‘A kind of sensory, strange thing to experience’: Speaking environmental disaster in the Sea Empress Project archive
Cooper, T
Date: 7 December 2021
Journal
Environment and History
Publisher
White Horse Press
Publisher DOI
Abstract
This article explores embodied encounters with the Sea Empress oil spill of 1996 and
their representation in oral narratives. Through a close reading of the personal
testimonies collected in the Sea Empress Project archive, I examine the relationship
between intense sensory experiences of environmental change and everyday
interpretations ...
This article explores embodied encounters with the Sea Empress oil spill of 1996 and
their representation in oral narratives. Through a close reading of the personal
testimonies collected in the Sea Empress Project archive, I examine the relationship
between intense sensory experiences of environmental change and everyday
interpretations of the disaster and its legacy. The article first outlines the ways in which
this collection of voices reveals sensory memories, embodied affects, and narrative
choices, to be deeply entwined in oral representations of the spill, disclosing a ‘sensory
event’ that created a powerful awareness of both environmental surroundings and their
relationship to everyday social processes. Then, reading these narratives against-thegrain, I argue that narrators’ accounts tell a paradoxical story of a disaster that most now
wish to forget, and reveal an ambivalent legacy of environmental change this is
similarly consigned to the past. Finally, I relate this social forgetting of the Sea Empress
to the wider history of environmental consciousness in modern Britain.
History
Collections of Former Colleges
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