Farming and the oil and gas industry: a toxic mix?

• In Event: Transgressing the Intersection of Science and Food I

Abstract

The existence of oil and gas reserves under prime agricultural land in the Taranaki region of New Zealand has brought the oil/gas and farming industries together in an often uneasy coexistence that requires new arrangements and accommodations. For those who challenge this concurrence, boundaries and their transgression assume particular importance – growing things on the land and extracting things from the same land represents a concerning and incompatible “cross-over”. The bioremediation of waste from drilling and oil/gas production activities by its ‘landfarming’ on local dairy farms brings the issues underlying this tension to the fore. Opponents of the practice articulate a sense of category violation in which things that do not fit together, that are meant to be kept apart because of the danger of contamination, are illegitimately juxtaposed (Douglas, 1966). In contrast, oil and gas industry representatives and regulators argue for a more technocratic perspective that emphasises the procedures and technological capabilities to contain and control the handling of waste to the mutual benefit of farming and the industry. Through a critical reading of publicly available texts, we analyse three moments of ‘breakdown’ in the technical and regulatory infrastructure governing landfarming in Taranaki: the discovery of contaminated well sites, stock grazing on recent waste disposal sites, and the possible contamination of milk tankers. The symbolically “dangerous material boundary crossings” (de Rijke, 2013) invoked in these instances have profound implications for the development and acceptance of this extractive industry in communities with an established identity based on pre-existing land use.

Authors

• Brian P Bloomfield, Lancaster University

• Bill Doolin, Auckland University of Technology