Taking Young Audiences Offshore: Petroleum Extraction in Norwegian Children’s Literature

Abstract

Norway is a major exporter of oil and natural gas, and the fossil fuel industry constitutes the country’s most important economic sector. Since all of Norway’s petroleum production is located offshore in the North Sea, the Norwegian Sea, and the Barents Sea, it is unobservable from land. This invisibility and inaccessibility make it hard for children to picture and comprehend what this form of extraction involves. Authors of Norwegian children’s literature have repeatedly tried to alleviate this imaginative deficit through conveying a child-oriented experience of working offshore in the oil and gas industry. This article applies a petroculture studies framework to the analysis of four such children’s books, published between 1986 and 2013. The fictional stories in these books tend to present oil platforms as utopian places that offer pleasant and exciting experiences but remain silent on environmental and climatic risks connected to this industry and on the possible depletion of the nonrenewable resources oil and gas. While the oldest of the studied examples is most nuanced in its portrayal of offshore work, the newer books are considerably more ideologically one-sided, and two of them even aim to recruit children as future oil workers. As overtly didactic works, these books have been dismissed in earlier research, while they have been attractive for use in educational contexts precisely due to their didactic characteristics. This indicates a need to enable educators to critically reflect on how works of fiction and nonfiction that are presented to them as benevolent, didactical tools may serve to normalize an unsustainable petroculture.