Domestic Left #39: Out of this earth
Domestic Left #39: Out of this earth
One of the things I have never loved about living in Pennsylvania is the land. Not the way I loved the land in Kansas, Iowa, Vermont.
I’ve never quite been able to put my finger on why. It’s not like I don’t appreciate the geography of Pittsburgh — the way rows of houses march up the hillsides, marshaled by church steeples, which is imbued with a particular magic at twilight, when the individual houses are marked with points of sparkling light but the whole is still bathed in a cool atmospheric blue glow. Or the view of Mount Washington — a long, high bluff with a sheer drop-off to the south bank of the the Monongahela — from my apartment window, where at night a string of lights traces the uneven crest of the ridge, decorating Pittsburghs’s celebrated indifference to heights.
But when I leave the city, to hike in state parks or tool around small towns on two-lane roads or even just drive somewhere on the interstate — all activities that I generally enjoy — I am so often troubled by a slight unease, not dissimilar to a low-grade depression, that makes everything seem a bit diminished, reduced, hollowed-out; like I am troubled by considerations beyond my depth.
Perhaps that is why I am so drawn to We Refuse to Die, part of the exhibit Unsettling Matter, Gaining Ground, on display at the Carnegie Museum through January 7. It is not an artwork in the traditional sense so much as a multi-dimensional installation which documents the collective Not an Alternative’s artistic practice at sites of fossil-fuel extraction in Port Arthur and Galveston, Texas; Sulfur and New Orleans, Louisiana — and Marianna, Clairton, and Beaver County, Pennsylvania.
Not an Alternative “mounts and documents hand-carved sculptures made from charred logs, collected after forest fires, in the yards of residents living in the vicinities of fracking sites, refineries, and other infrastructural projects that directly contributed to the deterioration of the living conditions of surrounding communities and ecologies.” Taking up an entire room in the Heinz Architectural Center, their installation consists of four of these sculptures — animal-spirit heads mounted on vertical columns of blackened wood — silently watching video of their comrades silently watching the machinery of fossil-fuel extraction. Projected on the opposite wall are videos of the rituals the collective holds with frontline communities, where, wearing masks, they dig holes in the earth to plant the animal observers and face them towards the fossil-fuel “future” being imposed on them.
The videos of the on-site sculptures are not unlike Warhol’s screen tests. The observers do not move, and neither do the refinery tanks and towers, and it can occur to you that photography would have been a more effective (and efficient) way to document the observations. But then you notice the movement of the natural world, creeping around the edges of the videos. The wind still blows, and it stirs the plants growing along poisoned riverbanks, reclaiming the edges of gravel parking lots, and vining up and over barbed-wire fences.
Pennsylvania is the only U.S. state to have a period of geologic time named after it. (The Mississippian, which immediately preceded the Pennsylvanian, is named after the river, not the state.)
It was not much more than two centuries ago that geologists first began to challenge the idea that the earth is only about 6,000 years old (as calculated by the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University, based on the Bible).1 These early geologists were able to order (if not yet accurately date) the eras, periods and epochs of geologic time by observing the clustering of specific types of fossils in particular strata of rock. Their naming system, which is still used today, was somewhat haphazard, based on the locations where discoveries were made. The Permian, famous for the massive extinctions that came at its end, is named for a territory in the Urals. Several periods share my own Welsh heritage: “Cambrian” comes from the Latin name for the country used when the Roman Empire stretched throughout the continent of Europe, and the Ordovician and Silurian are named for two of the Welsh peoples who fiercely resisted that empire.
The Pennsylvanian, now technically a “sub-period” of the Carboniferous Period, was named as geologists recognized that the layer of rich coal deposits lying under the state were the remains of great swampy forests, filled with huge insects, massive amphibians, and towering tree ferns whose stored carbon powered the industrial revolution.
At the other end of the Heinz Architectural Center are paintings and prints by seven artists who were given a fascinating commission in 1954 by the Joy Manufacturing Company of Pittsburgh and Fortune Magazine. The commission was intended to celebrate Joy’s “continuous miner,” an enormous machine capable of extracting and processing two tons of coal per minute.
The artworks, which ended up in the Carnegie’s collection, were not only featured in Fortune, they went on tour throughout the country — a copy of their itinerary is included in the exhibit. They were intended as a publicity campaign for Joy and, more broadly, to legitimize automation of the coal-mining industry, which at the time was heavily unionized and facing increasing competition from oil as a source of power.
Artists make poor propagandists, though, especially for causes about which they may harbor doubts. Most of the depictions of the mining machine are menacing, a few comical, some both, and none heroic. The machine’s gaping maw roves through a dark underworld, impermeable and unstoppable, the future on its way whether we consent or not.
Pennsylvania, known for coal, is also the birthplace of the oil industry. The substance, which used to seep from the ground, was initially mostly a nuisance to farmers, well diggers and salt miners. In 1853 Samuel Kier built the world’s first oil refinery in Pittsburgh, close to where the U.S. Steel tower now rises, and his “carbon oil” started to be used as an alternative to whale oil in lamps. In 1859 Edwin Drake became the first to successfully drill for oil, near Titusville, a town in what is now known as “the Oil Region,” in the northwest corner of the state, and soon “Pennsylvania tea” was gushing from wells throughout the state.
The consolidation of the Pennsylvania oil industry into the Standard Oil Trust in 1892 was a major milestone in the development of the modern corporation, and although oil production in Pennsylvania peaked in 1891, Pennsylvania finance capital — especially that of the Mellon family — played a huge role in the development of the oil industry elsewhere. This is why we have a “Gulf Tower” in Pittsburgh. In the first years of the twentieth century the Mellons financed the building of a modern refinery in Port Arthur, Texas, on the Gulf Coast, whose flare stacks blaze still, under the watchful eyes of We Refuse to Die’s animal observers.
So perhaps it is not so much that I do not love the land here, but that it is tender in the way of a recent wound, discolored in the way of a bruise, its capillaries broken, refusing to die but in need of recovery and relief from the continuous pokings and proddings of its seeps and seams.
“Transition in Reverse,” an article written for the exhibit’s program booklet by anthropologist Gökçe Günel, is a fascinating meditation on the concept of “energy transitions” that will make you look askance at the simplistic invocations of the term that abound in our current environment. It’s only about five pages of text and well worth reading. (It begins on page 18 of the booklet, which is on the tenth page of the linked PDF.)
Günel recounts, among other things, how the solar panels of Abu Dhabi’s Masdar City depend for their functioning on low-wage workers who cannot afford to live in this “eco-city”; how climate change has forced Ghana to transition from hydroelectric power to fossil fuels; and how the discovery of petroleum in the nineteenth century led to more harvesting of whale oil, not less.
From the archives: My first physical encounter with the landscape and infrastructure and history of carbon extraction was in 2010, when I was driving through southwestern Colorado. I wrote about it on my first blog.
Your playlist for this issue:
(For those unfamiliar with centuries-old British trade-union lingo, a “blackleg” is a particular type of scab, perhaps the lowest type — a worker who crosses his own co-workers’ picket line, as opposed to one brought in from outside.)
Vice-Chancellor Lightfoot’s calculations were remarkably precise, if not scientific. Apparently the world was created on October 26 at 9am.