I’m reading a novel by Helon Habila called Oil on Water. And after reading The Windup Girl, I’ve been thinking a lot about how technology and capital follow closely on each other to destroy fragile human political and social arrangements.
The Habila novel takes place in “the oil rich and devastated Niger Delta,” as the bookjacket announced. The plot takes us up river, similar to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and as the two journalists seek the wife of a oil executive, kidnapped by militants, we see the horror of this devastation firsthand.
Indigenous people who sold their rights to clean water and their original life to oil companies and ended up with broken VCRs and a river awash in life-destroying oil, dead fish and armed resistance, a government keen on keeping oil revenues flowing even if it means the flow of blood and the flow of pollutants. And those who tried to resist the oil money? Who made the “right” choice? Their chief is taken and executed; the soldiers come back with his “confession” and his “signature” on papers, and the oil companies win anyway.
The mixing of valuable natural resources and neocolonial multinational corporations and infinitely corrupt and corruptible “governments” - well. When you read Conrad and get to the horror, the horror, you know what he’s talking about, his code for the horror of the Western mix of naïve and arrogant idealism and decidedly non idealistic strategies for the taking of things from those with flatter noses and darker complexsions. Not much has changed, except perhaps for the extent of the environmental devastation that now accompanies the extraction of what the white men value.
Hannah Arendt said that fascism and totalitarianism always come home; the strategies practices “over there” come back with the people who practiced them. Now we have fracking, the extraction of natural gas from bedrock, a mind numbing technology for destroying water sources and land on the way to finding “clean” natural gas.
Those of us who have learned to distrust the adjective clean will not be surprised when the head of an energy corporation smiles into the camera and makes fracking sound like a miracle of human ingenuity which will help heat homes employ people bring us safe and clean energy. And that is part of what novels like Habila’s do: they help us not only see and think, but feel, and feel again, the human and environmental horror visited by the neverending search for resources.
The modern curse: to live over or next to things the first world needs, and needing, feels it owns.
I’m at a Farmers Market and it is June and everything feels hopeful, sustainable, a moment when humans can and do pull off a marvelous cultural action. It is strange to be writing this post amidst such a scene. And these burgundy red cherries will taste sweet on the tongue later.
A sweet side to life, and a shadow side, always.
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