It will take engineers--and damn good ones--to put a plug in the gushing oil well off the Gulf Coast that's leaked around 40 million 'barrels' of oil into the ocean, through the wetlands, and onto dry, American land; but it will take people who pay keen attention to language use and linguistic representation to put a plug in the mouths of people who can't seem to understand that the way we talk about things both indicates much about how we think about things, why we act (or fail to act) on things, and what those actions will look like.
Consider the ways in which prominent people in politics, industry regulation, and the media have talked about oil-in-quantity throughout the BP disaster:
Former US Environmental Protection Agency administrator and ConocoPhillips board member William K. Reilly, while pointing out the failure of the oil industry to reach the level of technological advancement necessary to prevent offshore and deap-sea drilling disasters, nonetheless can't help himself while marveling at the technology required to drill offshore and 'to get the product up.' For Reilly, a former EPA administrator, even in the context of describing the disaster of the endless spouting of oil from inside the Earth into the ocean, the natural substance, the sticky, black substance from the center of the Earth that existed before humans walked on two legs, is articulated as a "product." Just like, you know, a pair of shoes or a kind of breakfast cereal.
Sarah Palin, while on the campaign warpath (campaigning for herself, generally speaking, that is) has been a fiery proponent of offshore drilling. Her 'drill, baby, drill' mantra was taken up by more important colleagues like John McCain and Rudy Giuliani; but Palin in particular has phrased this desire strangely, suggesting we ought to drill for all the 'barrels of oil that are warehoused underground.' Palin is evidently so convinced of the idea that this naturally occurring substance called oil is not only inherently and primarily a commodity, but also that oil's commodity nature is best represented by thinking of oil as already prepackaged for sale, barreled-up, and stored neatly in rows in a commercial warehouse four miles beneath the surface of the Earth.
It's not just political shills like Palin, however, who chiefly conceive of oil as a prepackaged commodity. One notices with ease (given the repetition of coverage) that the standard unit for measuring the volume of oil is 'barrels,' such that even oil gushing out of control directly into the ocean (i.e. oil that is currently running wild, about as far from being corralled and commodified as possible) is measured and conceived of as 'barrels' of oil by media left, right, and center (wouldn't it be nice if the BP oil spill were really just 40 million barrels filled securely with oil floating around in the gulf, ripe for the plucking of BP cargo ships with big, barrel-snatching cranes attached to them?). Consider that the extent to which oil has been commodified, its price in barrels manipulated in finance markets far away from wells where the 'product' is extracted from the Earth, has led us to measure its volume not in standard metric or Imperial units, but in packaging units.
The reality, however, is that no matter how intensely and thoroughly we commodify something, be it a human or natural resource, a thing never becomes just a commodity. When we start thinking that we've successfully manipulated and brought under control through commodification virtually everything under the sun, divorcing material reality so far from perception, we play a very dangerous game. The language of those talking about the oil spill is telling, as it suggests that we've become so caught-up in the idea of oil as pure commodity, measured in 'barrels,' 'warehoused' underground for the taking and selling, a 'product' to be extracted, that we've lost sight of the fat, loud, sequined material fact that's been right in front of our faces the whole time: the oil floating around in the gulf and washing up on the shores in gelatinous blobs isn't available in barrels, never exited in a warehouse, and always has required tremendous labor and technology, and tremendous risk (including the risk of human life) to transform it into a neatly packaged commodity. When people get up and talk about oil, in the face of this disaster, as though it grows on a barrel tree in a warehouse somewhere, they demonstrate the very lack of care and consideration that produces disasters like the one in which we're currently embroiled. It's not that their metaphorical language should be understood literally, but that they're so deluded by the metaphor that the literal (and its attendant dangers and risks) has long since escaped them.
Yes, at the end of the day, a brilliant engineering team will 'save' the day by figuring out how to stop the gushing oil, and they'll get all the credit in the media and all the funding for future salvation projects, and they'll mostly deserve it. But if the rhetoric of 'drill baby drill for those warehoused barrels of oil' persists, this won't be the last Exxon-Valdez...ahem..BP oil disaster. Conventional wisdom (it's called 'conventional' in part because it's never particularly good) suggests that 'actions speak louder than words.' Well, you rarely hear of a human action that words didn't have a hand in causing.
