As oil gushes into the Gulf in quantities too large to understand (millions of barrels, with no end in sight), it’s perhaps worth thinking a little about the controlled vocabularies that collate coverage of this and other petroleum disasters. If oil spills, drilling catastrophes, ground seepage, and general pollution are simply part of the oil industry-as-usual, how does starting from the point of the event make these seem like exceptions rather than the rule of dependence on petroleum-based fuels? Since the BP disaster, news stories in the Proquest Newspapers database have been tagged with general headings likePipelines, Oil spills, and even Read More …