Natural Risk : A History of Oil, Politics, and the Environment in West Texas

Sarah Stanford-McIntyre shows how Permian Basin oil production reshaped Texas’s environment, economy, and political culture, with major consequences for American understandings of health, wealth, and the social safety net.

The longest-running oil-producing region in Texas, the Permian Basin fueled the state’s transformation from agricultural backwater to extractive powerhouse in the middle of the twentieth century. During the same period, Texas was also a crucial outlier in a national trend that placed risk management and environmental safety in the hands of state regulators. This book shows how Permian Basin oil production reshaped Texas’s environment, economy, and political culture, with major consequences for American understandings of health, wealth, and the social safety net. Sarah Stanford-McIntyre argues that the energy industry naturalized the risks of extractive capitalism, redefining what sorts and levels of danger were seen as acceptable. She traces how West Texas oil employers and employees—prospectors, bankers, roughnecks, drillers, contractors, and engineers—encountered and assessed the industry’s many overlapping risks, demonstrating why different groups prioritized immediate economic concerns over long-term public health or the environment. Energy workers and communities often saw environmental and health hazards as inherent and unavoidable, believing that risk could be managed on economic terms. For the industry, risk became a language for justifying deregulation, contamination, and neglect. Bringing together the political, environmental, and business history of West Texas with the lived experience of workers in the energy industries, Natural Risk reveals how Permian Basin oil transformed American capitalism.