Fears about the sustainability of oil-rich communities and hopes that petroleum would fuel financial, social, and moral renewal have accompanied the oil industry since its inception in the mid-nineteenth century. With each successive ecological disaster caused by oil spills, debates over the industry's ecological sustainability sharpen. Discussions about the geological sustainability of the petroleum industry intensify when oil supplies tighten, and dissipate when they increase. Although concerns about the moral viability of communities dependent on oil have become radically unfamiliar since the late nineteenth century, these, too, were once central to debates about the effects of oil on human society. In the nineteenth century, the progress that oil promised to bring was to be measured not only in material wealth, but in the attainment of social harmony and the attenuation of political strife.

Hope for material and social progress fueled the economy of the Habsburg monarchy's northeasternmost province, Galicia. Galicia was one of the first regions to develop an oil industry of global significance and one of the first to run out of commercially exploitable volumes of oil. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled in 1918, its oilfields became the subject of a bitter military dispute between the Republics of Poland and Western Ukraine. Only the former was to survive; the Austrian oil industry became the Polish oil industry. Poland's political victory could not, however, prevent steady declines in oil production both relatively, as larger oilfields were found elsewhere, and absolutely, as local beds were exhausted. The Polish oil industry had become all but irrelevant by the outbreak of Second World War, and was virtually erased from public memory by the end of the twentieth century.

In 1909, however, Galicia was the third-largest oil-producing region in the world (after the United States and the Russian Empire), and had been for most of the preceding half-century.Footnote ¹ Galicia's oilfields inspired a vision of prosperity for the province and the empire that contrasted sharply with the poverty it required no imagination to see. In the absence of empirical evidence of success, that vision was sustained by an anticipated never-ending increase in the production of a natural resource that was not only nonrenewable, but, on a global scale, not even abundant. Many Galicians—entrepreneurs, engineers, journalists—agreed that the way to avoid a natural catastrophe was through technology, despite copious evidence that technology was wreaking havoc on the environment. The commitment to using petroleum as the vehicle for the transformation of the economy and society depended on rationalizing persistence despite signs of impending disaster, on willfully remaining blind to foreshadowed failure. That blindness was something more than the absence of sight; it was, rather, an active insistence on seeing what was not there. This is a story of political, economic, and ecological interests that conflict, but also a story about the power of optimism and the power of the desperation that comes from the absence of other options. In Galicia, it turned out, the question of sustainability was never limited to environmental dearth: it was an economic question, a political question, and, perhaps most importantly, a moral question.Footnote ²

In the long nineteenth century, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria was predominantly agricultural and infamously poor. At century's end, over eighty percent of Galicians lived off the land—most of them on plots too small to support a family. Between 1875 and 1884, 23,642 farms were sold at auction, often to cover debt claims of fewer than twenty florins.Footnote ³ Subsistence farming made peasants vulnerable to the slightest decrease in their paltry yields, which led to periodic famines (and the nickname Golicja i Głodomeria—based on the Polish words for “naked” (goły) and “hungry” (głodny)Footnote ⁴). To escape the epigrammatic “Galician misery,” 1.1 million men and women emigrated from Galicia between 1870 and 1914, and of the eight million who remained, not even 100,000 were classified as working in industry (although the category of “industrial workers” included waiters and waitresses).Footnote ⁵ The Austrian inspector of industry for Galicia reported in 1884, “there is not a single so-called industrial city in all of Galicia, and the few factories lie like oases scattered in a desert.”Footnote ⁶ What industry did exist was often only one step removed from agricultural production: distilleries and breweries made vodka and beer out of grain, sugar refineries processed sugar beets, small factories produced simple farm equipment.Footnote ⁷

The realization, in the 1850s, that petroleum was commercially valuable, and the belief that “Austria possesses in Galicia immeasurable quantities of oil,”Footnote ⁸ gave rise to a host of new nicknames for the province and its oil regions: “Polish Baku,” “Eastern European Pennsylvania,” “Galician California,” and “Austrian El Dorado.” Despite illiteracy, malnutrition, and disease, oil industrialists proudly announced that this was not a poor land. Stanisław Szczepanowski, a pioneer of the Galician oil industry, declared Galicia's nature “miraculous and rich,” but lacking “people who were able to make use of it.”Footnote ⁹ After visiting Galicia in 1924, the novelist Joseph Roth commented, “Die Erde ist reich, die Bewohner sind arm”—“The earth is rich; the inhabitants are poor.”Footnote ¹⁰ In the late nineteenth century, at the height of the oil boom, this proverbial richness of the soil was redefined to refer to the natural resources hidden below it, rather than the crops it could yield.

The oil industry's advocates concluded that the only way to improve the lives of the Galician population was through industrial development. In 1898, August Ritter von Gorayski, the president of the Galician Provincial Petroleum Association (himself a landowner and an aristocrat), warned, “our country, even given the greatest advances in [agriculture], must always lag behind if it fails to create any industry, through which undoubtedly the entire civilized world is morally and economically improved.” His colleague, Szczepanowski, called Galicia “a country where natural industry is lacking, where agriculture is not capable of developing as it has elsewhere, where finally the entire enlightened, intelligent class has been condemned to less-productive labor.” In this context, only the petroleum industry could “breed a truly ambitious and productive—instead of the heretofore disputant and criticizing—intelligentsia. The petroleum industry offers us an example of the harmonious cooperation of all classes, from which progress and development grow.”Footnote ¹¹ Szczepanowski insisted that the agrarian economy was responsible for the indolence of Galician magnates who did nothing to improve the world they condemned. Gorayski and Szczepanowski agreed that neither the Galician economy nor the society that depended on its vitality was sustainable in the absence of industrial development. The petroleum industry, therefore, was Galicia's ticket to a prosperous and morally robust future—a future, moreover, that would be free of class conflict.

What was particularly appealing—at least to Galician elites—about the version of social harmony that oil seemed to promise was that it did not come at the cost of a redistribution of land. On the contrary, the legal regime underpinning the Galician oil industry was based on a continually renewed commitment to private property, and thus to a form of industrial capitalism that promised enough wealth for all to benefit, albeit unevenly. In most states, the central government controls mineral rights, including those to oil, and only grants extraction privileges, or concessions, to individuals or corporations in return for considerable royalties. Even within Austria, most mineral rights were controlled by the state.Footnote ¹² Instead of basing oil ownership on the principle of “royalties,” however, Austrian oil ownership followed the “rule of capture,” derived from British game laws. According to this principle, the owner of oil was the person who could “capture” it by bringing it to the Earth's surface within the boundaries of his or her own property. This property regime meant that only a modest amount of capital was needed to begin exploring for oil; it encouraged a proliferation of smaller, low-capital firms. At the same time, by hindering organization, it hampered industrialists’ ability to slow down production and prevent price collapse. After many failed attempts to bring petroleum within a legal framework that separated landownership from mineral rights, the central government in Vienna was ultimately unwilling to pay the political cost of defying the provincial Galician diet's demand that property rights and rights to petroleum remain inextricably linked.Footnote ¹³ This was a purely political decision that had nothing to do with either the technological demands of petroleum extraction or the economic structures most favorable to the production of inexpensive fuel. On the contrary, it was a strategy designed to encourage Galicia's landowning political elite to support the imperial government in Vienna. For those landowners, the primacy of private property ownership (not nationalism) was the first principle of politics.

Hopes for the oil industry, therefore, were based on the notion that oil would create such a vast quantity of wealth that even those who only received the tiniest portion of it would be lifted out of poverty. After the initial opening of the oilfields of Borysław in 1894, the explosion of the “Jakób” gusher in 1895, and then, in 1906 and 1907, the discovery of eruptive new wells such as “Wilno” and “Oil City” in the Borysław suburb of Tustanowice, Galician petroleum production was given a new boost. In 1904, Borysław alone produced two-thirds of Galicia's total output of oil, and surpassed the entire demand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, leading Władysław Szajnocha, professor of geology at the University of Cracow, to proclaim, “A veritable flood of petroleum pours out of the local oil wells.”Footnote ¹⁴ Galicia's most famous well, “Oil-City,” alone produced over 750,000 barrels of oil in 1908. By 1907, Galician production had surpassed 7.5 million barrels, and the next year 15.75 million barrels.Footnote ¹⁵ Now the hopes of Galicia's many oil investors were justified; suspicions that the wealth of Galician soil had been underestimated and in reality was boundless seemed confirmed. Even territories that had been given up as exhausted seemed to hold new promise of endless riches.

Galician oilmen had a vision of prosperity for themselves as individuals but also as the leaders of a mission—literally fueled by petroleum—to rejuvenate their homeland. Chemists, geologists, investors, and landowners referred to the happy coincidence that their product—lighting oil—would, in spreading light and illumination, also spread enlightenment. Enlightenment was more than a metaphor: it was a plan with concrete manifestations; it would, at long last, bring the populace into concomitance with their land and resources. In the minds of some, it promised new educational and employment opportunities for Galicia's impoverished peasant population. Oil could make a few lucky landowners and investors tremendously wealthy. But beyond that, it could create a more sustainable social foundation for an agricultural economy supported by the industry without which, oil advocates insisted, no society could prosper. In the minds of Catholic oil entrepreneurs, it would, moreover, be a society buoyed by widespread education, Catholic (Roman or Greek) piety and tolerance of “those citizens of the Mosaic confession who understand how to bring their own interests into alignment with those of the country.”Footnote ¹⁶ Instead of condemning Galician Jews for their presumed commitment to profit, oil seemed to offer them a pathway into the social body.

According to Szajnocha, petroleum could be credited with a dramatic improvement in Galicia's human geography, through the enlightenment of one of Europe's most “benighted” provinces: “inhospitable regions have become productive,” he claimed; “significant capital could be fruitfully invested and meaningful sums of money sprang forth from a mineral that, destined to radiate brightness, was able to bring light and wealth where there was only poverty.”Footnote ¹⁷ Heinrich-Eduard Gintl, the central inspector of the Lviv–Czernowitz railway, said in an 1884 lecture, “Petroleum is a lighting material—it is primarily destined to spread ‘light.’”Footnote ¹⁸ That was precisely the image that the Galician Provincial Petroleum Association, a trade association representing the province's producers of crude oil, tried to disseminate. While producers lobbied for government support of a domestic industry facing competition from Romania and Russia, a newspaper friendly to the organization, Naphta, reported on the industry's beneficial influence on Galician society. “And why should workers and entrepreneurs be dissatisfied? . . . The work is not difficult, the wages are relatively high (25 to 150 florins monthly), charitable institutions, schools, and churches are built at the entrepreneurs’ costs in the larger mining complexes.” This paternalism was not, however, selfless: “the entrepreneurs,” the article continued,

The conviction that people absorbed certain characteristics from their natural environments was here turned on its head: the ingenuity of oilmen had transformed the landscape itself from idiotic to radiant.

In addition to furnishing jobs and training for drillmasters, engineers, and sundry other technical laborers; funding schools, churches, and soup kitchens; making homes, streets, and railway stations light, safe, and hospitable through the long Carpathian winter, oil producers proclaimed, the oil industry brought advantages that radiated beyond provincial borders. Galician petroleum production furnishes

Since Galician oil was critical not only to the provincial economy, but to the entire monarchy, the “promotion of domestic petroleum production lies in the interest of the state . . . It would be an economic crime to inhibit the natural development of an industry that draws its right to exist from an abundantly occurring valuable natural product.”Footnote ²⁰ Economic development was the next chapter in Galicia's natural history.

From the 1880s through the 1920s, oil derricks overtook trees and workers’ barracks replaced peasant huts. Far from discouraging visitors, the oil industry quickly became a tourist attraction: most guidebooks to the province included an entry on the oilfields, highlighting “the forest of derricks” and the railway station's “one hundred daily train departures.” According to one 1914 guidebook, Borysław, a town with 15,000 residents but no recommendable hotel or restaurant, had been an “unknown and poor mountain village half a century earlier,” but was now a “heavily populated and, although unsightly, prosperous” town at the very epicenter of the oil-production industry. “Of particular interest,” the guidebook noted, “is the sight of the eruption of crude oil shooting up at the drilling of a bed, as well as the not infrequent conflagration of derricks and crude oil flowing out of the drill-holes (usually as a result of lightning).” A lucky visitor might catch sight of a blazing gusher like “Oil City,” which featured a “pillar of fire and smoke resembl[ing] a volcano” for four months in 1908.Footnote ²¹

The promise of a more sustainable society built on the foundation of a steadily growing, petroleum-fueled industrial sector had to overcome evidence that oil posed its own threat to Galicia's social and natural environment. The oil industry posed two types of challenge to the health and sustainability of moral society in the region: natural catastrophes pitted man against the environment, but the nature of the enterprise itself turned the exploitation of the environment into an attack on the moral sustainability of local society. Sustainability was a question not only of duration, but of compatibility between certain forms of enterprise and a prosperous, healthy, and morally vibrant human society.

A gusher, even if interesting, was also an ecological catastrophe. In fact, many of the metaphors used to praise petroleum's beneficial influence had a sinister side: “floods” of petroleum were exciting to watch and rewarded the prospector with proof of success—but became catastrophic when they covered fields and coursed into rivers. Lighting fuels illuminated darkness, fueling hopes of enlightenment, but they also ignited fires, fueling fears of destruction of property from either arson or accident. Numerous “alarming complaints from the rural population in the region of Tustanowice about immense damages caused by the flowing of petroleum into the Tyśmienica River” brought Galician viceroy Michał Bobrzyński to Borysław shortly after the opening of the “Oil City” well in June 1908. “Unfortunately,” he concluded,

Damage to rivers and waterways from petroleum-related pollution was nothing new, of course. In the early 1890s the Viceroy's Office had been approached with complaints about oil pollution, from individual farmers and the Provincial Fishing Society, leading the mining inspector to order the cleansing of ponds “emitting suffocating odors” as well as the removal of oil and drilling grime from rivers.Footnote ²² The reaction to the opening of the Anglobank's Jakób well in Schodnica in August 1895 combined concerns about human safety, pollution, and inefficiency. Jakób was Galicia's most famous and most productive well to date.Footnote ²³ Together with the neighboring well, Cäcilia, it produced 60,000 tons of oil in 1896—but it had had the potential to produce much more. No one could calculate how many tons had been lost when the gusher's initial outburst flooded with oil a territory half a kilometer in diameter. Recalling the oil that had streamed into the Stryj River, Szajnocha called the loss of so much crude a “tragedy” for the producers.Footnote ²⁴ But the petroleum lake Jakób created also distressed local farmers and women who used the Stryj's water for cooking, drinking, and laundry, as well as fishermen and, presumably, not a few fish. The region was rich in natural mineral-water springs; the economy of the local community of Truskawiec depended on tourist traffic drawn to sample its “excellent sources of mineral water, for example the famous ‘naftusia’”Footnote ²⁵ (nafta was the Polish word for petroleum)—but in the aftermath of explosive gushers like Jakób, the waters “reeked” of oil. “Borysław had many small streams, the tributaries of the Tyśmienica,” Leopold Held reminisced, but you “couldn't take a refreshing swim in any of them. Their surface was covered with a film of oil leaking from broken pipes or from wells in the hills. Often, the oil completely covered the surface.”Footnote ²⁶

Beyond that, the film of petroleum that covered water and land created considerable danger of uncontrollable fires, making everyone in the region vulnerable to loss of life or property. The mining inspector noted the danger of a “general fire” throughout the town as “oil poured into streams, gutters, onto streets, etc. and in this manner came into proximity with various fires (steam boilers, smithies, private houses, etc.).” Despite the rhetoric of enlightenment as a metaphor for education and improvement, the mining inspector feared the dark side of the villagers’ proximity to oil. Human activity tended to increase rather than decrease the risk: “every residence” was turned into “a dangerous oil depot” as the region's poverty induced residents to attempt to steal flowing oil on the cheap. Even after the oil was directed into an iron reservoir, “the gas pressure that collected in the reservoir tore its roof and lifted it into the air.”Footnote ²⁷ The mining inspector's report reads like a catalogue of the many ways oil production threatened the lives and property of those in its immediate environment. It made agriculture in its immediate proximity impossible; it polluted waterways, killing fish and destroying the fields and meadows that they irrigated during periodic floods. It caused fires as standing oil was struck by lightning or ignited during recurrent worker disturbances. Gases caused explosions. The ubiquitous holes dug in the ground throughout the oil basin were “the cause of many accidents. Even if an owner is so conscientious as to cover his shaft, the [wooden] cover is simply stolen overnight and not replaced.”Footnote ²⁸ (Residents of this coal-poor province relied on wood to heat their homes.) The holes and tunnels built to find it caused land to shift and homes to collapse, and made leisurely strolls through the oil district (not to mention wandering home in the dark after a night spent in the local tavern) perilous, if not suicidal. These calamities were grouped together in the minds of those disturbed by them under the general heading “natural disaster”;Footnote ²⁹ they were disasters caused by humans’ inability to control their environment. To right all these wrongs, what was needed was better, smarter industry—more infrastructure, more investment, more interference—and never less.

The insistence that the industry's solutions depended on more development, more technology—and more oil—was facilitated by a very muddy understanding of the implications of oil's nonrenewability. Technological limitations made it very difficult to say with any precision how much oil there actually was in Galicia. Eduard Schmidt's assertion that “Austria possesses in Galicia an immeasurable quantity of petroleum” was both literally true (it could not be measured) and wildly overoptimistic (it was not, in fact, limitless). And it was not quickly forgotten. In 1897, Polish geologist Rudolf Zuber estimated that the Galician oilfields contained over 361 million barrels of oil. In 1905, the founder of the Geology Department at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Władysław Szajnocha, referring to Zuber's estimate, asserted that “this quantity, even if only a portion of it can be effectively extracted, will suffice for production for many years—during which time undoubtedly new terrains will be discovered, one after another into the future . . . One should not,” he continued,

Szajnocha's moral discourse suggested that through overcoming difficulty, oilmen could also resolve doubt.

Geologists and chemists could not agree on the origins of oil, but their work could be marshaled to support confidence in the everlasting usefulness of the industry for Galicians—if it could be regulated properly. Scientists knew that hydrocarbons could not be replenished naturally. When renowned Austrian geologist Hans von Höfer published Das Erdöl und seine Verwandten in 1888, he summarized the work of scores of geologists, chemists, and other scientists who had been debating the origins of petroleum for the preceding century. He presented his own conclusions drawn over the course of a decade of observation of the oil industries of North America and Austrian Galicia. Dismissing stories such as the one he heard from a Pennsylvania oilman who claimed that American petroleum was actually whale urine that had found its way from the Polar Basin to Pennsylvania through underground pathways, Höfer presaged the modern consensus that petroleum was created over the course of between 10 and 300 million years, as innumerable marine organisms died and their corpses sank one by one to the ocean floor.Footnote ³¹ Over further millions of years, they were covered with layers of sediment and deprived of oxygen. The combination of immense pressure from sedimentary rock, heat created by that pressure, and the activity of anaerobic bacteria transformed this biomass into petroleum.

Strictly speaking, the creation of petroleum is ongoing. But a large, commercially relevant oilfield takes millions of years to form. An individual drop of petroleum cannot be extracted—it has to find its way into an underground pool containing a lot of other drops—and that takes time, and luck. Producers can only get petroleum out of the earth economically where it has collected in enormous underground reservoirs. Fortunately for oil producers and the consumers who have come to depend on their success, gases push oil from its primary location, the place where it is formed, to secondary beds, bubbling and pressing against any weakness in the rock, sometimes even reaching the surface of the earth. Well before 1900, scientists knew that it took over ten million years for petroleum to be created, and they knew that it was, functionally, a nonrenewable resource.

Not all scientists, however, accepted Höfer's organic theory of oil's origins in the early twentieth century. Attendees of the 1914 New York Meeting of the American Institute of Mining Engineers witnessed a rancorous debate between Höfer and the Canadian geologist and oilman Eugene Coste (1859–1940), a steadfast proponent of the inorganic origin hypothesis, which held that petroleum was “the product of volcanic solfataric emanation.”Footnote ³² Both men used petroleum's nonrenewable nature as an argument against their opponents’ proposition. Höfer said,

Coste countered that if petroleum was produced from dead sea creatures,

One of the only notions on which the two could agree was that petroleum was nonrenewable.

Any industry built around petroleum production is on a fundamental level unsustainable, as is any society built around its consumption. But there are different scales of unsustainability. Choices can shorten or lengthen the potential life of an industry—even one based on limited, nonrenewable resources. In Galicia, there were lengthy disputes about how to minimize waste. This likely would have involved heavy-handed government intervention in oil production—in the form, at a minimum, of limiting rights to extract oil to a smaller number of firms in order to prevent the frenzied production of neighbors competing for the same oilbeds. Such a practice would have addressed a fundamental characteristic of extraction within a capitalist system: that overaccumulation leads to falling rates of profit. The benefits of intervention were clear—but given the central administration's reliance on the support and goodwill of landowners who were loath to see property rights infringed, the political will was absent.

Although even the most enthusiastic Galician oilmen knew that the oilfields were finite, this had no practical implications as long as production's anticipated end was sufficiently distant. Pennsylvania's Oil Creek-centered petroleum industry had reached its heyday in the 1870s,Footnote ³⁵ and, in 1899, “the newest reports from the oil districts” revealed that production in the region was decreasing. Nevertheless, the Galician producers’ trade journal could reassure its readers: “that there are still immeasurable petroleum beds hidden within the soil of the relevant districts is above suspicion.”Footnote ³⁶ To voices expressing concern that Galician oil supplies might be decreasing, producer Albert Fauck responded,

Only with hindsight is it apparent that 1908 was the peak of Galician production. Although Galician production dropped 58 percent from 1909 to 1911, hope that the Galician oil basin would, under the new Republic of Poland, surpass the production achieved under Austria–Hungary flourished into the 1930s. In the 1920s, a Polish geologist estimated that 210 million barrels of oil had been extracted from Polish soil, and that 840 to 1,120 million barrels remained. This estimate was quickly taken up by the Polish–American Chamber of Commerce as proof that, with only seven percent of its existing oil reserves exploited, the industry deserved considerable investment. At the same time, the New York-based Bankers Trust Company pointed out that Galicia still possessed the third-largest oil reserves in Europe, and that the Drohobycz refinery was the largest on the Continent. Even in the late 1930s, many continued to place their hopes on the potential for increased production in Galicia, now “Little Poland.”

As in the earlier period of expansion, it was not only Poles who hoped to benefit from Poland's natural resources; investors appeared from the West and the East, with plans based on varying predictions of voluntary cooperation from the Polish government. French companies’ investment in Galician oilfields continued to increase throughout the early 1920s. Göring gave a speech on 9 September 1939, as German troops headed southeast towards the Galician oilfields, in which he noted his intention to see what goods Poland had to offer—“the Poles have only exploited 10 percent of their ‘natural resources,’” he claimed, and, making special reference to Galicia's oilfields, he added, “we will soon have an exploitation of 100 percent.”Footnote ³⁸ According to Alexander Nazaroff, even in the Second World War, “Soviet experts were unanimous in asserting that the recovery of oil could be substantially increased in . . . Galicia.”Footnote ³⁹ In the face of such stubborn optimism, it took decades before the suspicions of a few became the conviction of many: oil would not play a significant role in resuscitating the Polish economy, nor would it provide the pathway to economic development of the region. Polish, Ukrainian, French, German, and Soviet hopes were all to prove unsubstantiated, and by the last years of the Second World War, an American expert reporting to the Petroleum Industry War Council asserted that “oil [was] truly ammunition in World War II,” and simultaneously dismissed Poland's oil industry as insignificant and unworthy of attention. “Poland's negligible oil industry,” he wrote, “enemy-occupied and Nazi-dominated, has doubtless been mulcted to the limit.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Szajnocha was wrong; there were no gigantic untapped deposits of oil in the Eastern Carpathians.

Why did it take so long to notice a decline that, with hindsight, can clearly be seen to have begun in 1910? Drops in Galician production had been noted by contemporaries, but past experience had proven to the optimistic that downward trends were often reversible. After all, periodic declines were known not only in Galicia, but also in the incontestably thriving oil industry of the United States. A year or two of stagnating or declining production was not considered a sign of irreversible doom. Since 1910, Galician oil production had periodically fallen, then risen again—from 1921 to 1925 by as much as ten percent—giving industry experts cause to believe as late as 1928 that “the decline in production is thus not yet an unhesitating and hopeless decrease.” Even in a context where an industry was known to be unsustainable, it was not possible to identify at what point in the future it would cease to be viable. The end of the Galician oil industry seemed to lie in the future long after it lay in the past.

Practically speaking, the knowledge that sources of petroleum were finite meant very little. Arthur McEvoy's description of the “repetitive pattern of boom and bust” that characterized the California fisheries could just as easily describe the Galician oil industry, or any extractive industry, for that matter.

But fishermen could console themselves with the thought that, if left alone, eventually fishing stocks would be repleted—even in their own lifetimes. Oil supplies do not operate on a human timescale; nonetheless, oilmen seemed to think that, like fish, supplies could rise and fall, yet never disappear.

Time and time again, oilmen leapt from the particular to the general—any instance in which a region once presumed exhausted was granted a second life became proof that no evidence of exhaustion was conclusive. Even a minor discovery became a sign of the durability of the industry. Oil represented progress; its extraction, even on a small scale, sustained a narrative of progress based on the presumption of virtually unlimited supply. Stubborn optimism disabled the ecological critique, but the social critique persisted. The reporting of natural catastrophes and disasters in the industry suggested that the problem was not of a finite resource, or of irreversible environmental damage, but rather of a failure to promote human welfare.

The failure of petroleum to bring prosperity to the province was a matter that even the most enthusiastic oilmen had to address. This failure, in their minds, seems to have had little to do with the renewability of petroleum reserves, and a lot to do with political will. But whose? An observer sent by the Ministry of Agriculture to report on the state of the industry in 1903 concluded that the chaos characteristic of the largest oilfields was caused by what he called “an entirely peculiar local lack of any public spirit [Gemeinsinn] as well as multiple other unseemlinesses of more or less local nature.” Galicians countered that the causes were beyond their control. Szczepanowski, for example, in a speech before the Galician Provincial Petroleum Association on 29 December 1898, blamed the inferiority of Galicia's oil industry compared to America's not on the difference in the quantity of oil involved, or even different cultural commitments to entrepreneurship, but rather on politics pure and simple:

The paucity of those conditions in Galicia meant a failure to fill the demand for 750 million florins’ worth of petroleum that the United States shipped to Austria and Germany in the 1860s and 1870s. “If only a portion of these riches had benefited our country, how differently its economic situation would have turned out. How much income for the population, what a boost to industry, how much wealth could have been created out of it!”Footnote ⁴² His German colleague, Albert Fauck, agreed: “It has come to the point where the rich oil treasure of the country must remain locked in the bore holes. Galicia's only valuable product is devalued in an artificial and unnatural manner by bad laws.”Footnote ⁴³ Even in 1919, when Galician petroleum production had been steadily declining for a solid decade, the Polish delegation to Paris attributed the ultimate cause of the industry's success or failure to politics—in this case, differences between Poland and Ukraine:

Although critics disagreed about whether over- or underregulated oil production was the problem, they agreed that a poorly functioning political system cost Galicia economic opportunities. But their criticism did not stop there. Perhaps more troubling, though more difficult to quantify, was the industry's contribution to moral decay. In 1884, thanks to new mining regulations, a young technical chemist named Arnulf Nawratil (1853–1935) began annual inspections of industrial installations, plants, and factories throughout the provinces of Galicia and Bukovina. In the first year alone, he spent 139 days travelling to 301 factories and small businesses, 69 of them more than once.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nawratil's reports represented a historical moment of moral environmentalism: Nawratil believed that the workers’ state of moral development was inseparable from their surroundings. Because their environment did not meet the minimum requirements of human decency, they lived and behaved like beasts. Through this connection between people's moral capacities and their immediate household and workplace environments, the sustainability of the economies in which they participated was linked to the sustainability of human society. To Nawratil, morality was revealed by clothing, determined by sleeping arrangements. Nawratil did more than report on workers’ conditions, upon violations of safety regulations or legislation controlling employment practices: he condemned the dehumanization of oil workers who lived and worked in conditions that did not meet the minimal standards for sustainable human life. Workers in steady employment for one company were treated by their managers like “workhorses by a horse-keeper”: in exchange for food and housing, the workers labored in shafts supervised by the manager and paid him 10 percent of their wage; the remainder of their wage usually went to the manager's wife, who held a license for food and drinks. Dependent on the couple for food, lodging, and the irresistible drink, the worker soon fell into debt that his wages would never cover:

Workers’ dehumanization stemmed not only from the managers’ abuse, but also from their physical surroundings. “One must only glance into a workers’ hostel to see in a crowded room sometimes sixty or seventy persons, without any distinction between the sexes, lying shoulder to shoulder, fully dressed, so closely together that they can't turn from side to side,” wrote Nawratil, adding, “So can one measure the material and moral decay of the Borysław worker.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Workers themselves were complicit in their own demoralization, he further contended. When he claimed that “an overheated, cavelike bedroom, thickly fitted out with foul-smelling beds for the workers,” failed to meet “basic human needs,” Nawratil was told by the workers themselves that they were satisfied with their quarters, since “their comrades in other companies didn't even have such sleeping quarters as these, and that they lived miles away, and only seldom were in a condition to go home.” Under such conditions, it was impossible for workers to thrive spiritually, morally, physically, or financially. Their “oppression” was physical: “they are poorly fed, are exposed to dangers of all kinds at work, and, thanks to their unsound way of life, exposed to all possible illnesses, and the demoralization among them is universal.” Worse still, because of that oppression, their humanity was in doubt: “This is really a rare type of depraved people, driven together from all corners of the globe, who can hardly be viewed and treated as human, and who, therefore, no one cares about.” Individual workers were fully interchangeable. Like commodities, they were completely fungible, and had no unique value as human beings: “this is the main point: the worker, just like a draft animal, only has value as long as he has the strength to work.”

Nawratil's outrage shows that the relative lack of concern with environmental degradation should not be interpreted as a lack of concern about sustainability: the question of social sustainability was left at the heart of the problem. Social questions were treated not as stemming from industry, extraction, or even capitalism, but rather as the result of political failures. Failures, that is, not only of the state, but also of the peasants themselves, who were deemed incapable of articulating their needs in terms the state could address. An argument that had begun with the promise of enlightenment now circled back to the notion that enlightenment was impossible.

Nawratil was not some hot-blooded socialist revolutionary; he was a chemist and a civil servant who believed firmly that the conditions in which workers could survive, prosper, and live like humans did not need to await a revolution, but rather only the actual enforcement of already existing legislation. Laws that would protect workers from these conditions existed, and the workers themselves, moreover, were partially responsible for the fact that they were not enforced.

And it was not only ignorance that stood in the workers’ way—it was their own impatience with what they considered to be useless and even counterproductive rules that, although designed to guarantee their safety, seemed to be more like hindrances to the completion of their labor.Footnote ⁴⁷

Nawratil did not stand alone in his dismay at the workers’ lot. Even Naphta, a journal that faithfully represented the interests of oil producers themselves, noted that the oil workers’ moral well-being had not been promoted as thoroughly as the promise of paternalism had suggested: “The only fault one could perhaps find with the employers,” one author confessed in 1901,

Nor was this simply a matter of time: in the 1920s, Joseph Roth visited the oilfields and described them thus:

The “illumination” and “enlightenment” offered by oil came at a heavy price in Galicia. The production and distribution of oil led directly to pollution, property damage, injury, and death. Petroleum, it turned out, was no panacea for social ills: despite petroleum's illuminating properties, the oil basin remained shrouded in darkness. “A radical reform must be carried out if Borysław is not to remain in a repulsive fog towards the end of the nineteenth century,” geology professor Rudolf Zuber warned. Zuber added that it was an established economic principle that every rationally run business requires a certain minimum of material and intellectual vigor to allow for both the profit of the entrepreneur and the safety of the worker—a level of vigor that exceeds the means of smaller oil companies. Many Galician oilmen had enough money to acquire a small terrain but not enough

A firedamp explosion in the ozocerite mine in Borysław in 1902 caused eighteen deaths, either from fourth-degree burns; inhalation of poisonous gas; suffocation face-down in seeping petroleum; or the degeneration of heart, lung, and kidneys after a combination of burns and inhalation of gases.Footnote ⁵¹

It would be tempting to see in the evidence of distress about the petroleum industry hints of growing suspicions that an economy based on the ever-growing dependence on the consumption and production of hydrocarbons was unsustainable. Galicians—whether directly or indirectly involved in the oil industry—did agree that it could not continue as it was. Rarely, however, was the limit to the industry's sustainability perceived to derive from geological givens. Even in the case of so-called natural catastrophes (such as uncontrollable gushers, fires, and floods) that might seem to represent the problem of unsustainability, the solution was always considered to be more industry, more exploitation of natural resources, never less. It was, after all, the smallest companies whose workers suffered under the worst conditions. Contemporary criticism of Galicia's oil industry centered on cultural or moral problems on the one hand, and political problems on the other. The Galician oil industry shows the impossibility of separating geological questions about renewable resources, abundance, and exhaustion from economic questions about capital, investment, and industrial development; social questions about labor relations, public health and hierarchies of power; and cultural questions about morality and enlightenment. Long before the outbreak of the First World War, geologists, oilmen, and politicians in oil-producing countries recognized that in some meaningful sense, oil production in any given locale was unsustainable. And yet this realization had minimal, or fully inadequate, policy implications. And so if the Galician oil industry was unsustainable, it was not because the material on which it was based—petroleum—was nonrenewable. It was a political failure, compounded by moral weaknesses and economic underdevelopment.

The commonly held belief that Galician society was not sustainable without petroleum made the unsustainability of the industry itself all too tempting to ignore. Galicians shared with their Pennsylvanian counterparts a blind optimism in the potential of petroleum to support their societies and economies into the distant future—a sentiment that historian Brian Black has called the “yearning for permanence in a temporal industry.”Footnote ⁵² In the late nineteenth century, petroleum seemed to offer the solution to problems not only of an economic, but also of a political, cultural, and even moral nature. These problems were, not, however, seen to be primarily environmental—nor was there any real appreciation of how limited the capacity of a nonrenewable resource (and one very restricted in quantity) to provide lasting solutions to endemic poverty, structural inequality, and political corruption really was. On the contrary, Galicians maintained their hopes that petroleum would rescue them despite evidence that the oil industry could not last for long. Oil would bring them out of the past, and secure their place in the future.

It was profound optimism that drove criticism of the “unsustainability” of the oil industry at the turn of the twentieth century. The solution to the challenges posed by perceived economic backwardness, moral degradation, political caprice, social division, or even geological limitation was not to abandon the oil industry, but rather to improve it with more technological and financial investment. This was true when the challenge was overproduction, pollution, fire; this was true when the challenge was accident, injury, death; and it was even true when the challenge was underproduction, premature exhaustion. The failure of both critiques—the critique based on ecological sustainability and the critique based on social sustainability—rested on the idea that, since oil represented progress and enlightenment, the story would have to end with some sort of magnificent technological fix. Both critiques demanded solutions to pressing problems without challenging the underlying structures that characterized the world in which they lived.