McGill history professors Jason Opal, Thomas Jundt, and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert spoke at a public forum on Wednesday to address last April’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The aim, according to Opal, was to tackle “the legal, cultural and political dimensions of deep-water drilling in and near American waters and relate it to the American sphere.”

The speakers took a historical, rather than strictly environmental, approach to the subject. The idea for the forum, Studnicki-Gizbert said, began by discussing how the Deepwater Horizon disaster could be a turning point in the environmental and political consciousness of the United Sates.

“We said, ‘If we did some history on this, we could look at how environmental crises feed into environmental consciousness, environmental politics, and in particular issues of regulation,'” he said.

History Students Association VP Internal Marni Isaacson coordinated the forum and reached out to the professors.

“They were all very enthusiastic about coming together with the McGill community to both share their insight on the topic and hear what the public had to say,” she said.

The forum, though long after the initial oil well blowout, took place just 10 days after the U.S. government announced that the spill was officially over.  

The forum and discussion were  pertinent to the summer-long fiasco, and allowed academics, students, and the public to reflect on, as Opal said, “what we find to be most troubling, what we find to be most compelling, and above all perhaps where we are now and where we are going to head in terms of environmental disasters and the political response to them.”

On April 20, a fire erupted early in the morning on the drilling rig Deepwater Horizon.  The failure of a “blowout preventer” resulted in a massive explosion, the death of eleven workers, and the release of a continuous stream of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Each professor approached the disaster differently. Opal, who studies early American history, compared aspects of the disaster to the 19th century American frontier.  

“British Petroleum had a reputation as ‘cowboys.’ The terminology of the frontier suffused this disaster and is everywhere if you look carefully,” he said. “A frontier, or horizon, relates to or describes a specific relation of peoples to the environment and the people living there.”

The notion of untouched tracts of wilderness, Opal said, gave people the sense that anything they conquered would be theirs, and the frontier was the future. Now, he said, we see the consequences of similar attitudes regarding oil, and “a sense of being impotent in the face of crisis.”

Studnicki-Gizbert, on the other hand, who researches mineral and resource extraction in Latin America and the involvement of Canadian mining companies in these activities, discussed the spill in the context of other environmental disasters. He linked the spill to similar ones in the last century, like the spills of the Exxon Valdez or the Newtown Creek in Brooklyn.  

“It was a highly mediagenic event, because of the kind of historical resonances with other disasters and other events,” he said. “We inherently relate images of today’s crises to those for which we already have an understanding. This in turn dictates our reactions to current disasters.”

Jundt, an environmental historian, took the most straightforward approach to the disaster.

“In the case of the BP spill, it speaks quite loudly in terms of being representative of issues that characterize 20th century United States history,” he said. “It reflects a long-standing tension between protecting the environment and promoting the economy.”

Jundt discussed the issue of responsibility, and where the blame should lie. While all of the presenters agreed there was no clear-cut answer, Jundt explored the complex relationship between excessive corporate power and governmental involvement.  

“The U.S. government, through tax exemptions and lackadaisical egulation, has helped big companies get a foothold in this deep-water drilling,” he said.

Over five months after the enviromental disaster took place, McGill faculty and students were able to analize the issue from a historical perspective rather than the traditional environmental view, by relating and comparing the oil spill to previous events of the same nature.