Oil, gold, and blood

I recently visited some friends in Lubbock TX, which is on a high, cold, windswept plain. The town of 200,000 consists mostly of strip malls and fast food joints, and does not even have recycling. The surrounding countryside is devoted to traditional cotton farming and livestock. The very picture of unsustainability, and yet beautiful in a rugged way. Just 100 miles away is the Palo Duro Canyon, second largest in the US (to the Grand Canyon) - where we went for a truly stunning Easter hike.

The other highlight of the trip was visiting the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum (in Midland - hometown of George W Bush). This huge oilfield supplies oil to many US states, including California. The musuem was a combination of fairly technical information on petroleum engineering and historical/cultural information about how the oil industry reshaped life in that region. I really got a sense of how much human ingenuity and perseverance were needed to extract this stuff from the Earth and pipe it all over the country. And how oil was a major transformative force in this poor, rural area that otherwise scratches out a living from dusty soil. There was a propoganda-like movie about the current challenges of the petroleum industry - fewer big oil fields, lower-quality oil, etc - calling on young people to help join the battle to scour the Earth for more of it. "We must not fail," it concluded ominously.

It was both chilling and deeply moving. I had never felt a particular emotional connection to oil, except in sort of a derisive intellectual way when expressing frustration with our thirst for it. I can understand the analogies to gold, and to blood, much better now.