Nice. There's something interesting going on concerning the (non-)fungibility of landscape and climate futures around marshes. I'm writing this partly just to help me think it through.
I find it helpful to frame most landscape change in a geologic context, so I'll start there. Fossil fuels are created when organic material gets buried and forced into the underground pressure-cooker. This process of organic material burial works best under anoxic conditions (i.e. not in the air but underwater) and when the burial happens rapidly, giving the material not enough time to decay heavily, which would mean shedding its carbon to its surroundings. Tidal marshlands are primed for this process, given that they combine high net primary productivity (i.e. plant growth), aquatic conditions, and rapid import of mud. If you add geologic-scale action that push marshes under the earth—subsidence, subduction, or sea level rise—you have a great recipe for the creation of fossil fuels.
So, why is there oil where there is oil in the world? It's wherever this combination of factors aligns, where shallow seas sloshed with sediment and lots of plant and plankton life got buried. For North America, the Western Interior Seaway followed by sea levels dropping, orogeny, and subsidence gave us most of our oil. By these processes, marshlands and fossil fuels become intimately related. This is curious because marshes (or other wetlands in general) are also central to many carbon sequestration strategies due to their outsize capabilities at sequestering and storing atmospheric carbon. Primary production and carbon burial capabilities—the same things that produce fossil fuels (with time and pressure)—prioritize wetlands to rapidly pull atmospheric carbon.
In short: marshes are skilled, on geologic time, at creating fossil fuels. Marshes are skilled, on a day-to-day scale, at burying atmospheric carbon back into the earth. When we drill, we're reaching back into deep time for oil that meets some present-day market demand, and the emissions therein may be seen as robbing from the future. The timescales become intertwined, with valuation of the past and present colliding in the present-day.
At this point, I feel the need to put myself in a specific place, where things actually matter. What do things look like as this marshy (extracted) value manifests?
There are options. I could explore the inland landscape of fracking and oil sands, or other material histories of "unconventional petroleum deposits." But I don't know about these technologies or their landscapes or people. I could dive into the petrochemical "cancer alley," one of the United States' most concentrated regions of oil refining, built out of the riverine and tidal marshes which have collected carbons for centuries in the lower Mississippi. This, too, is a place I know less about though. I would ask RC Clarke instead. What I can speak to are the oil platforms visible from the surf in Orange County, and my adventures in the small marshy margins of California. These marshes are far from the interior seaway and sediment conveyer belt that is the Mississippi river; they are built on a narrow & steep subducting tectonic plate boundary between the mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
Before I had ever walked around California marshes, I had personally encountered some of their oil: my first apartment in Los Angeles was within a few blocks from some pumpjacks in the LA cityscape. If you look at this map, the role of geology in these oil wells across Los Angeles becomes immediately clear: the oil fields are in coherent structures along the major tectonic axis of the region. Few things scream "Municipal Geology" (what I would like to name my future consulting firm...) more than this, "the most urbanized oil field in the nation," where the long processes of marsh systems and fossil fuels ram up against the urgency of the city and its industries.
Now economics set in. Oil reserves are valuable. Green spaces such as marshlands are valuable. But, in an off-the-cuff way, they are ontologically different value sets. This is the whole reason ecological economics exists as a field, and why we often gravitate towards instrumentalizing these landscapes to interplay with typical forms of capital. But where the value systems run into each other is still messy: what happens when the marshes get paved over to install new oil pumps? What happens when an oil field transforms back into marshland?
I need to credit my friend Caylee with introducing this bizarre "oil-wetlands land swap" in Southern California to me. (She is thinking more deeply about the interrelationships between this stuff and real estate development / corporate bankruptcy, too.) Synergy Oil is looking to do new drilling in some wetlands (Puvungna / Los Cerritos), and will "swap" this territory for a larger (in acres) site of historic degredation and drilling. The larger site would undergo a marsh restoration process. Whether or not this is an equivalent trade, even only on financial grounds, is complicated, rooted in the modeled oil reserve outputs, murky assessments of financial evaluations of social and environmental services, and timelines of extraction and restoration. I'm sure Synergy Oil—who will likely not have to face much of the negative externality costs—has done the math to see if it's a worthwhile investment. But that doesn't mean the activists fighting the swap think it's a good idea, on the grounds of totally different priorities of value.
One of my favorite parts of my math education was sitting with and exploring different flavors of equivalence. When you use an equals sign (=) in typical context, it's only for numbers. Five here is five there, playing into the abstraction of the concept of "five"—the sign denotes that the things on either side represent the same mathematical object. But equivalence can be tighter and looser, depending on what you need. Are 10 acres of historic marsh equivalent to 10 acres of restored marsh? (No, says I, but it's an equivalence relationship that happens a lot.) But maybe the sites are geographically and geometrically isomorphic, in most ways. Our moral and social values, or how we value different entities, get embedded in the choices we make around what is equivalent to what, and our perceptions of balance. I love the marsh and what to see them protected, but to what end? on what timescale? In exchange for what?
Drilling the marsh, where the past, present, and future of both geologic-time sedimentation processes meet the economic-time mishmash of land use change, lived experiences, and discount rates... I find this all a fascinating case of values getting articulated in the weird little dusty marshlands of Southern California.
Smells like oil, smells like mud,
Lukas
note, some similar dynamics are happening in Northern California, too!
I find it helpful to frame most landscape change in a geologic context, so I'll start there. Fossil fuels are created when organic material gets buried and forced into the underground pressure-cooker. This process of organic material burial works best under anoxic conditions (i.e. not in the air but underwater) and when the burial happens rapidly, giving the material not enough time to decay heavily, which would mean shedding its carbon to its surroundings. Tidal marshlands are primed for this process, given that they combine high net primary productivity (i.e. plant growth), aquatic conditions, and rapid import of mud. If you add geologic-scale action that push marshes under the earth—subsidence, subduction, or sea level rise—you have a great recipe for the creation of fossil fuels.
So, why is there oil where there is oil in the world? It's wherever this combination of factors aligns, where shallow seas sloshed with sediment and lots of plant and plankton life got buried. For North America, the Western Interior Seaway followed by sea levels dropping, orogeny, and subsidence gave us most of our oil. By these processes, marshlands and fossil fuels become intimately related. This is curious because marshes (or other wetlands in general) are also central to many carbon sequestration strategies due to their outsize capabilities at sequestering and storing atmospheric carbon. Primary production and carbon burial capabilities—the same things that produce fossil fuels (with time and pressure)—prioritize wetlands to rapidly pull atmospheric carbon.
In short: marshes are skilled, on geologic time, at creating fossil fuels. Marshes are skilled, on a day-to-day scale, at burying atmospheric carbon back into the earth. When we drill, we're reaching back into deep time for oil that meets some present-day market demand, and the emissions therein may be seen as robbing from the future. The timescales become intertwined, with valuation of the past and present colliding in the present-day.
At this point, I feel the need to put myself in a specific place, where things actually matter. What do things look like as this marshy (extracted) value manifests?
There are options. I could explore the inland landscape of fracking and oil sands, or other material histories of "unconventional petroleum deposits." But I don't know about these technologies or their landscapes or people. I could dive into the petrochemical "cancer alley," one of the United States' most concentrated regions of oil refining, built out of the riverine and tidal marshes which have collected carbons for centuries in the lower Mississippi. This, too, is a place I know less about though. I would ask RC Clarke instead. What I can speak to are the oil platforms visible from the surf in Orange County, and my adventures in the small marshy margins of California. These marshes are far from the interior seaway and sediment conveyer belt that is the Mississippi river; they are built on a narrow & steep subducting tectonic plate boundary between the mountains and the Pacific Ocean.
Before I had ever walked around California marshes, I had personally encountered some of their oil: my first apartment in Los Angeles was within a few blocks from some pumpjacks in the LA cityscape. If you look at this map, the role of geology in these oil wells across Los Angeles becomes immediately clear: the oil fields are in coherent structures along the major tectonic axis of the region. Few things scream "Municipal Geology" (what I would like to name my future consulting firm...) more than this, "the most urbanized oil field in the nation," where the long processes of marsh systems and fossil fuels ram up against the urgency of the city and its industries.
Now economics set in. Oil reserves are valuable. Green spaces such as marshlands are valuable. But, in an off-the-cuff way, they are ontologically different value sets. This is the whole reason ecological economics exists as a field, and why we often gravitate towards instrumentalizing these landscapes to interplay with typical forms of capital. But where the value systems run into each other is still messy: what happens when the marshes get paved over to install new oil pumps? What happens when an oil field transforms back into marshland?
I need to credit my friend Caylee with introducing this bizarre "oil-wetlands land swap" in Southern California to me. (She is thinking more deeply about the interrelationships between this stuff and real estate development / corporate bankruptcy, too.) Synergy Oil is looking to do new drilling in some wetlands (Puvungna / Los Cerritos), and will "swap" this territory for a larger (in acres) site of historic degredation and drilling. The larger site would undergo a marsh restoration process. Whether or not this is an equivalent trade, even only on financial grounds, is complicated, rooted in the modeled oil reserve outputs, murky assessments of financial evaluations of social and environmental services, and timelines of extraction and restoration. I'm sure Synergy Oil—who will likely not have to face much of the negative externality costs—has done the math to see if it's a worthwhile investment. But that doesn't mean the activists fighting the swap think it's a good idea, on the grounds of totally different priorities of value.
One of my favorite parts of my math education was sitting with and exploring different flavors of equivalence. When you use an equals sign (=) in typical context, it's only for numbers. Five here is five there, playing into the abstraction of the concept of "five"—the sign denotes that the things on either side represent the same mathematical object. But equivalence can be tighter and looser, depending on what you need. Are 10 acres of historic marsh equivalent to 10 acres of restored marsh? (No, says I, but it's an equivalence relationship that happens a lot.) But maybe the sites are geographically and geometrically isomorphic, in most ways. Our moral and social values, or how we value different entities, get embedded in the choices we make around what is equivalent to what, and our perceptions of balance. I love the marsh and what to see them protected, but to what end? on what timescale? In exchange for what?
Drilling the marsh, where the past, present, and future of both geologic-time sedimentation processes meet the economic-time mishmash of land use change, lived experiences, and discount rates... I find this all a fascinating case of values getting articulated in the weird little dusty marshlands of Southern California.
Smells like oil, smells like mud,
Lukas
note, some similar dynamics are happening in Northern California, too!