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Petroleum Replaces Whale Oil

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Western society and culture have a long history of extractionism with the earth rather than entanglement. One species’s story helps to illustrate this principle: whales. Before the industrialization of petroleum oil, whales were hunted almost to extinction. Baleen was used in clothing, whale oil was used as fuel for lamps.
Whaling peaked in the 1840s before gradually declining. During this decline, petroleum oil began being extracted en masse. This artwork illustrates the relationship between whale oil extraction and petroleum extraction. Each whale stamp represents roughly 2300 whales killed that year, and the embroidery represents the thousands of barrels of oil produced daily in a given year. Materials are Tyvek (a synthetic polyethylene fiber, intractable from oil production), oil-based screen printing ink, mass-produced embroidery floss, and synthetic rubber stamps (rubber and synthetic rubber are inextricable from extractionism and oil respectively).

Works Cited:

“Ocean Water.” Wikimedia Commons, February 17 2017, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ocean_water.jpg. Accessed December 21 2023.

Ritchie, Hannah. “Global Whaling Peaked in the 1960s.” Our World in Data, 30 Nov. 2022, ourworldindata.org/whaling.

Thornton, Stuart, and Meghan Marrero. “Big Fish: A Brief History of Whaling | National Geographic Society.” Education.nationalgeographic.org, 13 May 2022, education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/big-fish-history-whaling/.

“U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil (Thousand Barrels per Day).” Www.eia.gov, www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?f=A&n=PET&s=MCRFPUS2. Accessed 22 Dec. 2023.



 

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  1. Student Data Physicalization Projects Selby Hearth

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