Behold, the non-oil hat!This is a guest post from Andrew, one of our GTT collaborators, who walked from Lake Iliamna to the Revelation Mountains this summer
Somewhere between the north shore of Lake Clark, Alaska, and the last human outpost before the bitter emptiness outside the Alaska Range, it dawns on me. 25 days and 200+ miles in the wilderness, dragging my entire life on my back:
I am a walking advertisement for the petroleum industry.
My entire expedition is built on fossil fuels. I am walking oil.
My pack is made of Dyneema, a.k.a. Ultra High Modulus Polyethylene. The strongest fiber in the world – made from oil. My clothing is made of nylon, capilene, polar fleece. Synthetic rubber shoes soles. Wool socks blended with acrylic. Oil.
The food I carry was grown by an industrial food chain, powered by the green revolution, powered by fossil fuels – mostly oil. The nitrogen in the ammonia that fertilized the soil was extracted from the atmosphere via natural gas. The salt was mined, using oil.
It’s all oil. The steel and titanium and aluminum I carry: mined, refined, and forged using coal, natural gas, and oil. Cigarette lighters… oil. Plastic-barreled mechanical pencil. Oil. Bicycle inner tube, duct tape, paraffin-coated sail thread, floss, glass bottle with a plastic lid. Sil-nylon stuff sacks. Half a down sleeping bag, sewn of nylon. A Megamid shelter: a thin film of woven polymer strands and plastic hardware, made of oil.
My knife, quenched in oil: double oil.
Overnight paddling on the Big River Do I count the electricity in the camera batteries, charged in Alaska? Alaska’s power generation is 58% natural gas, 9% coal, and 12% oil.
I carry a satphone. I don’t much like it. It’s for sending texts, which GTT transforms into tweets. Plastic casing. Metal components. Battery. It talks to a satellite, built of tinfoil and lofted into space at tremendous energetic cost in space on top of a giant pillar of rocket fuel. It’s an ultimate triumph of the Age of Oil.
I search my gear for anything, somehow, not made of oil.
I have only one thing that isn’t functional, on this trek: tiny, pink paper heart. It was given to me by a spooky, raccoon-like girl. It can be reimbursed for chocolate pudding.
The paper came from a tree that was cut by a gas-powered chainsaw. The wood was pulped in a mill. It was turned inoto paper in an electrified factory. It was dried in ovens and shipped on container ships and 18-wheelers, burning petrol. Chocolate pudding is made from cocoa, harvested and shipped overseas, and from milk. The milk comes from cows fed on grain, which is grown in the Midwest. Both derive their calories from photosynthesis, but are suffused and augmented with oil.
The fact that she gave me a tiny pink paper heart: not oil.
High passes and hardware store glovesTo preserve the heart, I laminated it in clear plastic packing tape. Oil.
The wool hat, my sister knitted for me, in college, almost 20 years ago. Not oil.
I’ve worn this hat on virtually every serious trip I’ve done for two decades. I have a critical need for this hat-not-of-oil, besides as a headwarmer. It’s made of sheep wool: keratin, a protein. Unlike every single scrap of hydrocarbon fabric I carry, it is heat-resistant. It is not fuel. I use it as a pot holder, for my titanium mug… precisely because it is not oil.
It’s not just my stuff that’s made of oil.
The satphone reminds me of this. It talks to a satellite. That satellite and I have a lot in common. As a modern urban American, I am the coalescence of a massive spike of liberated fossil energy: a seething, scintillating star of ancient sunlight, transformed by alchemy from hydrocarbons that were stored for millions of years beneath the ground.
I am, in the big scheme of things, one of the most energy-intensive humans in the history of planet Earth. I have been lofted, here – to the wilds of Alaska – on wings of petrol. As I march across the tundra, diving through rain squalls and smelling of urethane and curry, I am an ambassador from another world. I am a glowing scion of the hydrocarbon empire, carrying my torch through the barbarian lands. The bears, and sheep, the caribou: they all know I’m not one of their own. Because I smell of oil.
Lower Twin Lake, filled with liquid crystal I am not self-reliant, any more than the satellite, executing its first orbit around the Earth, can claim to have got there on its own.
Fifty miles downstream of me, where the Stony River plunges deep into the Interior, is Lime Village, the closest human settlement. Lime Village is a tiny Athabascan village of less than thirty people. They live by largly traditional ways. They snare beaver, shoot ptarmigan, fish, hunt moose. They have snow machines, shotguns, and outboard motors. They are made, only partly, of oil.
As modern humans, we are intimately connected into the fossil biome. The health and extent of ancient peat bogs is, strangely enough, one of our vital environmental concerns. Those bogs transformed sunlight into organic matter, which was then metamorphosed inside the earth. Their chemical energy became our hydrocarbon fossil fuels. Fossil fuels, and in particular the transportable, storable energy of liquid petroleum fuel, is inextricably woven into our entire civilization’s infrastructure. Geysers of fossil fuel provide the energy budget to lift the skyscrapers of the modern age. It’s a gigantic subsidy, passed forward through geological time.
A dignified portrait of the adventurering lifeThe way this trip is going, I’d find myself very naked, a long ways out in the wilderness, if I suddenly ran out of oil.
So where do we go from here? Deep in the jungles of the Amazon, there are small tribes who have no contact with the outside world. They build fires by friction and hunt with hand-made arrows dipped in curare. They’re an energetic anomaly in the modern world: people who draw their energy and materials almost entirely from the living biome. They have no books. No monuments. No antibiotics. No hot showers. No car wrecks. They have few of the amenities that most of us are happy to receive. Most of us don’t turn down energy.
Are they the future? Is this our vision of sustainability, when the pump runs dry? These are people who are not yet made of oil.
[This post is derived from my journal entries on the Wild Revelations journey]