Aruba

Aruba is the smallest ABC island by land area. The island’s history is entangled with the boom in petrocapitalism that coincided with the Great Acceleration (the surge in human activity and resource extraction during the twentieth century). During World War II, Standard Oil’s refinery on the island was the second largest in the world, exceeded only by Royal Dutch Shell’s Isla refinery in Curaçao. Together, the refineries on Aruba and Curaçao provided over 80 percent of the Allies’ naval and aviation fuel, prompting Nazi Germany to target the facilities with its fleet of U-boats (Bond 2017, 604). Despite the exploitation of Aruba by foreign corporations such as Standard Oil, some islanders remember oil’s heyday as a time of plenty: “The age of oil, unlike the era of tourism dependence that followed, was for some a time of reliable wages, expanding employment, and respectable housing” (Schields 2023, 7). The adverse effects of climate change are more severe and felt earlier in Aruba and other Caribbean islands than elsewhere in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, resonating with Amitav Ghosh’s observation that “those at the [geopolitical] margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us” (Ghosh 2016, 62–63). Aruba is home to several institutions involved in JUST ART, including Ateliers ’89, Imagination for Development and the Nature of Values Aruba (IDNOVA), and the University of Aruba (UA).

C.S.H.