Drills & Spills

The phrase of the last US president that is least missed today – and there are many candidates – may be the one celebrating ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Keith Fisher will probably not forgive me for saying that his new book brings to mind a similarly oxymoronic statement about oil. In his survey of every appearance of the stuff in world history and literature from the time of the Babylonians to the early 20th century – which reads like a grand Google Books search – we find ‘beautiful oil’ turning up everywhere, including in the writings of Herodotus and the poetry of Ovid. In pre-Columbian California, Native Americans used it to rainproof their humble houses; on Barbados, indigenous islanders relied on it as an ointment for sore limbs; Mexico’s Olmec peoples painted it onto religious statuary for decorative purposes. In pre-Islamic Persia, it may have been the source of a whole religion revolving around temples of perpetual fire, produced by steams of oil and gas seeping up from the ground. True, oil also makes plenty of appearances in this book as a weapon of war: the Byzantines employed it as part of a particularly lethal, ship-mounted flame-thrower (though lobbing burning oil-based projectiles at your enemies dates as far back as the Peloponnesian War). But it seems striking nonetheless that this substance – one associated with all that is ‘artificial’ in the modern industrial age – has always been a part of our extraordinary natural world.