More than 30 years after the Exxon Valdez supertanker hit a reef and released 10 million gallons of petroleum into the Alaskan coastal ecosystem, residents still find congealed oil beneath rocks. At the time, Exxon’s media campaign argued that nature would recuperate from the damage on its own. This presentation contextualizes Exxon’s media production after the 1989 spill by analyzing how their campaign’s aesthetics were strategically designed to misinform audiences about how disrupted environments worked. Through coordinated print advertising and TV broadcasting, Exxon circulated tourism commercials animating ecological recovery in the Prince William Sound while announcing a new commodity: “reduced emissions” gasoline that is “fine-tuned for climates as well as engines.” Exxon’s role, amongst others, in propagating climate denial is well understood by historians. In a moment when large majorities believe global warming is happening, historical inquiry must move beyond denial and reconstruct how climate knowledge has also been offered on agnotological and counterproductive terms. Images have affirmatively described global heating in ways that capitalize on the semiotic looseness between visual representations and the environmental functions they signify, presenting climate knowledge that is amenable to capitalist accumulation. The alleged resilience of the Alaskan coast became a resource for Exxon; it enabled their media campaign to aestheticize and disseminate a new social calculus by figuring the economic value of a changing climate.
Thomas Patrick Pringle is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. With Gertrud Koch and Bernard Stiegler, he is the co-author of Machine (Meson and University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Pringle’s articles appear in venues like New Media and Society, Media N, Environmental Communication, and NECSUS. He serves on the editorial boards of Film History: An International Journal and Journal of Environmental Media.