Macondo: environmental apocalypse and corporate hubris

Five months after the explosion of British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon rig, Admiral Thad Allen announced that the leaking Macondo well is finally dead.

The disaster killed eleven workers on the rig and spewed an estimated 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico throughout the summer.

Yet from what I can glean from articles about the single largest spill ever to occur in U.S.-controlled waters, few North Americans know Sept. 19 actually marked Macondo’s second death.     

Following updates on the oil spill, I repeatedly saw Macondo well mentioned without the slightest acknowledgement of the name’s origins.

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez famously named his fictionalized hometown Macondo.

It most prominently serves as the setting for his novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

The blogosphere has produced only a handful of posts identifying BP’s perplexing use of a major literary icon.  

Perhaps the popular press once briefly mentioned the borrowing, but the irony has not received close to the attention it deserves.

Though even cosmopolitan audiences do not embrace Latin American fiction as readily as celebrated writers from literary metropolises, this failure to call attention to a corporation’s appropriation of a major work of the 20th century’s cultural repertoire should alert us to a disturbing decline in standards.

Cultural capital has lost much of its buying power. In a more reflective world, we might have taken more time to examine BP’s hubris.

But our society no longer believes that reading long works of fiction can teach us crucial lessons about the world we live in.

We might have been a nation more attentive to implementing adequate environmental protections for offshore drilling if our citizenry and media had taken a proverbial page from Marquez’s novel. This summer’s oil spill unfolded with a remarkable similarity to the plot of “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”

The village of Macondo is founded as a magically utopian community. Impenetrable swamps isolate it from the rest of the world.

Through six generations, Macondo provides a fictional landscape for Garcia Marquez to call readers’ attention to a century of struggles: first the civil war between the Conservatives and Liberals and later the contemptible Banana Company’s greedy appropriation of natural resources and its inhumane disregard for the lives of the Macondinos.

The Gulf of Mexico was once a pristine ecosystem.

Yet after a century of surrendering rigorous ecological standards in the interest of private financial gain, I cannot help but wonder how our use of the ecosystem does not mirror Macondo’s fictional use of its resources.

When we allow hasty drilling and substandard engineering, which risks polluting an ecosystem with millions of barrels of oil, we respect neither future generations’ access to sustainable resources nor the integrity of the natural world.

Regardless of the depths to which BP’s stewardship of natural resources had sunk, it’s worth considering the possibility that the corporation’s naming of its well had little to do with Marquez’s novel.

If the general population doesn’t seem to recognize Macondo, could the well’s name not have been a coincidence or a casual oversight?

Hardly. Macondo is not only a name popularized by Garcia
Marquez’s fiction. It is, in fact, a cultural icon unique to it.

Literary critic Seymour Menton traces the possible origins of the elusive name.

Before its popularization in Marquez’s novel, Menton finds only single instance of a banana farm near Marquez’s childhood home sharing the name, as well as a Bantu tribe called “Makonde” and the Bantu-derived word “makondo,” meaning “banana” or “the devil’s food.”  

At a time when President Obama’s pre-spill proposal to open vast expanses of shoreline to drilling might be taken up again, it’s worth remembering the lesson of the ill-fated Macondinos.

After selling out the resources of the earth and allowing the human life to be exterminated in the interest of the Banana Company’s profitability, the novel concludes with an apocalyptic storm that wipes them from the face of
the Earth.

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a radical novel that shows literature can change the world for the better.

Because we read fiction, we, unlike the damned inhabitants of Macondo, can restructure the paradigms that shape our world. We can reclaim the power to prioritize the common good rather than self-interested profit.

On the other hand, if no one in our society talks about books or cares to reflect on a collective vision for the world, then we surrender our most basic responsibilities to the likes of BP, an organization that, short of massacre, has arrogantly proclaimed itself the Macondo Banana Company of the 21st Century.


E-mail:  wallacen@indiana.edu