily industrialized Los Angeles Harbor
contains estuarial wetlands, the LA River mouth, and a marine ecology
where colder and warmer Pacific Ocean waters meet. In this compelling
interdisciplinary investigation, award-winning author Christina
Dunbar-Hester explores the complex relationships among commerce,
empire, environment, and the nonhuman life forms of San Pedro Bay
over the last fifty years—a period coinciding with the era of
modern environmental regulation in the United States. The LA port
complex is not simply a local site, Dunbar-Hester argues, but a node
in a network that enables the continued expansion of capitalism,
propelling trade as it drives the extraction of natural resources,
labor violations, pollution, and other harms. Focusing specifically
on cetaceans, bananas, sea birds, and otters whose lives are
intertwined with the vitality of the port complex itself, Oil
Beach reveals how logistics infrastructure threatens ecologies as
it circulates goods and capital—and helps us to consider a future
where the accumulation of life and the accumulation of capital are
not in violent tension.