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Oil and natural gas development, Jonah Fields, Wyoming: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 14 May 2006
Oil and natural gas development, Jonah Fields, Wyoming: photo by Jane Pargiter/EcoFlight, 5 August 2008
Oil and natural gas development, Lookout Mountain, Moffat County, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Oil and natural gas development, Hiawatha Fields, Vermilion Creek, Moffat County, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Oil and natural gas development, Hiawatha Fields, Vermilion Creek, Moffat County, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Oil and natural gas development, Hiawatha Fields, Vermilion Creek, Moffat County, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Oil and natural gas development, heart of Vermilion Basin, Moffat County, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Runoff plume from oil and natural gas development, Vermilion Creek, Moffat County, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Vermilion Basin, Moffat County, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Oil and natural gas development, Sandwash Basin, Wyoming: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 19 August 2005
Oil and natural gas development, Powder Wash, Wyoming: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 19 August 2005
Oil and natural gas development, Honeycomb Buttes, Wyoming: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 19 August 2005
Oil and natural gas development, Killpecker Dunes, Wyoming: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 19 August 2005
Oil and natural gas development, Little Snake River Valley, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Pipeline, Little Snake River, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Laying pipeline, Moffat County, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Great Divide, with oil and natural gas development, Moffat County, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Great Divide road, with oil and natural gas development, Moffat County, Colorado: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 27 April 2006
Tunnel and fracking atop Roan Plateau, western Colorado: photo by Jane Pargiter/EcoFlight, 5 August 2008
Colorado River and I-70 with oil and gas development at the base of the Roan Plateau: photo by Jane Pargiter/EcoFlight, 25 August 2008
Colorado River and I-70 with oil and gas development at the base of the Roan Plateau: photo by bsgordonaspen/EcoFlight, 13 April 2006
18 comments:
Who among us can say they don't use products of the oil/gas industry.
I wish it were otherwise, and that the shame I feel for humans didn't deepen every day
Well, I expect you're a human, and that your own private burden of shame ought to do well enough to keep your conscience busy without having to feel shame on everyone else's behalf as well.
I haven't been behind the wheel of a motor vehicle in forty years, but six weeks ago I came within a hair of being killed by one.
And I am still waiting for an apology from the person responsible, and wouldn't even mind if it came in a delegated form, through for example you.
But failing that, I'd just as soon forget all the guilt and blame.
Evil is evil, and no amount of shame or sorry will change that.
The products of the oil/gas industry are destroying the planet while keeping up the convenience level of many humans and enriching a few.
That's evil, and speaking out against it seems one's duty, as does the strict avoidance of the products of that industry, insofar as it is possible.
And it is possible to a degree.
Hiawatha Fields
This the price of my travels
stuffing my face with Fritos
and Diet Pepsi
driving around
in my Subaru
wearing cheap clothing
from Ross
appropriate for work
I quit smoking no
more Marlboros but so what
my lungs are this ravaged
holes nobody can see
but me in my parents'
Crown Royale.
O Moffat County, O Peckerkill Dunes, O Sandwash, Powderwash--have I died who have I killed
in the future yet I forgot
something need
to go get it
at the store.
Susan,
The unfunny thing is, that's exactly what she said. She thought she'd just jump in the car and pick up whatever it was at Safeway. Then, she said, on the way to Safeway she'd changed her mind and decided to get gas instead. It was in that moment of revision of decision that she ran me over. Her mind was caught between Safeway and the gas station.
Wow, so you were the moment she looked away and she told you so? I have a fear that some day when I am thinking of X instead of what or where I am, I will do some unspeakable crime.
As to fracking, we do subsidize it instead of wind and solar. Big OIl does what Big Oil wants to do, and we the people have no say about it, which include putting their rigs and wells right next to our drinking water. A woman the next town over bought a house near a drill well--had her water tested - and they only tested for e coli and the like, unbeknownst to her. She was from NE and clueless. Long story short, she almost died. She's just one case . . . one of many cases.
And then, in case we're not having fun yet, here at home on the range... there are always the lovely Oil Sands of Alberta.
Nin, no, she didn't say that to me. She said it to the cops.
Well, I was lying there unconscious and hemorrhaging, having just been scalped (without even a tomahawk, merely a VW Jetta), so that circumstance would have been a bit of a conversation retardant in any case.
My sense of the frack, inject, extract rhythm is that it's definitely bigger than both of us and will get a lot worse before it ever gets any better.
And it won't get any better because everybody is always going to have to just jump in the car and just pick up that one more thing, even if it's only a scalp.
I think it's the American Way.
(By the by, I hope everybody who reads this will also be reading Nin's Fracking Comics -- see marginal link here -- essential.)
“She thought she'd just jump in the car and pick up whatever it was”—a Tom Clark out for an evening stroll!
In a more serious vein, most Greeks wouldn’t be caught dead walking if they could get out of it; we have examples right here in Meligalas of civil servants who drive the unheard-of distance of 300 meters from their house to their place of work in the town square; however, the financial crunch has forced many such Greeks to curtail their idiotic dependency on the automobile—probably the only benefit the IMF has contributed so far.
We’re all denizens of Planet Overshoot now. Thousands of years ago we stepped away from hunting and gathering and horticulture—to become farmers, for reasons still unclear. Horticulture had created a garden within the Garden; agriculture destroyed that Garden. Agriculture created relative abundance in the form of a surplus, which created the problem of storage, which brought about sedentism and permanent communities, which led eventually to the urban revolution and ultimately to perpetual war. The seizure and/or protection of those surpluses and settlements becomes the rationale of civilization. Plunder and defense. This is the history of the Holocene. It’s our history. It wasn’t beauty but booty that precipitated the Trojan war. The Myceneans, after all, were pirates, and the Trojans controlled the Hellespont.
Sorry to hear about your accident.
Agriculture, plastics, manufacturing, medicine - all run on oil and gas.
How do we imagine society without fossil fuels, let alone create such a society?
I am still appalled that she didn't apologize. I think it's hard to look at one's crimes.
And yes, it will get worse, and thanks for the plug. But the thing that baffles me is that as bad things are, they don't HAVE to be as thoughtless. That's the part that galls me.
A person can apologize.
And a company could behave ethically.
A government could be responsible.
We just do get used to this kind of --oh well, everyone's greedy logic,
and it's not my fault. Not everyone. No, and imagine if we thought we could be better? I mean, it does start with that thought. We could be caring. It isn't that big of a stretch.
In the spirit of balance reporting might I "inject" breaking news from the world of sports:
BEYOND THE PALE HOSE*
Scherzer pitches brown-eyed,
White Sox power six,
Tigers tater three and drop
Snowman in the fifth.
*No American poets were injured, intentionally or otherwise, during the making of this south-side spectacle. Next, your weather sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute.
Back in the bygone era of the 1978-79 "Energy Crisis", when the temporary rise in the cost of gas from OPEC caused the oil industry industry to turn to wholesale carbon-plunder of the domestic landscape of the West, I went out on a roving-reporter journalistic assignment to cover that story. Much of what I learned back then resonates with what is happening on a larger scale currently.
Wyo-Booming, 1979 (I)
Wyo-Booming, 1979 (II)
Of the present story there are obviously too many aspects and elements to cover responsibly in a single blog post.
Still a few recent developments perhaps merit note.
Latterly the prohibitive cost of pipeline-laying has led to the practise of "flaring", which is both wasteful in terms of the quantum extraction, and extremely nasty in terms of the atmospheric carbon emission levels -- unless, that is, living in a methane bubble be considered a good thing. This is not just tree-hugger lamentation. What with the recent frack-o-boom-arama in the Bakken Fields of North Dakota, even the NYTimes has shown interest in natural gas flaring, North Dakota.
Here's a bit of international space station video showing "mystery cities" of intense methane emissions at Alberta Sands and Bakken Fields (North Dakota) oil and gas exploitation sites.
Then too, the foul chemical injectant materials added to the fluids used to break up the subsurface of the planet so that carbon may be extracted have shown a proclivity (surprise!) for finding their way into both the aquifers at depth and the streams at the surface. Or did anyone suppose that the Little Snake River became a filthy mud-brown in colour "naturally"?
Everyone has read about the fracturing/injection developments, but words are never more than words, opinions never more than opinions, statistics and expert studies never more than... & c.
One tires easily in those areas of information absorption, particularly if one is the victim of a predominantly visual imagination.
The purpose of this post was to show what the fracture/inject/extract cycle does to the surface of the planet upon which human life is entertained.
Not surprisingly, images such as these are not readily available to the public.
These flyover shots are being made not by the government but by concerned (and heroic) private citizens.
It seems there remain some who think that turning the blue marble into a pockmarked fossil ping pong ball might not be such a good idea, just on basic principle.
Of course it would be helpful if the government were to provide us visual documentation of what's going on down in those fracking tunnels or out in the tailings pond and runoff plumes.
But don't hold your breath for the return of the great government sponsored geomorphological landscape surveys once conducted by the USGS and Dept of the Interior.
It's thanks to those surveys that we have what remain probably the best images of what it looks like when the Earth is pulverized by its children for their own blind short-term ends.
William Henry Jackson: Hydraulic Mining, Madison County, Montana, 1871
Scars: Grove Karl Gilbert, Nevada County, California, 1905-1909
Tom,
The driver of the Jetta SHOULD apologize! Do you even know who she is? And meanwhile, the beat ("frack, inject, extract; frack, inject, extract"; frack, inject, extract") goes on.
"I think it's hard to look at one's crimes." I think that's exactly it. Plus, as a friend of mine who was merely grazed by a car a few years back noted, "No one says sorry anymore. They're too afraid of getting sued." Which, to my mind, is both stupid and uncivilized. Fault is fault, no matter how you frack it.
We (as a race) are moving too fast and too distractedly. I'm sorry, Tom.
All of these shots are so powerful. Flying over the US and seeing the lines and mounds below always seems so mysterious. You wonder what they are and then they pass and you're onto the next formation. This is so revealing. Curtis
Tom, I am very sorry to hear about your accident. I take it from your writing here that you are relatively okay?
Years ago a right-turner hit my elderly father on one of his healthy walks.
Even before that I was becoming appalled at the car culture. I lived for 15 years without a car in Europe.
Now I am back in southern California and cars are starting to take over my life again.
I am sending you all the healing power I can muster from all the gods of India, Louisiana and points in between.
Thanks, Vincent. One remains not so much expecting as prepared to be surprised by and to gratefully accept the gifts of any and all gods, on the theory it's never too late... until it is.
Though of course for the gods, who do things at the speed of light, it's probably always a case of Too late, gotta run.
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