Thomas R. McGuire

Indian Water in the New West

Brings together the views of engineers, lawyers, ecologists, economists, professional mediators, federal officials, an anthropologist, and a Native American tribal leader--all either students of these processes or protagonists in them--to discuss how the legitimate claims of both Indians and non-Indians to scarce water in the West are being settled.

Work and Change in the Gulf of Mexico Offshore Petroleum Industry

The relationship between the offshore oil and gas industry and southern Louisiana has been one of ongoing, mutual adaptation. The industry has long been cyclical, responding to price changes, corporate decisions, and federal and state policies. Today, however, the industry offers little guarantee of employment, difficult terms of advancement, and, in general, an uncertain future. Many of the young men and women of the communities of southern Louisiana are looking elsewhere for work. As the local labor sources diminish, companies seek out new labor supplies, including workers from outside the region and from other parts of the world. This paper discusses some of the processes that corroded the unique relationship between the region, its people, and this industry.

Ethnography on Trial

“[Ethnography] is the most appropriate research approach for increasing understanding of the range of sociocultural effects of the multifaceted and evolving Deepwater Horizon disaster on the people and communities of coastal Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama.” Diane Austin Rebuttal to BP Round 2 Reports, September 26, 2014 It is fitting that this article is being published in April. On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster began with the blowout of the Macondo well in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, an event that killed 11 men, physically injured 17 more and spewed millions of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf just over 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. On Monday, April 4, 2016, almost six years later, Federal Judge Carl Barbier issued his final order approving an estimated

Oil and Gas In South Louisiana

20 billion settlement with BP addressing the local, state and federal claims arising from federal Clean Water Act (CWA) violations, Natural Resource Damage Assessments and economic and other losses related to the disaster. Between those two dates, in

A political ecology of fisheries

The oil and gas industry has developed in south Louisiana over the last hundred years, first in the salt domes and coastal marshes, then out onto the Outer Continental Shelf, and most recently in the deep and ultradeep waters off the shelf. Communities such as New Iberia and Morgan City have grown with the cyclical industry, experiencing prosperous upturns and difficult downturns. Many of the forces these communities have to contend with are outside their control, including the effects of globalization and corporate restructuring common to advanced capitalism. This paper provides an overview of communities and capitalism in south Louisiana.

History and Evolution of the Offshore Oil and Gas Industry in Southern Louisiana: Worker Perspectives

One of the central lessons harshly underscored by the collapse of northern cod stocks is that the relation between catch per unit of effort and stock abundance is problematic. It is confounded by local knowledge. But social scientists, with disciplinary training in the collection and interpretation of local knowledge, have made little contribution to this, and other problems in fisheries management. This commentary briefly reviews several contested issues in maritime social science: the skipper effect, fleet dynamics, folk management, scientific management, and adaptations to chaotic systems. It suggests that the debates, and much of the fine-grained empirical work underlying them, evolved in the context of largely academic contests over paradigms such as cultural ecology, political economy, and recently, political ecology.

Processes of adaptation to climate variability: a case study from the US Southwest

The history of the offshore oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico is one of both progressive and punctuated development. New technologies, forms of work organization, and regulatory regimes have all combined over the past seventy years to influence the evolution of this industry. This paper reports early results of a multiyear, multi-team effort to document this history and its impacts on southern Louisiana. It focuses on the work of one team, applied anthropologists from the University of Arizona, to capture the history from the perspectives of the workers and local entrepreneurs who made this industry happen.Copyright