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A Toxic Development: Pollution and Change in an Amazonian Oil Frontier

In: Commodity Frontiers and Global Capitalist Expansion

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  • Deborah Delgado Pugley

    (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú)

Abstract

Although science widely recognizes the importance of the Western edge of the Amazon Basin for Earth’s ecological systems, it remains a region of oil extraction, with drilling sites dating back to the mid-twentieth century. The oil economy has a long-standing social and economic prominence, even in its most remote regions. It has created a deep dependency on cash flow in several local communities and has diminished, by its devastating environmental impacts, other sources of livelihood. As prices of oil entered a lower cycle in the global market during the 2010s, tensions emerged in extraction sites. Sabotage and lack of maintenance of oil pipelines, due to budget cuts, caused several disastrous spills that ruined water sources on which communities depended. Spills caused pollution, affecting directly local people’s health and well-being, but people have also perceived changes in the form of infrastructure and cash investment in remediation. Those might be regarded as a form of ephemeral, and toxic, “development.” This chapter aims to explore the kind of toxic development the region is now experiencing grounded in fieldwork in the Peruvian Marañon Basin.

Suggested Citation

  • Deborah Delgado Pugley, 2019. "A Toxic Development: Pollution and Change in an Amazonian Oil Frontier," Palgrave Studies in Economic History, in: Sabrina Joseph (ed.), Commodity Frontiers and Global Capitalist Expansion, chapter 0, pages 255-277, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palscp:978-3-030-15322-9_9
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-15322-9_9
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