Social and political convergence on environmental events: the roles of simplicity and visuality in the BP oil spill.
Hoffbauer, Andreas ; Ramos, Howard
ON THE EVENING of April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon offshore
drilling platform located in the Gulf of Mexico was rocked by a series
of explosions. The accident claimed the lives of 11 workers and after
burning uncontrollably for two days the platform sank to the ocean
floor. This series of events led to what has become known as "the
BP oil spill" and it quickly turned into the largest accidental
marine oil spill in history (Robertson and Krauss 2010). To put the
disaster into perspective, over 200 million gallons of oil were
estimated to have flowed into the Gulf, which is equivalent to 20 Exxon
Valdez spills (Steffy 2011). At first, however, the issue was not widely
engaged by news media, environmental nongovernmental organizations
(ENGOs), oil and industry support companies, or government, and much of
the attention paid to the disaster has focused on the economic and legal
consequences instead of environmental damage. This is of little surprise
to those who track the social and political engagement of environmental
harms.
Oil spills are far more common than one might think and most spills
gain little attention. In 2010 alone, the same year of the BP oil spill,
the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration responded to 60
different oil spills and other incidents (Office of Response and
Restoration 2012). In the year before, it responded to 178 oil spills,
and the year after 44, showing the regularity of their environmental
destruction. Most oil spills, however, do not become the focus of media
scrutiny, environmental advocacy, or political intervention. In this
paper we ask why this is the case by looking at environmental events as
actants that potentially drive convergence of social and political
engagement.
LITERATURE REVIEW
We consider three possible explanations for why social and
political actors engage environmental events. The first comes from the
agenda-setting literature, which looks at issue attention cycles and
feedback loops that drive convergence of social and political action on
a given issue (Downs 1972; Henry and Gordon 2001; Hilgartner and Bosk
1988; Peters and Hogwood 1985; Trumbo 1996). According to this
literature, timing is important. Most analysis focuses on how problems
and the events that drive them become hubs for social and political
claims-makers (such as journalists, environmental advocates, businesses,
or politicians) to contest power. Hilgartner and Bosk (1988) argue that
claims-makers cluster around issues, borrowing each other's ideas
and information and driving increased rates of public attention through
multiple feedback loops that lead to convergence of social and political
actors (Dalton et al. 1998; Ungar 1998; Wood and Peake 1998). In
essence, if one high-profile claims-maker acts, it triggers the actions
of others. This observation aligns with the discursive opportunities,
arena, and field analogies used by many social movement scholars (see
Ferree et al. 2002; Fligstein and McAdam 2012; Gamson 2007). This leads
to our first hypothesis.
H1: Engagement of environmental events is seen in temporal
convergences of high-profile claims-makers.
Most scholars in this tradition concentrate on the power and
significance of political actors and the political economy of media and
advocacy rather than looking at the properties of the events themselves.
The political opportunity literature, however, suggest that looking at
contextual factors could be useful. It examines how political actors
respond to changing social, historical, and political trends (Meyer
2004; Meyer and Minkoff 2004; Ramos 2008). Most of the focus of such
research is on institutional structures and how instrumental actors take
advantage of them. Murphy (2004) suggests this is a fruitful line of
inquiry and shows how environmental disaster can trigger political
action. He uses a Latourian approach that treats the environment as an
actant. Doing so not only looks at the instrumentality of human
political actors, but also considers the role of potential mechanisms of
change, which is in line with the mechanisms perspective advocated by
McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (2001: 24) as well as Charles Tilly (2006). An
actant is simply anything that makes other things respond, change, or
act (Latour 2007: 54-55). Many scholars looking at environmentalism have
adopted this kind of an approach to understand environmental politics
and advocacy (see Holifield, Porter, and Walker 2009; Lockie 2004;
Stoddart 2011). Essentially this recognizes that both humans and
nonhumans can trigger social change. For this reason, we look at the
properties of the environmental harms triggered by the BP oil spill and
the weekly events that define it as the impetus for the convergence of
social and political reaction.
Macnaghten and Urry (1998) theorize that a person's ability to
interpret an environmental problem is limited by their ability to
interact with it (see also Mazur 1981; Molotch and Lester 1974, 1975;
Wall 1995). When a person is not directly affected by an environmental
problem they will be more dependent on third-party information, such as
newspaper coverage, press releases by environmental advocacy groups, or
statements by companies involved in the problem or political
organization tasked with managing environmental problems. Social
movement scholars argue that public attention is directed at causes that
individuals can translate into their personal experiences (Castells
2004; Gamson 1992). When cultural schemas that represent the
characteristics and relationships of an issue can be drawn upon,
individuals can more easily infer what they are, where they fit in the
broader spectrum of life, and what to expect of them (Cerulo 2010:117;
D'Andrade 1995; DiMaggio 1997:269). Relatedly, Keck and Sikkink
(1998: 27) argue that in order for social problems to gain significant
attention they must be converted into "causal stories" that
explicitly establish who and what is responsible for the problem. When
the actions of specific culprits can be clearly identified, this allows
publics to narrow their attention on a specific target (Bennie 1998;
Weyler 2004). Causal narratives thus need to be clear and direct in
order to gain attention. Shorter, less technical, and less detailed
representations of complex issues are necessary for widespread response
to a problem (Hilgartner 1990:529; Star 1983).
Complex issues such as climate change or other environmental harms,
which have causal narratives with numerous interrelated elements that
require technical knowledge, are difficult to understand. Trumbo (1996)
notes that scientists play an important role in defining the cause and
effect frames of environmental problems but those accounts are often
speculative and fraught with uncertainty, and are difficult to interpret
(Anderson 2009; Boykoff and Mansfield 2008). As a result, scientific
rhetoric can be ambiguous and can be ripe with conflicting information
that makes it difficult to define an environmental problem (Futrell
2003:379).
Simpler issues with shorter causal narratives are easier to
comprehend and consequently generate more intense reaction by social and
political actors (Bennie 1998; Dale 1996; Tsoukas 1999; Young and Dugas
2011). For this reason environmental advocates need to make
environmental problems intelligible by increasing their commensurability
with existing cultural scripts or schemas. When environmental events are
linked in this way they form an effective causal narrative and are more
widely engaged (see Cormier and Tindall 2005). We thus ponder the
potential of environmental events to elicit simple causal links to harm,
which leads to our second hypothesis.
H2: As the potential for an environmental event's causal story
to be simplified increases, newspapers, environmental organizations,
business and government reactions will converge.
The use of images has long been regarded as a powerful tool in a
social movement's arsenal (Halfmann and Young 2010; Rohlinger and
Klein 2012:172; Wilkes, Corrigall-Brown, and Myers 2010) and has
certainly been important to the environmental movement (Dale 1996;
Rootes 2007). A potent image can capture the public's consciousness
and transform the way people view their world (DeLuca 1999). Gruesome
pictures of seals being slaughtered, aerial photos of vast tracts of
deforested land, and oil-covered wildlife have all come to serve this
purpose for environmental activism. Environmental issues that have the
potential to be visually represented through striking images allow
audiences to quickly see their severity (Castells 2004:187; Dale 1996;
DeLuca 1999; Downs 1972; Ungar 1998; Weingart, Engels, and Pansegrau
2000). In fact, many activists report becoming active in a cause after
being exposed to graphic images associated with an issue (Gorney 1998;
Shields 2009). This is attributed to the fact that powerful images
intensify advocacy frames by providing tangible evidence of a clear
victim and physical destruction (Halfmann and Young 2010). In short,
they generate causal simplicity.
Images also aid in the processing of information. The human brain
is far more adept at extracting information from audio-visual stimuli
and absorbing it with greater fidelity than from textual information
alone (Graber 1996:86-87). A Pew Research Center for the People and the
Press report reveals that 46 percent of American adults find visually
based stories easier to interpret and understand (Kohut 2008). Visuals
of the Exxon Valdez accident in Prince William Sound, Alaska, played an
important role in bringing that disaster to light (Daley and
O'Neill 1991). As a result, visuality is quite important.
Not all images, however, are equally potent in evoking moral shock
or aiding in making sense of information. Like other forms of
informational stimuli, the rhetorical efficacy of an image depends on
its salience with an audience's experiential knowledge (Gamson et
al. 1992; Graber 1996; Schudson 1989). If images do not resonate with
audiences' experiences they will likely be dismissed. This is not
to suggest that audiences interpret images homogeneously (Griswold 1987;
Milkie 1999; Shively 1992), but rather some images are more recognizable
and far reaching than others (Becker 1982, chap. 2; Gamson et al.
1992:375). North American and Western European audiences, for instance,
are more likely to draw connections between images of oil-covered
pelicans than more abstract environmental harms like holes in the ozone
layer.
Striking images that depict destruction have an elevated capacity
to emotionally draw observers and trigger moral commitment to act
(Calhoun 2004:390-91; Halfmann and Young 2010:19). Allowing images to
speak for themselves has likewise been attributed to Greenpeace's
success (Dale 1996; Hansen 1993, 2010; Weyler 2004). The more striking
an image, the more inclined observers will be to shift their resolve
from "this cannot be" to "this must not be"
(Halfmann and Young 2010:19). Action-orientated shots and drama in the
visuals' frames further act to attract and hold attention by
engaging the viewers' emotions (DeLuca 1999:124; Graber 1996:90;
Heuer and Reisberg 1990). Mundane and static images by contrast are less
gripping and likely to be overlooked by audiences.
Most analysis of such images in the social movement literature,
however, tends to focus on the actions of activists to strategically
advance campaigns or to conform to dominant media selection biases. This
artificially skews analysis from capturing environmental events that are
more mundane. Few studies look at the visual potential of environmental
harms to be captured. For this reason, we change the focus to assess the
potential of an environmental event to be visually captured to see if
this drives convergence of newspaper, activist advocacy, business, and
government response to a potentially harmful environmental event. We
hypothesize the following.
H3: Events that can be more easily visually represented are more
likely to be engaged by newspapers, advocacy organizations, business,
and government.
In sum, we expect that the reaction to the environmental events of
the BP oil spill will converge because of temporal feedback-loops and
the potential simplicity of an event's causal narrative and its
potential visuality. Less complicated events and those that are easier
to portray visually should drive more convergence of social and
political actors.
METHODS
To examine the convergence of news media, environmental advocacy
organizations, oil and industry support companies, and the government in
response to the BP oil spill, a new data set consisting of the number of
news articles and press releases issued by each is analyzed for the 2010
year. We decided to look at this spill and the events that are
associated with it because it is a prominent case and because it is the
largest marine disaster in history caused by human error. Each
actor's response is aggregated by week. This one-year time frame
was selected in order to capture discursive social and political action
before and after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon.
Following many scholars looking at agenda-setting and social
movements, the analysis examines news media by counting articles in a
number of newspapers. These include the Times-Picayune, New York Times,
Wall Street Journal, Globe & Mail, and Guardian. These venues were
selected because they represent a range of local, national, and
international news coverage. They also represent differing political
orientations. Newspaper response was tracked by counting articles, by
publication, which mention the keyword "BP." We decided to use
this keyword because it yielded the most hits of relevant material and
because we wanted to focus on the BP oil spill and not all oil spills
that year. We also conducted additional analyses with other keywords for
the same time frame and find similar overall patterns. (1) Searches were
conducted using the Factiva database and results were entered by day
into a time-series database for the year 2010. Results were then
aggregated by week to determine fluctuations and peaks in news media
engagement of the BP oil spill.
We examine ENGOs engaging the BP oil spill by looking at the online
press releases of two leading environmental organizations: the Sierra
Club and Greenpeace International. Both organizations are household
names and for years have been strong advocates of environmental issues.
Prior to the BP oil spill, both organizations vigorously campaigned
against offshore oil exploration and drilling. They employed distinctly
different tactics, making them ideal organizations to compare.
We also look at the online press releases of companies involved in
the spill and offshore drilling support. These include the following:
BP, Halliburton, Transocean, Shell, and ExxonMobil. All five companies,
save for Halliburton and Transocean, have extensive offshore oilfield
leases in the Gulf of Mexico and are leading companies in the industry.
Halliburton and Transocean are leading providers to offshore oil
drilling operations, and both were involved in the preparation of the
Macondo well. We decided to look at how companies engaged the incident,
to offer a fuller picture of reaction to the accident.
Last, we examine how the White House responded to the incident, by
examining the Press Secretary's press statements. The decision to
focus on the federal government rather than local or state governments
was made because of the scale of the accident and the pressure placed on
the White House to coordinate the management of the disaster both
domestically and internationally.
Press releases were obtained from online archives of each
organization, oil and industry support companies, and the White House.
As with newspapers, counts for the keyword were captured by day and then
aggregated by week. In the case of BP, all of their press releases for
2010 were captured instead of using the keyword. We decided to use all
press releases for this company given its centrality to the spill and to
assess the change in the volume of its press engagement before and after
the spill. Almost all press statements after the spill mention the
disaster in one way or another.
Convergence Scale
Aggregated weekly data from newspapers, ENGOs, oil and industry
support companies, and the White House were then ranked by the top weeks
of social and political engagement, listing up to the five most active
weeks, for each actor. This was done to identify points of convergence.
Some social or political actors did not have enough variance in their
action to offer five distinctive weeks. In those cases their top weeks
are reported. Cumulatively, we identified 34 weeks of peak engagement.
We next created a convergence scale based on the number of actors
engaging in discursive action during the 34 top weeks. The convergence
scale is simply a count of the discursive actions of the 13 actors
examined. If an actor issued a statement during a top week they were
coded as 1 for the given week. A week's score thus reflects the
total number of actors issuing at least one press release or statement
during a top week. The higher the score, the greater the convergence
among the actors. We acknowledge that, because of our choice of
keywords, some documents included in the scale contain some noise
because of coverage of events other than the oil spill. However, as we
explain in footnote (1), alternate keywords yield similar overall
results.
Simplicity and Visuality Scales
We also coded the environmental events resulting from the Deepwater
Horizon explosion and the ensuing oil spill during the 34 top weeks of
engagement. We did this with two 5-point scales, one for potential
simplicity and the other for potential visuality of environmental events
during a top week. We did not code articles or press releases. Instead,
data on the environmental events of a given week and their potential was
drawn from daily highlights on the New York Times "Tracking the Oil
Spill in the Gulf" and CNN's "Oil Spill in the Gulf"
webpages. (2) We took this approach over coding articles or press
releases because we wanted to consider temporal context and the
potential to offer a simple and visual story of an environmental event
irrespective of whether or not actors engaged the week's events.
The coding of weeks for each scale was initially done by the first
author and then reviewed by the second author until both authors
achieved complete intercoder agreement.
On both scales, 0 represented the lowest level of simplicity or
visuality and 5 represents the highest level. Table 1 offers detail on
the operationalization of the scales.
To give a sense of the simplicity scale coding, in week 37
(September 13-19) when the well was capped in turn stopping the oil
spill, all five criteria on the scale were coded yes for a score of 5
out of 5. During this week it was clear that the oil spill was caused by
the faulty blowout preventer (criterion 1), BP was for the most part
responsible (criterion 2), and cementing in the well would stop the
unabated flow of oil into the Gulf (criterion 3). Using a garden hose as
an analogy, audiences could clearly understand what was happening at the
seabed and the steps necessary to cap or "plug" the pipe
(criteria 4 and 5). An example of the visuality scale coding can be seen
in week 16 (April 19-25) when the Deepwater Horizon initially exploded.
All five criteria on the scale that week were coded yes. The fire that
engulfed the oil platform following the explosion was easily captured on
film (criterion 1), clearly depicting a destroyed oil platform and
leaking oil (criteria 2 and 4). Moreover, images captured during this
week fit common understandings of industrial accidents (criterion 3) and
were action orientated with fire flaring uncontrollably and boats and
helicopters trying to rescue workers and gain control over it (criterion
5). (3) Looking at the convergence, simplicity and visuality scales
allow us to examine if environmental events have specific properties
that draw a wide range of actors into their engagement.
Analysis
The discursive action of newspapers, ENGOs, oil and industry
support companies, and the government can be aggregated in four distinct
phases during the 2010 year. They include: a preaccident phase, which
occurred between January 1 and April 18, an oil disaster phase that
lasted between April 19 and June 20, a capping-the-well phase, between
June 21 and August 15, and a normalizing phase beginning on August 16 to
the end of the year (for detailed analysis of each phase, see Hoffbauer
2011). Figure 1 identifies those phases and offers an overview of the
ebbs and flows of the actor's discursive engagement of the BP oil
spill.
Unsurprisingly, Figure 1 shows that the preaccident phase received
the least response. This is despite the fact that problems at the site
of the Macondo well began as early as 2009 and that during this period
BP cut corners to keep costs down and the project on schedule and the
Gulf of Mexico experienced a number of oil spills (Bourne 2010:45;
Cavnar 2010:27; Freudenburg and Gramling 2011:40). Things began to
change, however, when a large gas bubble entered the well's
pipe-casing through gaps in the cement around the wellhead and shot up
to the Deepwater Horizon platform on April 20th (Bourne 2010:46). This
ultimately led to an explosion on the rig killing 11 workers. The
ensuing inferno, fed by crude oil and natural gas from the Macondo well,
engulfed the rig for two days. On April 22nd, the rig sank after a
flotilla of boats unsuccessfully attempted to battle the flames and
remotely activate the blowout preventer. These events occurred at the
beginning of the oil disaster phase, which Figure 1 shows was the period
of greatest reaction. The first actor to discursively engage the
disaster was the Times Picayune, then BP, and days later almost all
others, showing convergence and feedback-loops. The explosion had a
simple causal narrative and was certainly visible; however, it is
unclear whether the environmental harms were similarly acute and
perceptible. Repeated efforts to repair the blowout preventer failed
during the initial stages of the accident and oil continued to leak into
the Gulf of Mexico. This led to a prolonged period during which BP
engineers attempted a variety of techniques to stem the flow of oil,
leading to what we call the capping-the-well phase. During this period,
moments of convergence were also found; however, the simplicity of
environmental events and visuality varied. On August 9th, BP announced
that its "static kill" operation and cementing procedure were
successful and that the Macondo well was finally plugged (Corum et al.
2010). This led to a phase of normalization, where social and political
engagement of the oil spill declined steadily. With the Macondo well
successfully capped, BP focused all its public relations attention on
compensating the victims of the accident and mending its tarnished
image. This period had less convergence among social and political
actors, and the environmental harms were less clear-cut and visual. The
timeline shows mixed support for our hypotheses. As a result, using the
preaccident, oil disaster, capping-the-well, and normalizing
distinctions, we next look into the BP oil spill in greater detail by
comparing weeks of "top engagement" to investigate our
hypotheses further.
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
We begin by looking at convergence in Table 2. The table ranks the
top 34 weeks of engagement by level of convergence among social and
political actors. The numbers in the table report on the rank of the top
week for different social and political actors. For instance, if the
number reported is one, that means that it was the week where the actor
published their most articles or press releases. As noted in the Methods
section, we look at the top five weeks of actors save for those that
have too little variation to look at five weeks.
Week 23, which occurred during the second-last week of the oil
disaster phase, saw the most convergence of social and political actors
in their top weeks of engagement. Interestingly, this was almost seven
weeks after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. Nine of the 13
actors examined published an article or issued a press release or
statement during that week. Combined, the nine actors published 320
newspaper articles and issued 16 press releases and statements that
week. The four actors that did not converge that week were the oil and
industry support companies. For most social and political actors week 23
was the second or third most active week of their discursive action.
Most actors that week focused on the technical aspects of the disaster
and the increasing scale of environmental harms to the Gulf's
coastal ecology and wildlife. This is exemplified in the following
excerpt from an article published by the New York Times that notes:
A cap placed over a ruptured well spewing oil into the Gulf of
Mexico is capturing about 10,000 barrels a day, indicating engineers are
making some progress in stanching the flow ... [but] even if the
ultimate strategy--two relief wells--finally succeed in plugging the
leak one mile below the surface of the gulf, it would take "well
into the fall" to clean up the beaches and marshes sullied by the
oil and to address other environmental harm. (Krauss 2010)
Such reaction was common across newspapers, as well as the ENGOs
and the White House. By contrast, the week of the Deepwater Horizon
explosion received the least convergence in terms of top weeks of
engagement. During week 16, Transocean was the only actor to have a top
week of engagement. In fact, it was Transocean's number one week of
discursive action on the spill. During that week most engagement was
speculative, which can be seen in a press release issued by Transocean:
The combined response team was not able to stem the flow of
hydrocarbons prior to the rig sinking, and we are working closely with
BP Exploration & Production, Inc. and the U.S. Coast Guard to
determine the impact from the sinking of the rig and the plans going
forward. The U.S. Coast Guard has plans in place to mitigate any
environmental impact from this situation. (Transocean 2010)
Surprisingly, the events during this week did not generate enough
action by the newspapers, ENGOs, or the White House to be considered one
of their top weeks of discursive action. In total, Transocean issued
four press releases that week focusing on remotely activating the
blowout preventer and stopping the leakage of oil into the Gulf. This is
a far cry from the reaction and convergence generated in week 23.
As a whole, Table 2 illustrates what most agenda-setting and social
movement scholars would expect. Convergence of social and political
actors during the peak moments of discursive action largely occurs in
clusters of feedback-loops where actors respond to one another. For
newspapers, ENGOs and the White House this largely occurred during the
oil disaster and capping-the-well phases. The only exceptions are the
oil and industry support companies that were more active in the
normalizing phase and conspicuously silent during the peak of the
disaster. Much of their discursive action was geared to reassuring the
public that the industry learned from the disaster and to project a
positive image of offshore oil production. ExxonMobil's Lloyd
Guillory demonstrates this in a press release during this phase by
noting the following:
We are working quickly and effectively in an unprecedented effort
to improve incident preparedness. Our progress since we announced the
system demonstrates the commitment of our companies to make equipment
immediately available for incident response. (ExxonMobil 2010)
Not surprisingly, it appears that the oil and industry support
companies focused on preserving their industry rather than the
environment.
Next, in Table 3, we consider whether or not convergence of social
and political actors is tied to the potential of environmental
events' causal narrative simplicity and visuality. Table 3 shows
that environmental events during the top week of convergence, week 23,
scored 3 out of 5 on both the simplicity and visuality scales. During
that week, the potential problems associated with environmental harms
were clear, the culprits were identifiable, and with oil washing up on
beaches there was no technical knowledge needed to understand what the
problem was. Sierra Club used powerful examples of how the oil spill had
affected the gulfs ecology and demanded that BP be held fully
responsible for the response efforts and the ecological recovery of the
region. This can be seen in a press release issued by Sierra Club two
weeks after the blowout, which argued the following:
We are already watching wildlife like sea turtles and birds washing
up on beaches and we can expect things to get much worse. Recovery and
rescue of marine life and habitat will likely take decades. (Sierra Club
2010)
As the language evoked illustrates, there were simple stories but
there was also much potential for visuals of the environmental damage.
By contrast, during the week of the initial accident, week 16, there was
little convergence, and ambiguity surrounded the events and
environmental harms. All of the parties involved were grappling with
understanding what had happened. That week the potential to offer a
simple causal narrative was low, with a score of only 1 out of 5 on the
simplicity scale. Yet, despite the ambiguity surrounding the initial
accident, there was no shortage of potentially striking images. In fact,
that week received the highest score, 5 out of 5, on the visuality
scale. The problem on the rig was clearly depicted by vivid images of
the inferno. With the rig crippled by the blaze, there was a clear
victim and signs of physical destruction and potential environmental
harm. The data in Table 3 appear to offer some support for the
importance of the potential simplicity of an environmental event's
causal narrative; however, the potential of its visuality is less
clear-cut.
To examine this further, in Table 4 we look at correlations among
convergence and the potential for simplicity and visuality as well as
week and phase. When this is done, we see that simplicity and visuality
are positively correlated with convergence, though visuality has a
greater correlation than simplicity. However, neither set of relations
is statistically significant, countering our expectations. When
convergence is correlated with week and phase we see that it has a
negative and statistically significant relationship--showing that timing
and response to other social and political actors seem to matter more
than the properties of an environmental harm. It also means that social
and political actors were more likely to act discursively in the earlier
weeks and phases of the disaster.
To examine the relationship between convergence and phase further,
we also examined the average levels of convergence, simplicity, and
visuality across phases. To test statistical significance we use t-tests
of differences of means for each factor in a given phase compared
against means in phase four as the reference group. When this is done we
see that the average level of convergence decreases over time. It is
highest in the oil disaster phase (2) and lowest in the preaccident and
normalizing phases (1 and 4). The same is seen with visuality. The
differences of means across phases for both are statistically
significant. The average level of simplicity across phases is more
balanced and is not significant. The correlations and differences of
means show that, as the disaster moved from environmental harms in the
earlier phases and weeks to economic problems in the normalizing period,
convergence decreased. It also shows that much of the engagement was
from social and political actors responding to one another.
In fact, much of the discursive engagement of the spill after the
well was capped was not about its environmental harms, but rather its
social and economic consequences. This can be seen in White House Press
Secretary Robert Gibbs's response to a reporter's question
pertaining to the size of BP's escrow account:
What's important to the President as it relates to the claims
process is that they're handled fairly, promptly, and that BP has
enough money to make these folks whole who have been hurt so much by the
spill. (White House 2010)
The focus was on the legal and economic aspects of the spill,
barely recognizing its environmental impact.
CONCLUSION
The explosions on the Deepwater Horizon set in motion a series of
environmental events that captured the attention of newspapers, ENGOs,
oil and industry support companies, and government for much of 2010.
Even so, just a year later, BP's profits increased 16 percent
(Associated Press 2011) and 69 percent of Americans favor increased
offshore drilling, the highest rate since the summer of 2008 (Walsh
2011). In this paper we treated the environmental events that followed
the explosion as actants, to see how they shaped the social and
political convergence to the oil spill. We examined the role of
temporality and analyzed if convergence around the oil spill's
environmental events were dependent on their potential simplicity of
causal narrative and their visuality.
Tabular and graphical analysis suggests that social and political
actors responded to one another in feedback loops when engaging the
environmental harms of the BP oil spill. The same analysis also shows
that potential simplicity of causal narratives and visuality of
environmental events play a partial role in when social and political
actors engage environmental harms. Newspapers, ENGOs, and the White
House all had the most discursive action relating to the spill during
times when the dangers of the spill were most pressing. However, that
period was also when causal simplicity of environmental harms was most
ambiguous. It was only as the oil spill grew larger and more reflection
was offered that potential simplicity increased. At that point the oil
and industry support companies became more active. At that time the
spill moved from an environmental disaster to an economic hardship.
Newspapers, ENGOs, and the White House also converged when the
environmental dangers of the oil spill had the most potential to be
portrayed visually. The oil and industry support companies during this
period were conspicuously silent. As the potential visuality of
environmental harms decreased after the capping of the Macondo well, the
oil and industry support companies had more discursive action. Save for
the local newspaper, other social and political actors were more
sporadic in their engagement of the environmental harms. When these
trends were tested statistically, however, only temporal factors
relating to phase of the oil spill or week of engagement were
statistically significant with convergence. The potential for causal
narrative simplicity and visuality were not statistically significant in
their correlation with convergence of discursive action. Convergence
appears to have less to do with environmental events' properties
than with social and political actors. The BP oil spill moved from being
framed as an environmental disaster to economic devastation of
communities.
Overall our research offers some insight into how social and
political actors respond to environmental harms and why environmental
events, despite posing substantial threats to the earth's ecology
and human well-being, are largely sporadically engaged by newspapers,
ENGOs, businesses that cause them, and politicians. At the end of the
day, treating environmental events as actants shows that most social and
political actors do not respond to the properties of environmental harms
but, instead, to other social and political factors. Until this changes,
the environment will silently suffer.
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ANDREAS HOFFBAUER
University of Toronto
HOWARD RAMOS
Dalhousie University
We would like to thank Paul F. Armstrong, Jim Conley, Mark C.J.
Stoddart, and Yoko Yoshida for advice and feedback on earlier drafts of
this paper. We are also greatly indebted to the anonymous reviewers and
the current and previous editors of the CRS for their suggestions on
tightening the focus of the paper. The research was funded by the Social
Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Howard Ramos, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology,
Dalhousie University, 6135 University Ave., Rm. 1128 Marion McCain Arts
and Social Sciences Bldg., Halifax, Nova Scotia, B3H 4R2 Canada. E-mail:
[email protected]
(1.) The BP oil spill is also known as "the BP oil
disaster," "the Gulf of Mexico oil spill," and the
"Macondo blowout," the latter referring to the oil field that
the platform was tapping into. By far, the most common reference to the
event is "BP oil spill." A hard quote Google search conducted
on May 5, 2011 found that it returned 13,300,000 results, compared to
6,560,000, 3,170,000, and 25,900 results for the other terms,
respectively. For this reason, this is how we refer to the overall
events related to the Deepwater Horizon explosion and ensuing oil spill.
The resulting analysis would likely have been different had other
keywords been used, such as those mentioned above; however, to
illustrate the most common trends we focus on "BP" because it
yielded the most hits and because we wanted to focus on the BP oil spill
and not all oil spills. We also conducted analysis for the keyword
"Oil Spill" for the same time frame and find similar overall
patterns. Results can be made available upon request.
(2.) The New York Times Oil Tracker Web page:
(http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/01/us/
20100501-oil-spill-tracker.html), the CNN Web page:
(http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/05/03/timeline. gulf.spill/index.html).
(3.) An Appendix detailing the events that were coded in the top 34
weeks of engagement is available at
http://howardramos.ca/bposp%20appendix.htm. If you cannot access the
site, please contact the second author.
Table 1
Simplicity and Visuality Operationalization
Concepts Questions Range Focus
Simplicity (1) Does the event have Yes/No Source of causality
an identifiable
problem?
(2) Does the event have Yes/No Actor(s) responsible
an identifiable
culprit?
(3) Does the event have Yes/No Proposed plan of
an identifiable action
solution?
(4) Can the problem Yes/No Likelihood of average
associated with the audience's ability to
event be conveyed in understand
a comprehensible way problem *
without using
technical or advanced
concepts and ideas?
(5) Can solutions to Yes/No Likelihood of average
the problem audience's ability to
associated with the understand
event or issue strategies for
be communicated to addressing the
average people problem *
without technical or
expert knowledge?
Visuality (1) Can the focus of Yes/No Photographic
the event be visually potential
captured by a
picture?
(2) Can a picture of a Yes/No Visibility of victim(s)
clear victim be taken
during the event?
3) Would pictures of Yes/No Likelihood of average
the event fit an audience's ability to
"average person's" understand image
experiential
knowledge?
(4) Would pictures of Yes/No Visibility of
the event offer clear destruction *
evidence of physical
destruction?
(5) Would a picture of Yes/No Context of image
the event be action
orientated?
Average audience's ability to understand is operationalized as
something that fits within the broader popular consciousness of North
American and Western European publics.
Table 2
Top Weeks of Engagement by Newspapers, ENGOs, Oil and Industry
Companies, and the White House
Newspaper publications
Conv. New Wall Globe
Conver- Times- York &
gence Picayune Times Journal Mail Guardian
9 2 3 2 2 2
8 3 1 1 1 1
8 5 4 3 4 4
6 1 5
6 4 2 4 3
4
4 5 3
4
3 5
3
3
3 5
3
3
3
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
ENGOs Oil and Industry Support
Conv. Companies
Conver- Sierra
gence Club Greenpeace BP Transocean Halliburton
9 3 4 4
8 3 3
8 3 3
6 2 4 2
6 1
4 3 4 5
4 2
4 5 1 2
3 1
3 3 2
3 3 2
3 5
3 5 2
3 3 3
3 2 1 1
2 2
2 2
2 5 3
2 5 4
2 5
2 5
2 5 1
1
1 1
1 1
1
1
1
1
1 2
1 3
1 5
1 5
1 5
Oil and Industry
Conv. Support Companies Govt. Timing
Conver- White
gence Shell ExxonMobil House Week Phase
9 3 23 2
8 1 24 2
8 3 25 3
6 3 21 2
6 3 22 2
4 2 30 3
4 2 28 3
4 3 31 3
3 2 18 2
3 2 17 2
3 3 19 2
3 2 29 3
3 5 35 4
3 5 39 4
3 1 38 4
2 2 20 2
2 2 26 3
2 47 4
2 34 4
2 5 40 4
2 5 41 4
2 43 4
1 5 7 1
1 13 2
1 16 3
1 5 27 3
1 3 32 4
1 2 33 4
1 2 36 4
1 37 4
1 42 4
1 45 4
1 48 4
1 50 4
Convergence refers to the number of actors engaging in discursive
action during a given week. Numbers for the individual actors indicate
top five weeks of engagement, where 1 represents the week with the
most discursive action for a given actor.
Table 3
Simplicity and Visuality Scores by Convergence
Convergence Simplicity Visuality Week Phase
9 3 3 23 2
8 2 2 24 2
8 3 3 25 3
6 3 3 21 2
6 3 3 22 2
4 3 0 28 3
4 3 0 30 3
4 3 3 31 3
3 3 3 17 2
3 3 4 18 2
3 3 3 19 2
3 3 0 29 3
3 3 3 35 4
3 1 0 38 4
3 2 0 39 4
2 3 4 20 2
2 1 4 26 3
2 4 4 34 4
2 2 2 40 4
2 2 0 41 4
2 3 0 43 4
2 3 4 47 4
1 0 0 7 1
1 0 0 13 1
1 1 5 16 2
1 3 4 27 3
1 3 0 32 3
1 3 0 33 4
1 2 0 36 4
1 5 3 37 4
1 5 0 42 4
1 2 0 45 4
1 1 0 48 4
1 3 0 50 4
Convergence refers to the number of actors engaging in discursive
action during a given week. Simplicity and complexity refer to scales
where 5 means the simplest and/or most visual.
Table 4
Correlations and t-Tests of Means for Convergence, Simplicity,
Visuality, Week, and Phase
Correlations Convergence Simplicity Visuality
Convergence --
Simplicity .14 --
Visuality .25 .22 --
Week -.30 * .27 -.38 **
Phase -.34 ** .32 * -.30 *
t-Tests of means
Phase 1 1 0 ** 0
Phase 2 .56 *** .67 .33 ***
Phase 3 .38 *** .75 .75
Phase 4 (Ref.) .73 .73 .07
Correlations Week Phase
Convergence
Simplicity
Visuality
Week --
Phase .93 *** --
t-Tests of means
Phase 1
Phase 2
Phase 3
Phase 4 (Ref.)
* p < .10; ** p < .05; *** p < .01.
