Coal, Oil, and Natural

EXTRACTION ART SELECTED IMAGES, ESSAYS AND POETRY “The greatest emergency is the absence of emergency, that is, the status quo, the normalization of disaster.” —Santiago Zabala Left: Ilka Hartmann Grebe Victim of the San Francisco Oil Spill, January 18, 1971 photograph, © Ilka Hartmann 2019 158 159 Chuck Forsman, Sasketchewan, Bakken Area, 2019, photograph Chuck Forsman, Bonneville Salt Flats, UT, 2017, photograph Chuck Forsman, Logging Debris, South Africa, 2019, photograph Chuck Forsman, Gilsonite Trench, Northeast UT, 2019, photograph Chuck Forsman, North Dakota Fracking Pond, 2019, photograph Chuck Forsman, Morrocan Pit Mine, 2019, photograph 160 161 Chris Boyer, Pulpwood, Baileyville, Maine (45.162863°, -67.424985°) Chris Boyer, Prairie Pothole Junkyard, Eden, South Dakota (45.580135°, -97.420159°) 162 163 Chris Boyer, Atlantic Salmon Pens, Welshpool, New Brunswick, Canada (44.885980°, -66.959243°) Chris Boyer, Gold Mine Tailings, Whitehall, Montana (45.886368°, -111.991425°) 164 165 A GENERAL VIEW OF But that’s a long time in the future, a process EXTRACTION our universe is currently presumed to be only about halfway through, and our species will have been but William Fox a momentary and almost invisible flare in the career of the cosmos. Entropy as a process on our planet, The rubric of “extraction” for a series of long-run- however, is speeding up dramatically via human ning exhortations and examinations about human technology, the development and use of which in- use of land and associated resources—a public effort creases rapidly as our population explodes. culminating periodically along the way with publi- How we determine our efflorescence on Earth, cations, exhibitions, and conversations—opens up and the effect of it on ourselves and other species— an opportunity to discuss what the word performs. which is to say our moral obligation to the planet— For example, the bumpersticker adage “If it’s not is where we have a say in how we live within the uni- grown, it’s mined” is not exactly a Zen koan, but it versal dynamic of extraction. It’s a question of scale, points out that everything we consume—from food, among other things: how much do we consume, to clothes, to cellphones—is made from materials how fast, how much do we waste, and simply how derived from only two mechanisms. I’d add to that many of us there are performing extraction. Phys- proposition research geologist Bill Langer’s obser- icist Geoffrey West in his book about scale parses vation, that “if it’s growing, it’s mining.” Langer out many of the relevant numbers, some of which points out that agriculture is constantly mining soil are as follows. for nutrients, and is also often dependent on loess, Extraction and entropy have been established the wind-blown dust from deserts that provide key facts of human life since we discovered fire, but they resources, such as phosphates, to agricultural lands became a problem once the Industrial Revolution in much of the rest of the world. started around the late 1800s. That’s when coal-fu- My point is that human extraction of resources is eled steam engines began laying down a strata of part of nature as well as culture, part of the universal carbon around the world that marked at least one chain of action that transforms the hydrogen burn- definition of what some scientists call a new era, the ing in stars into all of the elements up to iron, and Anthropocene. Carbon was, however, only a symp- then via supernovas up through all the heavier ele- tom. The real issue was the exponential growth of ments, such as uranium. Nature works by building the size and number of cities that began then and the blocks that build life, and our species, as with all continues today. Two hundred years ago, for exam- others, is built from extraction at every level. But ev- ple only 4 percent of Americans lived in cities; today ery time one material changes into another, through it’s more than 80 percent. That trend is worldwide. natural or artificial means, a quantity of energy is Every two months the number of people equivalent dispersed as waste heat. That’s called entropy. Even- to the entire New York metropolitan area moves into tually, that energy is so attenuated that all matter cities. Every eight weeks fifteen million people make grows cold and inert. All energy stops, no informa- that migration. Consider that China is building 300 tion flows from one place to another, and nothing cities to hold more than a million people each during moves. That heat death of the universe, an inexora- the next twenty or so years, and that both Africa and Left: Chuck Forsman, Love in a Pit Mine, 1999, oil on canvas, 54 by 42 inches ble consequence of entropy and the Second Law of India are following similar trajectories. West points Thermodynamics, which Einstein termed the only out that this is “by far the largest migration of hu- law of physics that would never be overturned. man beings to have taken place on the planet.” 166 167 Garth Lenz, The True Cost of Oil, Triptych, 2011 The amount of biological energy it takes to keep It’s worth quoting the numbers, even though humans swamped the planet, energy consumption movement around the world, the Harrisons began a human alive averages 2,000 calories per day, or we are basically an innumerate species that can’t took place in an open system, where sunlight from intervening into the systemic failures of ecosystems about ninety watts, the equivalent of what powers reliably count past a hundred. But put it this way: a source external to the planet powered the world. at the local level in the early 1970s with a small la- an incandescent lightbulb. During pre-agricultural at the height of the Roman Empire the worldwide Once we opened the Industrial Age and the sun was goon north of San Diego, where they were teaching. times the human population is estimated to have human population is estimated to have been 300 no longer the primary source of energy, our burning By the time the 2000s rolled around, they were tak- been as large as ten million people, and our energy million people—a little less than the current popu- of fossil fuels essentially converted the planet into ing on the entire peninsula of Europe, the Tibetan consumption was still on an even keel with the rest lation of the United States. That was enough people a closed system—one that relied primarily upon Plateau, and the 400-mile-long chain of the Sierra of the natural world; our rate of entropy was man- to move more dirt on the surface of Earth than rain, internal resources such as coal and oil. Ultimately, Nevada. Their proposals included: farming tech- ageable within the planetary ecosystem. Now there which had been the primary force rearranging ter- such resources are finite, whereas the sun’s energy niques for Europe that would make the topsoil act are twenty thousand times as many of us. Further- restrial geography for billions of years. Or, consid- is, relative to the timespan of human civilization, like a sponge to re-normalize the water cycle; a re- more, to keep alive a person in a city, which requires er that in the first forty-five years following World virtually eternal. Burning up finite resources in a forestation project in Tibet to keep the Himalayan powering everything from infrastructure and vehi- War II humans impounded so much water behind closed system is not a successful strategy for life on rivers flowing; and planting the Sierras with ensem- cles to home computers, takes 11,000 watts per day the largest dams in the world—all in the northern Earth. Add today’s sunlight to the accelerated burn- bles of plants that would slow forest fires and regu- in the United States, a standard of living that is the hemisphere—that we altered both the axis of the ing of fossil fuels—essentially mineralized organic late clean runoff of snowmelt from the mountains. goal of most people on the planet (which, in turn is Earth and the rotational periodicity of the planet. material that stores ancient sunlight—and the re- Through poems, performances, annotated maps, why so many people are moving towards cities, and The changes were small but measurable using GPS. sult is a rapidly warming planet whose ecosystems and photo-collages, they convinced entire govern- toward that goal). An estimated third of our ener- We can solve much of our energy problems with are unable to cope. Species start dying. ments to at least acknowledge these problems. gy use in America goes to waste, which is to say en- solar panels. The sun delivers more power in a sin- Scientists and engineers aren’t the only people By the end of their careers, the Harrisons came tropy. Pre-technological “natural” processes—in- gle hour to the Earth’s surface than is used by the dealing with the entropic fallout of resource ex- to understand that their role as artists was to mod- cluding the growth of plants, forest fires, radiation whole planet in a year. Relative to our current car- traction—the “global thermodynamic dysfunction” erate the gradients of entropy in ecosystems, to less- generated by minerals––produce heat, but in man- bon-based energy practices, converting more sun- as Paul Mankiewicz and Dorion Sagan put it—a en the loss of energy transferred, and to see that it ageable, ultimately useful levels. How do we return light into electricity would reduce entropy toward a mechanism that is putting into peril the entire ter- would dissipate in ways slow enough that life could to that level, where entropy increases only very slow- level of waste heat comparable to photosynthesis in restrial ecosystem.

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