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Book Review
| The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900–1938. By Myrna I. Santiago. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Såo Paulo: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xii + 411 pp. Notes, tables, bibliography, and index. Cloth $85.00.
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| In The Ecology of Oil, Myrna Santiago provides a critically important new source in the historical consideration of petroleum as well as in the social and cultural impacts of massive industrial change. Although the book is quite constricted in its scope and coverage, it provides an example that will inspire environmental historians approaching any episode of industrial resource use. |
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The story that Santiago chooses to tell, that of the Huasteca, Veracruz (an area of Mexico along the inner coast of the Gulf of Mexico), serves as a representative case study. Oilmen such as California magnate Edward L. Doheny represented great corporate behemoths such as Standard Oil and brought the ethic of extraction perfected in other areas—including Pennsylvania and California—wherever crude was found. |
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In the early twentieth century, the petroleum business became one of the world's most flexible undertakings: able to arrive in a nonindustrialized, inaccessible locale, extract the crude, and move on to the next site. These external priorities and values, of course, carried with them severe social and environmental consequences. In this case study, Santiago pursues what she sees as the fundamental aim of environmental history: "to locate human actions not only within their social, political, and economic spheres, but also within a network of ecological relationships" (p. 3). |
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