Petroturfing
Refining Canadian Oil through Social Media
Petroturfing presents an incisive look into how Canada’s pro-oil movement has leveraged social media to rebrand the extractive economy as a positive force. Revealing the deep divide between Canada’s environmentally progressive reputation and the economic interests of government and private companies operating within its borders, Jordan B. Kinder highlights the limitations of social media networks in the work of promoting environmental justice.
Through the enormous explanatory power of ‘petroturfing,’ Jordan B. Kinder names and theorizes the hybrid engines of Canadian petroculture—resource extraction, settler colonialism, environmental racism, and social media—and their ill effects at planetary scale. Brilliantly revealing pro-oil’s concerted hypocrisies and social media strategies to misinform the public and grease the elbows of ‘fossil fascist creep,’ this is a profound and necessary book.
Janet Walker, coeditor of Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment and coeditor-in-chief of Media+Environment
Petroturfing presents an incisive look into how Canada’s pro-oil movement has leveraged social media to rebrand the extractive economy as a positive force. Adapting its title from the concept of astroturfing, which refers to the practice of disguising political and corporate media campaigns as grassroots movements, the book exposes the consequences of this mutually informed relationship between social media and environmental politics.
Since the early 2010s, an increasingly influential network of pro-oil groups, organizations, and campaigns has harnessed social media strategies originally developed by independent environmental organizations in order to undermine resistance to the fossil fuel industry. Situating these actions within the broader oil culture wars that have developed as an outgrowth of contemporary right-wing media, Petroturfing details how this coalition of groups is working to reform the public view of oil extraction as something socially, economically, and ecologically beneficial.
By uncovering these concerted efforts to influence the “energy consciousness,” Jordan B. Kinder reveals the deep divide between Canada’s environmentally progressive reputation and the economic interests of its layers of government and private companies operating within its borders. Drawing attention to the structures underlying online political expression, Petroturfing highlights the limitations of social media networks in the work of promoting environmental justice and contributing to a more equitable future.
Through the enormous explanatory power of ‘petroturfing,’ Jordan B. Kinder names and theorizes the hybrid engines of Canadian petroculture—resource extraction, settler colonialism, environmental racism, and social media—and their ill effects at planetary scale. Brilliantly revealing pro-oil’s concerted hypocrisies and social media strategies to misinform the public and grease the elbows of ‘fossil fascist creep,’ this is a profound and necessary book.
Janet Walker, coeditor of Sustainable Media: Critical Approaches to Media and Environment and coeditor-in-chief of Media+Environment
Jordan B. Kinder’s Petroturfing offers great insight into an underdeveloped aspect of the cultural study of energy, the ‘oil culture wars’ sponsored in social media by Canada’s (and the United States’) alt-right that undermine just transitions to renewable energy and economic dignity.
Stephanie LeMenager, author of Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century
Contents
