Zeno Swijtink
10-18-2009, 11:07 PM
Scenes from the Violent Twilight of Oil (https://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/17/scenes_from_the_violent_twilight_of_oil)
PETER MAASS - Foreign Policy
Peter Maass is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. His book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, from which these excerpts are adapted, comes out in September.
Across the globe, oil is invoked as an agent of destiny. Oil will make you rich, oil will make you poor, oil will bring war, oil will deliver peace, oil will shape our world as much as the glaciers did in the Ice Age.
But how?
Oil is not a machine that can be disassembled or schematized for comprehension. It is a liquid. How do you coax secrets from a liquid? To know a person, you talk to him. To know a country, you visit it. To know a religion, you study sacred texts. Oil defies these norms of interrogation. It is a commodity that is extracted, refined, shipped, and poured into gas tanks with few people seeing it. It has no voice, body, army, or dogma of its own. It is invisible most of the time, but like gravity, it influences everything.
Over the course of eight years, I tried to solve this puzzle by talking with people who worked in the industry, visiting people who were touched by its operations, and taking a look not only at oil fields but the battlefields they have spawned.
{snip}
continues at
Scenes from the Violent Twilight of Oil (https://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/17/scenes_from_the_violent_twilight_of_oil)
PETER MAASS - Foreign Policy
Peter Maass is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. His book, Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, from which these excerpts are adapted, comes out in September.
Across the globe, oil is invoked as an agent of destiny. Oil will make you rich, oil will make you poor, oil will bring war, oil will deliver peace, oil will shape our world as much as the glaciers did in the Ice Age.
But how?
Oil is not a machine that can be disassembled or schematized for comprehension. It is a liquid. How do you coax secrets from a liquid? To know a person, you talk to him. To know a country, you visit it. To know a religion, you study sacred texts. Oil defies these norms of interrogation. It is a commodity that is extracted, refined, shipped, and poured into gas tanks with few people seeing it. It has no voice, body, army, or dogma of its own. It is invisible most of the time, but like gravity, it influences everything.
Over the course of eight years, I tried to solve this puzzle by talking with people who worked in the industry, visiting people who were touched by its operations, and taking a look not only at oil fields but the battlefields they have spawned.
{snip}
continues at
Scenes from the Violent Twilight of Oil (https://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/17/scenes_from_the_violent_twilight_of_oil)