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Fossil, Fuel: Manifesto for the Post-oil Museum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2012

STEPHANIE LE MENAGER
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Abstract

It is no secret that natural history museums strive to be archives of life, a common task grown more fraught in recent decades because of the crisis of biodiversity, the extinction of roughly 60,000 species per year. “Bio-informatics” has been a buzzword in the natural history literature of the twenty-first century, which recommends the digitization of museum collections such that global information sharing can keep scientists up to date about species loss. Some curators resent the emphasis upon information technology as the key to the continuing relevance of their collections, arguing, for instance, that “museums are the cornerstone of an object-oriented approach to the natural world.” The question of what durability means for natural history, and by extension for both “nature” and “history,” breaks around what counts as most lifelike: information or object, technology or bone. Los Angeles is a rich setting for the consideration of these questions, both because it is the world capital of the entertainment industry and because it hosts the world's largest archive of Pleistocene fossils, preserved in the asphaltum sinks that formed atop the Salt Lake Oil Field, itself the largest urban oil reserve. What petroleum means to evolving definitions of life, and thus to nature and history, has long been on display at the La Brea tar pits. What is not on display, namely micro-organisms grown up in the region's petroleum sludge, may be the saviors of our current geologic epoch and key to the renewal of the tired natural history concept.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 46 , Issue 2: Special Issue on Oil Cultures , May 2012 , pp. 375 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

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27 Griffiths, Shivers down Your Spine, 252.

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40 Latour's discussion of the entangled agency of quasi-objects, nonhumans, and “matters of concern” runs throughout his work. One might begin with the explicitly political argument of a more recent book, for example Latour, Bruno, The Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)Google Scholar. Here is Latour discussing the “tangled beings” which are the concern of political ecology: “Political ecology does not shift attention from the human pole to the pole of nature; it shifts from certainty about the production of risk-free objects (with their clear separation between things and people) to uncertainty about the relations whose unintended consequences threaten to disrupt all orderings, all plans, all impacts.” Ibid., 25.

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