Over the past few weeks, we have discussed story-telling as activism. I talked about Obama’s perspective on great leadership, we watched Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk about the importance of diverse stories, and we read Oil on Water by Helon Habila. In the novel, Habila talks of villages in the Delta that fall victim to oil colonization – that is, when oil corporations invade a village and effect change in the community. Following something like this, the story that is so often told is one of wealth and prosperity. We hear that the villages see economic booms and that without the oil companies, they would have lived in poverty forever. We even hear stories of how initially happy the villagers become.

However, we have to remember Adichie’s warning of a single story and ask ourselves, “what other stories need to be told here?” Habila tactfully delineates the slow but sure decline of a community after oil invasion. At one point, the doctor reveals that the oil causes levels of contamination never-before-seen. The pollution levels disease the humans and the ecosystem, resulting in worse conditions overall. We also often hear the story of how oil invasions provide jobs to blue-collar workers, so people make more money and generally are happier. However, Habila tells of the ways that the oil companies exploit workers, by forcing them to believe certain truths and shielding them from the real world. Using the doctor as an example again, Habila tells of how the oil companies pay the doctor to hide the truth from the real world – what kind of work is that?

In class, we questioned why this book does not ever explicitly mention climate change – I think this was a deliberate way to get us to identify what makes this book some form of activism. Like I spoke about in my blog post about our 44th president, not every act  of leadership and social change has to be concrete – sometimes, inspiring and informing others does the trick. Habila tells us a tale that most of us did not know before – one of struggle and pain due to oil. He paints a gruesome picture to get us to cringe and weep about the current state of affairs. By doing so, he motivates a previously ignorant population to act.

I learned through this book that “environmental activism” — at least as we talk about it in this class — is not solely about saving the environment. After reading Habila’s novel, I know that environmental activism means rectifying the environmental wrongs that corporations and governments create. This means not only saving the environment itself, but also the people that the pollution hurts the most. These are the people that Habila talks about so much, and the people that we need to keep in the back of our minds when thinking about environmental activism.