Vital Curse: Oil As Culture

Rapidly-evolving technology draws increasing amounts of petroleum from the ground, while wars and friendly agreements move it around the globe, all to occasionally-disastrous result. Pronounced environmental concerns such as fracking, pipelines, plastics, climate change are nearly synonymous with the petroleum industry. And yet, oil is integral to meeting basic human needs like food and water, and integral to meeting modern desires for mobility, energy, and consumer-products on demand. This class approaches the modern world¿s increasingly-reluctant reliance on oil¿from extraction to consumption with problems included¿as a complex cultural practice to be analyzed using anthropology, geography, and environmental studies.