This entry was originally written in my journal during a regional geology trip to West Texas from March 12-19, 2011. For the complete list of regional geo blog posts, click here.
day one: flying into El Paso, Texas
Flying in looks like civilization, like creeping destruction, like our abusive conquest to impose order on a world too beaten down to resist. Square plots, prescribed Edens, green with life stolen from deep underground, from river choking with petrochemicals. Houses and houses and houses and they all look the same. At least they’re honest. I want to believe we can turn this around, but we’re all so invested in keeping the machine moving forward that three-quarters of us will never see the problem or understand how deep it goes, how rotten our civilization is. I want to believe that peak oil will be our unwelcome savior, an intervention when we most need it, forcing us to get clean, to break the habit, to once again live our lives as fully and humanly as we’re capable of, the way no Westerner has in recent memory. I pray for this, knowing that when we’re on the other side of the Hubbert curve, we’ll murder and rape and bomb each other into oblivion for every last sweet black drop. What the drug trade has done to Ciudad Juarez, to inner-city Los Angeles, oil will do to Western Civilization. I want to open my eyes and look my future full in the face, but I’m afraid that the clarity of reality will be too blinding for me to coexist with it. So I fly over, falling in and out of sleep, dreaming of place crashes, and I don’t look down anymore. I close my eyes and sleep.
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