Oil and water shore up the foundations upon which our global, national and regional societies are built. The increasing scarcity of these essential resources calls for public education, conversation, and reflection. In All-Consuming: Conversations on Oil and Water, the IHC uses the lens of the humanities to bring fresh perspectives to issues relating to the access and control of oil and water resources.
The public programs held across the state through 2008 and 2009 will connect Illinois residents with scholars, writers, artists, scientists, activists and policymakers working on and thinking about oil and water. In addition to these programs, the IHC is pleased to provide this online resource center that will complement the programs and also serve as stand-alone resources for Illinoisans interested in these topics. The resources on this page are organized by the program topic that will be presented during the series. There are additional materials such as a convenient statistics page and a bibliography of printed resources relating to oil and water. If you're looking for water and oil in popular culture, have a look at the "Rainmakers and Oilmen" page. Or if you're interested in the debat es about technologies that we have used to manage oil and water resources, try the page on "No Silver Bullets: Unintended Consequences of Oil and Water Solutions."
The links provided below are all publicly available and include newspaper articles, blog posts and comments, government publications, and the websites of professional organizations. Though a wide range of opinions and publications was sought for these pages, there are many other sites and publications available on the web. A search for "oil scarcity" in Google, for instance, turns up over 17,000 pages. So feel free to use these resources as a supplement to the programs, or as a springboard for further information about our modern and historical relationships with oil and water.
*The IHC's year-long series All-Consuming: Conversations on Oil and Water will begin in Fall 2008.
Views and opinions expressed by individual panelists, scholars, and artists in the articles featured in these pages do not necessarily state or reflect those of the Illinois Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the Illinois General Assembly.
The Illinois Humanities Council cannot guarantee the accuracy or continued availability of online texts. Please notify us if you encounter any problems.
The All-Consuming resource section was researched and built by Justin Floyd, Columbia University.
