Is the title of a new book, by award-winning photojournalist Ed Kashi with the geopolitical insights of UC Berkeley professor Michael Watts. Interview on Alternet.
They are wars that are already well under way. In mid-June, a Shell facility was attacked by local militants, disrupting production and sending the already sky-high price of oil to further heights before coming back online a week later. Attacks like those have increased in frequency, as Nigerian factions have fought for control of the nation’s lucrative petroleum resources, which are the largest in Africa.
The problem, especially as indigenous populations caught between Nigeria’s prosperous rich and their oil industry’s environmental devastation see it, is that viable land and resources have been wasted on a handful while the majority of the country falls into further disrepair and depression. From natural gas flares and oil spills to the destruction of native plants, animal species and other salable commodities, Nigeria’s oil industry has wreaked havoc across the land and its people.
And it’s only getting worse. And if you think it doesn’t affect America, think again.
And the rest of the ‘developed’ world.
MW: I hope that this book lays out the dynamics of oil and development in Nigeria and Africa, that it reveals the complicity in this perfect storm of international oil companies, foreign governments, corrupt oil-producing states and U.S. consumers. Perhaps in the same way that the “blood diamonds” issue showed our complicity and need to assess the conditions under which the resources we use are produced. In a sense, this book documents “blood oil.”
I hope that the book will contribute in some way to the struggle in Nigeria for a more democratic and transparent political system in which oil wealth can be deployed for productive purposes in a socially and ecologically just way. I also hope it contributes to a much wider debate in the U.S., and everywhere else, about the consequences of dependency, as well as the vast costs of hydrocarbon capitalism.
http://www.curseoftheblackgoldbook.com/
Lots of information and emotive images of the impact that the oil industry has had on the lives of people, and the environment, in the Niger Delta.
