Kalama Methanol Refinery Case Study

Jasmine’s comments about the OEC at the Stop Fracked Gas PDX meeting raised many questions for me about the organization, and I decided to pursue the question of their participation in the Kalama Methanol Refinery issue with the OEC itself. After spending several minutes on hold after asking for someone who could talk with me about the Stop Fracked Gas PDX coalition and the Refinery in particular, the OEC operator connected me to Jana Gastellum, the climate program director at the council, who was better equipped to answer my questions than her. After asking a few cursory questions about the issue, Jana deflected the question yet again to a list of Riverkeeper, 350PDX, and Sierra Club activists who were more versed on the issue. I changed

I hope that over the course of my analysis, I have shown that in the case of environmental activism in the Pacific Northwest, that could not be further from the truth. The process of choosing what expertise a group wants to be able to transport and the infrastructure that is required to create that expertise in the first place limits how it can travel, specifically, that it cannot be transported outside of these thematically cohesive spheres without significant compromises and discomfort, or in the case of Riverkeeper—whose natural expertise is founded on and therefore constrained by the Columbia—who were forced to destroy the traditional delineation between expert and lay person. For the Oregon Environmental Council, these sacrifices are too significant a burden to bear, and they instead are focusing on work within the framework of their expertise. This not to reprimand the OEC for how they stay within their sphere of expertise, or to commend Riverkeeper for their efforts to work outside of it, but to illuminate the complexities inherent in the creation of frontiers, expertise, abstraction, and environmental