Gretchen Bakke

This project is a study of the end of the age of oil. As oil dependency declines globally much of the world is grappling with interrelated challenges and changes in economic structures, transportation infrastructures, the shifting natural world, while attempting to imagine and engineer of new realities. What differentiates the Scottish communities of the North Sea where this research will be conducted is that there the effects of the end of oil are both intensified and already pressing, for residents, for climate stressed marine species, and for the fading oil industry. Research will be conducted in the rural communities of the Shetland Islands in their engagements with the sea and with oil and in the former oil boomtown of Aberdeen and its offshore assets. Care is taken to understand the interconnected well-being of sea creatures, offshore infrastructures, oil workers, and regular folks as each contends with changing environments that force movement upon even the most recalcitrant entities. My goal is to understand how this change is happening as a mode of investigating the pragmatics of a life no-longer premised upon oil as both adaptative and proactive responses come to characterize to the end of this long historical epoch.