"Negative Ecologies provides a genuinely new historical analysis and nuanced ethnographic portrayal of the empire of oil. Bond captures a fundamental paradox of the taken-for-granted status of environmental management tools—thresholds and impact assessments— and specifically their role as gatekeepers, determining at what levels harm is constituted as safe, acceptable, and without corporate liability. Negative Ecologies is a must-read."
— American Anthropologist
"Negative Ecologies is a prime ethnographic book on toxicity and disasters caused by the fossil fuel industry. Both beautifully and intricately written, the book offers various fundamental case studies of the social and environmental consequences and costs of our exemplary commodity – crude oil."
"Whereas Adorno’s negative dialectics attempted to resuscitate philosophy and ethics after the Holocaust, Bond’s negative ecologies similarly try to rethink ecology in the ongoing catastrophe of the Anthropocene. . . . The range and breadth of detail from the multisite ethnographic fieldwork is a real strength, with a range of heartbreaking quotes from residents, Indigenous activists, and calculating corporate executives illustrating the human and ecological devastation that surrounds the oil industry."
— Cultural Politics
"Although ethnographic, the book is an interdisciplinary or perhaps 'adisciplinary' piece of critical research. It embraces other disciplines' knowledge production and epistemologies, empowering us to do it and perhaps reminding us that anthropologists have always been doing that.”
"This riveting history of the present explores petrochemical capitalism's ongoing assault on planetary conditions. Showing how environmental thresholds and assessments have been organized not as protections against but as authorizations for pollution, this book unpacks with passion and precision the amplifying force of industrial toxicity. An essential book for our times."—Joseph Masco, author of The Future of Fallout, and Other Episodes in Radioactive World-Making
"Negative Ecologies is a bold and brilliant exemplar of what a critical adisciplinary scholarship needs today. One wants to underline every sentence, to asterisk every page. I can think of no ethnographic work, no social inquiry that forecasts with such power and purpose the subversive work demanded of those with the resources to confront and document how the embrace of fossil fuels is decimating the US and the world."—Ann Laura Stoler, Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies, The New School for Social Research
"David Bond has a different sort of oil story to tell. Wide-ranging and multifaceted, Negative Ecologies inventories the enormity of oil's catastrophic impact on planetary life. Bond shows how oil spills and petro-disasters are generative, the means by which the environment is known, governed, and normalized through toxicity thresholds and environmental impact assessments that narrow what constitutes evidence, interpretation, and regulation. Bond brilliantly reveals how oil's negative ecologies produce new landscapes of vulnerability, new mappings of the mediums of harm, and new responsibilities."—Michael Watts, Professor Emeritus of Geography, University of California, Berkeley
"This book challenges us to think in new, powerful ways about the origins of the environment as a category of knowledge, the production of knowledge, and the predicament of human dependence on fossil fuels."—Kathryn Morse, author of The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush
"Read this! It calls us back to fundamental questions about how the environment has been conceptualized, pointing to the risks of thinking in established terms. Thinking with Bond in terms of negative ecologies is a powerful alternative."—Kim Fortun, Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
