ABSTRACT
In late 1999, the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) published a coffee-table picture book commemorating its oil operations in the Upper Amazonian rainforest. This chapter suggests that the way ARCO imagined the terrain of its operations significantly affected its rights, responsibilities, and legitimacy to explore for and exploit petroleum in Ecuador. By situating its oil operations in the “rainforest,” ARCO conferred new rights and responsibility on itself – rights of property that served to sanction, even champion, the company’s activities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In making a messy business clean and green, ARCO’s biotechnical calculus was sublime. The company projected itself as a model global citizen whom the Ecuadorian Ministry of Energy and Mines and the World Bank have praised and sought to replicate. In appealing to a global discourse on environmentalism, ARCO’s oil operations were transformed; the crude metamorphosed into the sublime.
