The Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 in Prince William Sound, Alaska, caused catastrophic environmental damage and generated billion-dollar liability claims; it transformed environmental liability insurance and forced insurers to quantify ecological loss for the first time.

The Valdez spill prompted elegiac and protest poetry from writers including John Haines and others in the Alaskan literary tradition; it intensified the ecopoetry movement and the turn toward environmental loss as a major theme in late twentieth-century American verse.