On the morning of April 21, 2010, Sara Lattis Stone began frantically calling the burn units of various hospitals in Alabama and Louisiana. She was searching for news about her husband, Stephen, who worked on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico where a massive explosion had occurred. The blast took place the day before Stephen was scheduled to return home from his latest three-week hitch on the rig, a semisubmersible floating unit called the Deepwater Horizon.
In the hours after a spokeswoman from Transocean, the company that owned the Deepwater Horizon, called to tell her that an “incident” had required the rig to be evacuated, Sara veered between panic and denial. One minute, she was telling herself that Stephen was fine. The next, she was convinced that she would never see him again. On Facebook, she came across frightening messages—“the water’s on fire!”, “the rig is burning”—posted by the spouses of other workers. At one point, Sara got on the phone with one of them, a woman who had her TV tuned to the same channel that she was watching, which was airing live coverage of the blowout. As they peered at the screen, both heard the same update, describing the blast as a catastrophic accident and raising the possibility that no one on the rig had survived. The news prompted both of them to drop their phones and scream.
Sara lived in Katy, Texas, a town just west of Houston where she’d grown up and where she and Stephen had settled after getting married. The day after he got home from his hitch, they were planning to meet with a real estate agent, having just gotten preapproved for a loan to buy a house. Now Sara wondered if Stephen would ever come home. None of the hospital burn units that she tried reaching had any information about him. Eventually, she received another call from Transocean, informing her that although the blowout had caused multiple fatalities, Stephen was among those who’d managed to escape from the burning rig. The survivors were now being transported by ferry to a hotel in New Orleans, she was told. After consulting with her mother, Sara tossed some belongings into a suitcase, drove to the Houston airport, and boarded the next available flight to the Gulf. The following morning, at around 3:30, she got a call from Stephen, who told her he was on his way to the hotel where she and other family members had gathered to wait. “Are you okay?” she asked him. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said.
Later, when she saw him shuffle through the hall that had been cordoned off for surviving crew members, she knew immediately that he wasn’t fine. His expression was blank, and like the other survivors, he looked shell-shocked and traumatized.
“When he walked in, from the look in his eyes, it was obvious that something horrible had happened,” she recalled.
Eating meat produced in industrial slaughterhouses is one way that consumers benefit from dirty work performed in distant places on their behalf. Relying on fossil fuels that are drilled, mined, and fracked to sustain their lifestyles is another. In 1937, after visiting the coalfields of Yorkshire and Lancashire the year before, a British writer named Eric Arthur Blair, better known by his pen name, George Orwell, reflected on society’s dependence on the people who extracted these resources from beneath the earth. What Orwell found after descending into the pits—“heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space”—struck him as a “picture of hell,” teeming with miners whose exertions were as invisible as they were essential to society. “In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil,” Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier. “He is a sort of grimy caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported.”
“Practically everything we do, from eating an ice to crossing the Atlantic, and from baking a loaf to writing a novel, involves the use of coal, directly or indirectly,” Orwell went on. When you see workers stoop down and shovel coal onto conveyer belts inside the narrow, dust-choked tunnels, “it is brought home to you, as you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior. You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop of Canterbury and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants—all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.”
In Orwell’s day, the griminess of coal mining—the ash and dust, the foul air—was physical, staining the clothing, as well as the faces and bodies, of the workers who ventured underground. (“The most definitely distinctive thing about them is the blue scars on their noses,” Orwell wrote. “Every miner has blue scars on his nose and forehead, and will carry them to his death.”) By the time Stephen Stone found himself on the Deepwater Horizon, the taint of working in the extraction industry was less physical than moral. People who cared about the environment associated the oil industry with events like the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, which blackened the shorelines of Prince William Sound, and with carbon emissions that imperiled the planet. It was an industry whose pipelines and projects threatened delicate ecosystems like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska; an industry from which more and more reputable institutions—universities, philanthropic organizations—had begun divesting; an industry that anyone concerned about the fate of the earth would sooner protest than turn to for employment. JOBS FOR CLEAN ENERGY, NOT FOR DIRTY OIL, read a sign at a rally on a college campus in Iowa, expressing a view that more and more environmentalists, scientists, and young Americans shared.
But while condemning the greed of oil companies was easy enough, avoiding relying on the product they produced was more difficult, the evidence suggested. For all the talk of shifting to wind and solar power, fossil fuels still supplied 84 percent of the world’s energy in 2019, and in many places their use was increasing. Part of the reason for this was the emergence of a middle class in countries like China and India. Another factor was the massive carbon footprint of the United States, which made up less than 5 percent of the world’s population but consumed a quarter of the world’s energy. More than eighty years after The Road to Wigan Pier was published, “dirty oil” was no less important in the metabolism of global capitalism than coal had been in Orwell’s time, thanks in no small part to the lifestyles of Americans and to the policies of their leaders. Although he spoke frequently about the importance of addressing climate change, Barack Obama presided over a massive increase in crude oil production, which grew by 3.6 million barrels a day during his tenure. When Obama left office, the United States was the world’s leading petroleum producer.* His successor, Donald Trump, was an even more unabashed promoter of the fossil fuel industry, rolling back environmental regulations to restore America’s “energy dominance.”
Stephen Stone did not grow up dreaming of working in the energy industry. He was far more interested in enjoying his natural surroundings. Throughout his childhood, his favorite place to spend time was outdoors, swimming in the Tennessee River or trekking through the wilderness near his home in Grant, Alabama, a small town nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians. The bucolic setting suited him, at least until he got a bit older, when life in a backwoods town with limited opportunities began to feel stifling. During what would have been his senior year in high school, he started working the night shift at a rug factory in nearby Scottsboro, the same factory where his mother worked after his parents got divorced. After graduating, he quit the rug factory and enlisted in the navy. Two and a half years later, in 2007, he was discharged, mainly because he’d spent too much time drinking and partying at the string of sun-splashed naval bases (Aruba, Panama City) where he was stationed. Upon returning to Grant, he started calling various oil companies to see if he could land a job on a rig, both because he’d heard that oil companies liked to hire former navy guys and because the work paid well, far more than any other job a high school graduate from rural Alabama was likely to stumble across. Some time later, he flew to Houston to interview for a position as a roustabout with GlobalSantaFe, an offshore drilling company that would later be bought by Transocean.
It was on this visit to Houston that Stephen decided to strike up a conversation with the redhead sitting next to him on the airport shuttle. The redhead was Sara, who had just come back from a trip to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. They chatted for three hours, bonding over everything from their shared southern heritage—he was from Alabama, she from Texas—to their fathers’ fondness for the same restaurant in Houston, a clam-and-oyster bar called Captain Tom’s. Afterward, they exchanged phone numbers. Within a year, they’d gotten married.
In some ways, Sara and Stephen made for an odd couple: she was a college graduate with an introspective manner; he was a good old boy who was quick with a joke and liked to laugh and party. From the moment they started talking, though, Sara was struck by Stephen’s intelligence, the books he mentioned reading, and the thoughtful gaze in his eyes. Whenever he would go offshore on a hitch in the years to come, Sara would notice, Stephen made sure to pack some reading—novels, poetry, philosophy. He also brought along a couple of pocket-size notebooks that he would fill with poems and drawings. To some college graduates, marrying a rig worker, even one who wrote poetry in his spare time, might have seemed like a step down. To Sara, it felt natural. Virtually everyone she knew in Katy came from a family with ties to the oil industry. Her own father had worked in the industry for decades, which was another thing she and Stephen had in common. The rhythm of the lifestyle, marked by two- and three-week hitches during which rig workers were separated from their spouses, was familiar to Sara, who often went months without seeing her father during her childhood. When Stephen would leave on hitches, she would miss him, but she also liked having time to focus on her own interests, in particular her art. In college, she’d majored in painting and photography, visual mediums through which she’d always found it easier to express herself than words. After she graduated, one of the first jobs she landed was as a fine art reproduction artist, copying paintings that were sold to doctors’ offices and furniture stores like Ethan Allen. The pay was modest, and duplicating other artists’ compositions felt strange to her, but the job boosted her confidence and made her realize how important it was for her to find an outlet for her creative impulses.
In the aftermath of the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon, Sara’s creative impulses went into overdrive. After seeing images of the spill on television, she persuaded Stephen to take a road trip through the Gulf so that she could film what was happening and take some pictures. She also started painting more seriously. Among the canvases she composed was a series of portraits of the blast’s survivors. The paintings were drafted, fittingly, in oil and were inspired by a visit that she and Stephen paid to Washington, D.C., a few weeks after the blowout, where they and other survivors were invited to testify at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Deepwater disaster—a disaster that was still unfolding and that, upon closer inspection, was hardly a surprise. The immediate cause of the blast on the Deepwater Horizon was a bubble of methane gas that floated up through the drill column, most likely because of a breach in the cement casing that enclosed it, and spread across the deck before igniting into a deadly fireball. In the view of many analysts, the deeper cause was a lack of attention to risk—and an excessive focus on profits—that characterized the entire oil industry and was particularly pronounced at BP, the company that leased the rig from Transocean and owned the exclusive rights to the Macondo Prospect well, an oil and gas reservoir located forty-nine miles off the coast of Louisiana. In the 1990s, BP had undergone a restructuring, outsourcing many technical functions and concentrating on maximizing production in each of its so-called strategic production units. The company’s emphasis on the bottom line, affirmed in the motto “Make every dollar count,” drew praise from business analysts. Safety experts were more alarmed. In 2005, an explosion at a BP refinery in Texas City killed fifteen workers and injured hundreds more. An investigation conducted afterward by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board found “serious deficiencies” in “safety culture” at the refinery and faulted BP for pushing for 25 percent budget cuts “even though much of the refinery’s infrastructure and process equipment were in disrepair.” Between 2007 and 2010, OSHA cited BP for 760 safety violations, by far the most of any major oil company. Leasing the Deepwater Horizon cost BP one million dollars a day, and the Macondo well had fallen behind schedule, ratcheting up the pressure to brush aside concerns that might have slowed the pace of drilling. Some workers feared that raising such concerns would get them fired, which helps explain why an array of ominous signs—problems with the cementing, flaws in the blowout preventer—were ignored. Hours before the rig went up in flames, a BP executive on the rig congratulated the crew for seven years without a “lost-time incident.” After the blowout, BP scrambled to contain the oil gushing out of the well, which remained uncapped for eighty-seven days, blackening and befouling everything it touched. Tar balls washed up on the shores of beaches in multiple states. Shrimp and oyster harvesters were put out of business. By the time the Macondo well was shut, an estimated 210 million gallons of oil had leaked out, twenty times the volume of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
There were also human costs, which Sara sought to capture in her paintings. One of them was of Chris Jones, whose brother, Gordon, was one of eleven workers killed in the disaster. Sara sat next to him during the congressional hearing. In Sara’s portrait, Jones’s lips are pursed and his face, painted ash blue, is creased with anguish. Another painting depicted a woman with her mouth agape and tears shimmering in her bright blue eyes. It was a portrait of Natalie Roshto, whose husband, Shane, also died on the rig. Titled Survivors, the paintings were stark and vivid, capturing the raw grief that filled the room. But the portrait that Sara drew of Stephen captured something different. Based on a photo that was taken during his testimony, it shows a bearded figure with a vacant, faraway expression in his eyes. He does not look grief stricken so much as bewildered and unmoored.
The bewilderment was still apparent when I met Stephen several years later, at a bar in San Clemente, California, where he and Sara were living at the time. They were staying in an apartment that Sara’s parents had bought (her father grew up in California and was planning to move there after retiring). Stephen was in his late twenties, with a shaggy mop of chestnut-colored hair and languid, downcast eyes. At the bar, he was taciturn, nodding occasionally at something Sara said while straining to keep his gaze from drifting off. Unlike some of the workers on the Deepwater Horizon, he had managed to escape from the rig without sustaining any burns or physical injuries. But as I would come to learn, the absence of visible wounds was a mixed blessing, prompting friends to wonder what was wrong with him and exacerbating the shame he felt for struggling to move on. Since the explosion, he’d been unable to hold down a job. He avoided social gatherings. He also had trouble sleeping. Not coincidentally, the explosion on the rig had happened at night, collapsing the stairwell above the room in which Stephen had fallen asleep after completing a work shift. The blast startled him awake and sent him racing into the change room, where he slipped on a pair of fire-retardant coveralls and fumbled his way toward the deck, at which point he saw that the entire rig was smoldering and heard the panicked screams of his coworkers. It was an experience he now feared reliving every time he shut his eyes, Sara had come to realize. “The way I understand it is, he’s constantly preparing for that wake-up,” she said.
In the days that followed, I visited Stephen and Sara several times in their apartment, a two-story dwelling in a complex of look-alike gray bungalows where they lived with a terrier named Kale and two pet ferrets. With each successive visit, Stephen grew a bit more open and talkative. He told me about his upbringing in Grant. He described his stint in the navy. He recited some of his poetry and showed me his collection of books—Shakespeare, Yeats, Thoreau. The blowout had not diminished his appetite for reading, but the genre that captivated him had changed. He now gravitated mainly to science fiction and had gotten particularly obsessed with outer space, which Sara interpreted as a sign of the compulsion he felt “to be away from reality, away from earth.” Stephen did not dispute this interpretation. He also did not deny that after the blowout another way he’d tried to escape from reality was by consuming large amounts of alcohol. The liquor helped him fall asleep at night, but it also fueled some erratic behavior. One night, after drinking with a friend, he grabbed the keys to their car, zoomed down a one-way street in the wrong direction, and rammed into a brick wall. The accident fractured vertebrae in his neck and collapsed a lung. When we met, Stephen had cut back on the drinking, but an air of melancholy enveloped him. Much of the time, so did a plume of marijuana smoke. Throughout my visit, he sat on an L-shaped couch in the living room of the apartment, sipping black coffee from a green mug and, every few minutes, lighting up and taking another toke from a bowl of weed. The pot was medical marijuana that a psychiatrist had prescribed to quell his anxiety. The same psychiatrist had diagnosed him with PTSD.
Given what he’d been through—a near-death experience that shattered his sense of security—this diagnosis made sense. Like military veterans who’d survived IED explosions in Iraq, Stephen was sensitive to loud noises and given to paranoid fears and panic attacks. The rattle of ice in the freezer was enough to set him off sometimes, Sara told me. A few days before I arrived, she’d found a knife on the dashboard of their car. Stephen had pulled it out after becoming convinced that the driver he’d spotted in the rearview mirror was following him.
But as with many military veterans, there was something else that seemed to afflict Stephen no less: not fear but anger and disillusionment. These feelings percolated immediately after the blowout, he told me, when the rig’s survivors arrived at the hotel in New Orleans. They were exhausted and still reeling from the shock, yet before getting to see their families, Stephen said, they were taken to a meeting room where a Transocean manager delivered a speech that sounded to him like an exercise in spin control. The experience left a bad taste in Stephen’s mouth. A few weeks later, a Transocean representative reached out to him and, over a cup of coffee at Denny’s, offered him five thousand dollars for the personal belongings he’d lost on the rig, which he accepted. Then the representative asked him to sign a document affirming that he had not been injured. Stephen was dumbfounded. “I’m not signing this,” he told the representative. “I don’t know if I’m injured yet—this just happened.”
To both Transocean and BP, the survivors were not human beings who deserved to be treated with dignity, Stephen was coming to feel, but a potential legal liability that needed to be contained. To people with a cynical view of the oil industry, this would not have come as a surprise. But Stephen was not such a person. When he applied for the job at Transocean, he understood that working on an offshore oil rig could be dangerous, but he also assumed the industry did everything possible to protect workers. “I thought everything was followed to a T safety-wise,” he said. After the blowout, as he read about how little money oil companies spent on safety and how many warning signs on the Deepwater Horizon had been ignored, a wave of disillusionment washed over him. “Who the fuck was I working for?” he wondered.
Stephen wondered this again when, within a year of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Transocean awarded lavish bonuses to several senior executives for overseeing the “Best Year in Safety Performance” in the company’s history. The decision was announced only a few months after a nonpartisan national commission submitted a report about the Deepwater spill to President Obama. Based on an exhaustive six-month investigation, the report linked the blowout to “a series of identifiable mistakes made by BP, Halliburton, and Transocean that reveal such systemic failures in risk management that they place in doubt the safety culture of the entire industry.” The report listed nine questionable decisions that were made when less risky alternatives were available, alternatives rejected because pursuing them might have cost money and time. When Stephen learned about Transocean’s “Best Year in Safety Performance” bonuses, he was still a Transocean employee. Afterward, he submitted an angry resignation letter. “I quit,” he said. “I was like, fuck you guys. I don’t want to be a part of your company.”
In Achilles in Vietnam, the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay argued that a primary cause of moral injury among military veterans was the betrayal of “what’s right” by their commanders, giving rise to mênis, a Greek term that Shay likened to “indignant rage … the kind of rage arising from social betrayal that impairs a person’s dignity.” According to Shay, this is what consumes Achilles after his commander, Agamemnon, violates his sense of moral order in the Iliad. It is what Shay found again and again among veterans who felt their dignity had been trampled on in Vietnam. And it is what appeared to grip Stephen, who felt deeply betrayed by an industry that upended not only his sense of security but also his moral bearings and his trust.
“I think there’s the personal betrayal of the company-employee relationship,” he said. “But there’s an even larger sense of betrayal. I didn’t think the industry was this bad.” He paused. “It just kind of takes some hope from humanity, shatters your illusions a little bit.”
There was one other betrayal that appeared to weigh on Stephen: the betrayal of himself, the part of him that loved nature and, after the blowout, as the scale of the disaster became clear, felt dirtied and implicated. He felt this in particular on the road trip that Sara persuaded him to take through some of the places in the Gulf where the pollution from the spill had begun to wash up. Among their destinations was Dauphin Island, on Alabama’s Gulf Coast. During his childhood, Stephen had vacationed there with his family. It was one of his favorite places, famous for the ribbon of pristine white sand that graced its shores. After the Deepwater spill, much of the island was surrounded by orange booms, and the sand was stained with oil sludge, a sight that filled Stephen with both shame and sadness. “This great place from my childhood was getting shit on,” he said, “and I was part of the group that shit on it.”
For Sara, too, seeing the impact of the spill dredged up difficult feelings about the world she’d grown up in, a world she realized she had long viewed through rose-tinted glasses. Throughout her upbringing, she told me, she was taught that oil rigs were actually good for the environment because, when they sank, they created reefs for fish. The footage she recorded on the trip through the Gulf told a different story. Later, when she watched BP air ads on television burnishing its commitment to the environment, she was furious. But unlike Stephen, Sara bristled at blanket condemnations of the oil industry that failed to distinguish between companies that behaved recklessly and those that at least tried to act responsibly. She also bristled at environmental groups that, after the blowout, seemed to focus far more attention on the pelicans and dolphins poisoned by the oil spill than the rig workers who’d died. Every day on the news, it seemed, she would see images of dead seabirds and marine mammals. The faces of the rig workers never appeared. Sara could not understand why they were so invisible. “It’s just weird,” she said.
But Stephen did not seem to find it so weird. Most of the people he worked with were “blue-collar guys” and “country bumpkins” from backwoods towns like the one he’d grown up in, he noted. The kinds of people “superior persons” looked down on, in other words. Then he mentioned another reason why the public might find it easier to sympathize with dead dolphins than with workers like him.
“People see the environment as completely innocent,” Stephen said, “whereas we, just being in that industry, you know, you kind of brought it on yourself.”
Stephen did not seem to begrudge people for feeling this way, and arguably with good reason. He had, after all, collected a paycheck from Transocean, making upwards of sixty thousand dollars a year as a roustabout, a salary that was bound to increase as he gained more experience (roustabouts were entry-level deckhands who were paid less than anyone on rigs save for the mess hall chefs). Were it not for the blowout, he probably would have continued working in the industry, he told me, for the same reason most of the blue-collar guys on the Deepwater Horizon did: the money was good. The same incentive explained why thousands of working-class men flocked to places like the Williston Basin, home to the Bakken Formation, during the fracking boom, where drillers and riggers could sometimes pocket more than ten thousand dollars a month. Some of Stephen’s coworkers on the Deepwater Horizon earned six-figure salaries despite having nothing more than a high school diploma. As with fracking, the job was hard—twelve-hour shifts during which Stephen raced around stacking equipment, mixing drilling mud, and performing other menial tasks. But it beat living paycheck to paycheck with few benefits or vacations like everyone he knew back in Grant. When Stephen came home from hitches, he and Sara would often hit the road, taking trips to places like Zion National Park in Utah without worrying about when the next paycheck would arrive.
“A path to a life otherwise out of reach” was the phrase that a team of reporters from The New York Times used to describe how the crew members on the Deepwater Horizon viewed their jobs, a life with its share of perks and benefits. If environmentalists had little sympathy for the workers who enjoyed these perks while ignoring the “dirty facts” about the fossil fuel industry cataloged in a report published by the Natural Resources Defense Council—water pollution, land degradation, the discharge of three-fourths of America’s carbon emissions—who, really, could blame them? These dirty facts were real, Stephen acknowledged. On the other hand, it was not lost on either him or Sara that a lot of people who saw rig workers as complicit in these dirty facts were happy enough to pump gasoline into their SUVs and minivans without feeling the least bit sullied themselves. “We like to forget that our everyday lives are what’s making that the reality,” Stephen said of an industry that catered to America’s insatiable demand for cheap oil, just as companies like Sanderson Farms and Tyson catered to the demand for cheap meat.
Who ended up doing this work was shaped by class but also, perhaps even more so, by region and geography. In 1994, the sociologists William Freudenburg and Robert Gramling examined the regional patterns in a book titled Oil in Troubled Waters, which compared the status and prevalence of offshore drilling in two states with large shorelines, Louisiana and California. It was in California that in 1969 a blowout on an oil platform in the Santa Barbara Channel first drew attention to the environmental risks of offshore drilling. The spill sparked widespread outrage, galvanizing support for the National Environmental Policy Act, a landmark law that was enacted the following year. It also prompted the then secretary of the interior, Walter Hickel, to issue a moratorium on offshore drilling in California’s waters. Decades later, few residents of the Golden State were clamoring to change this, Freudenburg and Gramling found. Virtually every Californian they interviewed opposed offshore drilling. The opposition was so uniform that they started to ask subjects if they simply knew anyone in California who held a different view. Virtually no one did.
In southern Louisiana, a series of blowouts also took place in the early 1970s, polluting the Gulf and, in some cases, causing fatalities. But unlike in California, no moratorium on offshore drilling ensued. By the time Freudenburg and Gramling conducted their study, more than thirteen thousand production wells had been drilled in the Gulf of Mexico’s outer continental shelf. Once again, the subjects of their study all seemed to hold the same view of this activity, only this time it was the opposite view: in Louisiana, opposition to offshore drilling was nonexistent. Only a handful of respondents knew someone who harbored even mild reservations about it.
What accounted for these starkly divergent attitudes? One explanation was ideological: California was a liberal state whose residents tended to care about the environment and distrust industry, whereas Louisiana was a conservative one where people held favorable views of business.
But the divergence also reflected radically different economic prospects. As Freudenburg and Gramling noted, the Californians they interviewed did not seem to care that closing the coast to drilling might hamper economic development. In fact, many of them were transplants from other states who had chosen to live in Northern California “to get away from that kind of shit,” as one respondent put it, describing rigs and derricks as eyesores that would defile the state’s natural beauty, which needed to be protected from development. Louisianans did not have the luxury of thinking this way. The oil industry meant jobs in a place that was starved of them. To no small extent, this belief helped explain the ideological differences, Freudenburg and Gramling’s study suggested.
More than a decade later, the Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild discovered something similar when she began interviewing Tea Party activists in Louisiana’s bayou. Like her neighbors in Berkeley, Hochschild’s subjects did not like the idea of eating oil-tainted shrimp and seeing their lakes and rivers polluted. But many saw drilling as essential to their survival. “The more oil, the more jobs,” went the logic Hochschild encountered. “The more jobs, the more prosperity.” Which, in turn, led people to support luring oil companies to Louisiana by offering them lower taxes and less government regulation. Unlike Freudenburg and Gramling, Hochschild did not find that support for drilling was monolithic. Younger, college-educated Louisianans who lived in urban areas often held different views. But among longtime residents of southern Louisiana who lived in smaller towns and had less education, it was extremely pervasive. As it happens, these residents fit the demographic described in a consulting report Hochschild came across, advising companies that owned plants or refineries that emitted large amounts of pollution on where to locate. According to the report, the ideal location was a place with a high concentration of “least resistant personalities.” One characteristic of “least resistant personalities” was that they were longtime residents of small towns. Another was that they had only high school educations.
It was easy for the residents of liberal, eco-conscious states to view such people with condescension while conveniently forgetting how dependent on them they were. “The centrality of oil and gas exploration to the Gulf economy is not widely appreciated by many Americans, who enjoy the benefits of the energy essential to their transportation, but bear none of the direct risks,” noted the national commission report on the Deepwater Horizon disaster. People in California could essentially off-load these risks to less privileged Louisianans who did the dirty work of running petrochemical plants and drilling offshore for them. And yet the truth is that even in southern Louisiana energy companies were not always welcomed with open arms. Back in the 1930s, fishers and trappers in the Bayou region expressed bitter resentment at the maudits Texiens (damn Texans) who began dredging canals and drilling holes into salt domes to extract oil from beneath the land that was their main source of livelihood. “It was like we had been invaded,” one resident complained. Over time, however, the ill will gave way to pragmatism. The opportunity to work in the oil industry came to be appreciated in places like Black Bayou, home to an oil field run by Shell, and later, as companies shifted their focus to offshore drilling, in the towns and parishes dotting Louisiana’s coast.
By the end of the 1990s, nearly one-third of America’s domestic energy supply came from offshore production in the Gulf of Mexico. To Louisianans who found jobs in the petroleum industry, this was both a source of livelihood and a point of pride, even if serving as “America’s Energy Coast” also had downsides, including the highest level of air pollution in the country and the degradation of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands. In American Energy, Imperiled Coast, Jason Theriot, a historian who grew up in southern Louisiana and was the grandson of an oil worker, described how, in the late 1990s, some Louisiana politicians began to argue that their state deserved more help to offset these costs. Much of the oil and gas that flowed through the state’s pipelines ended up servicing other parts of the country, they pointed out, absorbed into the metabolism of prosperous regions like New England. Meanwhile, Louisiana’s coastal communities were sinking, leaving the residents of cities like New Orleans more vulnerable to storms and hurricanes, a problem likely to grow worse in the future, thanks to rising sea levels precipitated by climate change. Louisiana “has not received appropriate compensation for the use of its land and the environmental impacts of this production,” argued Senator Mary Landrieu, who introduced a bill, the Conservation and Reinvestment Act, that called for her state to receive more of the revenue generated by offshore drilling to help restore its wetlands. Notably, however, the leaders pushing for reinvestment stopped short of threatening legal action, much less of calling for a moratorium on offshore drilling, steps that risked alienating an industry on which Louisiana relied. As Theriot observed, “Those leaders carefully walked the fine line between pursuing the restoration agenda and preserving the main driver of the state’s economy.”
The desire to preserve this driver was understandable in a state that ranked among the poorest in the country. As a way to foster long-term prosperity, it was also likely to be futile. While boosters hailed energy production as a catalyst for growth, studies showed that communities that relied too heavily on resource extraction often suffered from persistent poverty. Such communities were vulnerable to dislocations when prices fell. Many also underinvested in human capital, a problem exacerbated by industry’s demand for tax breaks, which made it hard to fund schools and other public institutions. A striking example of this was Cancer Alley, an industrial zone in Louisiana that was home to 150 refineries and chemical plants, facilities that belched out vast quantities of pollution but that often avoided paying taxes, which was why the quality of the public schools was no better than the air quality. “Without property taxes, these parishes do not have money for their schools,” Cynthia Sarthou, the executive director of the Gulf Restoration Network, told me. “They get little or no money and all the pollution.” In the rest of Louisiana, it wasn’t a whole lot better, said Sarthou, who likened the state’s dependence on oil to an abusive relationship in which the victim kept coming back because she feared it was all she had. “We get the promise of income, so we put up with it,” she said. “Yet we’re still one of the poorest states in the nation.”
A few days after meeting Sarthou, I saw some of this poverty up close on a visit to Morgan City, a port town where, in 1947, an offshore well was drilled beyond the sight of land for the first time. A plaque commemorating this milestone had been erected on the median of the first road I turned onto, next to a sculpture of an oil rig that looked weather-beaten and oxidized, with patches of rust spreading over its corroded metal facade. In the 1970s, after the OPEC embargo caused the price of oil to rise, Morgan City had been a boomtown, its harbor jammed with rigs and its streets crowded with people who came looking for jobs. So many outsiders flocked to town that “roustabout camps” sprang up to accommodate them. But by the mid-1980s, oil prices had fallen and the boom petered out. When I visited, the roustabout camps were long gone, and the only rig I saw in Morgan City’s harbor was Mr. Charlie, a rusted yellow pile that was now the main attraction at the Rig Museum. It was located at the end of a gravel road abutting the harbor and offered tours to visitors curious to stroll aboard an authentic oil rig. On my tour, which a couple of French tourists joined, a guide explained that Mr. Charlie had stopped drilling wells in 1986 and would have been converted into scrap metal if it hadn’t been saved by a local man named Virgil who decided to turn it into a tourist attraction. A modest attraction, to judge by the size of our entourage and the humble quarters of the museum, which was housed in a trailer park. After the tour, I chatted with Bryce Merrill, a former oil industry worker who was now the museum’s curator. Merrill didn’t hide the fact that Morgan City had seen better days. “There used to be seventy rigs out here,” he said, pointing to the harbor. “Now there are five. We’ve lost twenty-five hundred people in the last four years, and about twenty-five to thirty businesses have closed.”
After stopping for lunch, I paid a visit to James Hotard, a short, barrel-chested man who worked as a training manager at Oceaneering, which supplied subsea hardware to offshore rigs. Hotard recalled the time when virtually anyone in Morgan City could find a job. “You didn’t even have to graduate high school,” he said. “Just get to eleventh grade, say I’m done with school, step out, and you could make forty to fifty thousand dollars as a welder.” Nowadays, he told me, young people with ambitions went to college and, upon getting their diplomas, moved elsewhere (his own daughter had just graduated from LSU and was heading to Houston). Driving through Morgan City, I didn’t find it hard to fathom why. Empty storefronts lined the moribund commercial center, which looked less like a boomtown than a ghost town. The housing on the residential streets was in a state of dramatic disrepair—porches crumbling, roofs moldering, wooden beams jutting out of run-down shacks. In front of one of the houses, I spotted a weather-beaten basketball hoop with a shredded net hanging from the rim. Next to it was an empty shopping cart. The image reminded me of something I’d seen before, though I couldn’t recall exactly what. Later, it came to me—the visit I’d paid to Florida City to see the Dade Correctional Institution, during which I’d stopped to talk to Jimmy, the man who was selling mangoes and lychees on the street, next to an empty shopping cart.
Just as dirty work was disproportionately allotted to certain classes, so, too, was it concentrated in certain places: “rural ghettos” where prisons like Dade were located; remote industrial parks where slaughterhouses set up shop; towns full of “least resistant personalities” where refineries were built and coastlines were opened to offshore drilling, creating eyesores that the residents of places like Marin County, California, were spared. The geography of dirty work both mirrored and reinforced race and class inequality, ensuring that stigmatized industries and stigmatized institutions were situated in less affluent parts of the country, places like “Cancer Alley.”
To be sure, not everyone saw these industries as stigmatized or regretted working in them. A few days before visiting Morgan City, I had dinner with Rick Farmer, a drilling engineer. We met in La Villa Circle, a gated community near Lafayette where he lived in a large brick house with a columned porch and a pair of magnolias out front. Farmer had grown up in more hardscrabble circumstances. The son of farmers, he cut his teeth in the oil industry when he was eighteen, working as a roustabout while attending Mississippi State University, where he earned a degree in petroleum engineering. He had just turned sixty and was financially secure and openly grateful for a career that had enabled him to avoid the drudgery of a conventional day job. Working offshore was “an adventure,” he said. He loved the feeling of being out at sea and the rush that came from getting things done. He also didn’t mind the salary, mentioning that he made between $350,000 and $400,000 a year.
If this was dirty work, a lot of Americans would have happily signed up for it, I thought while listening to Farmer describe how lucky he felt in the brick-floored kitchen of his spacious home. But not everyone would have considered him lucky, nor had he always felt this way himself. In 1984, he was pulling a well apart when some equipment collapsed. The falling debris instantly killed one of his coworkers and left Farmer permanently disabled, bound to the wheelchair in which he sat during dinner. His house was designed to accommodate his disability, with halls and doorways that were wide enough for him to maneuver around. This had not always been the case on the rigs he’d worked on. At dinner, he recalled having to crawl on his hands and knees to go to the bathroom. He also recalled the despondency he felt after the accident, when he took to drinking to try to dull the pain. When the pain persisted, he contemplated suicide. “Two years after it happened, I was ready to end it,” he said. Eventually, some friends persuaded him to go to a rehabilitation center, where he met with a psychiatrist who handed him a pillow that he tried with all his might to tear apart. “Why me?” he howled. Then Farmer, who’d been raised Catholic, flung aside the pillow and thought of the torment endured by Christ during the Crucifixion. “We are all forsaken,” he told me he realized in the throes of his despair. He had been a devout churchgoer ever since.
Surviving a near-death experience was not unusual in the oil industry. The person who’d introduced me to Farmer was Lillian Espinoza-Gala. She lived in Lafayette, in a wood-frame house crammed with books about the oil industry, for which she began working in 1973, becoming one of the first female roustabouts in the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, there were no separate bathrooms for women on rigs, she said. There were also few jobs for which Espinoza-Gala seemed less suited. Although her father worked in the oil industry, she had drifted in a different direction, joining the peace movement after several of her high school classmates returned from Vietnam in body bags. At one antiwar rally, she handed out a pamphlet that read, “Big Oil Is Raping the Earth.” Eventually, after a series of adventures that took her all the way to Canada, where her relationship with a charismatic peace activist went awry, she returned to Louisiana and began looking for a job so that she could pay the tuition to go back to school. One day, her father came home and told her that offshore companies were going to start hiring women. “I could do that,” she said. Some time later, she went on her first hitch, pulling her sandy-blond hair beneath a hard hat and trading in the jeans swathed in antiwar patches that she often wore for a pair of coveralls. All her friends in the peace movement were appalled. To her surprise, she actually liked the job. Working on an offshore rig was like “living on a castle in the middle of the ocean,” she told me. There was a lot about the job she came to love.
What she did not love was seeing more people die for no good reason. On two occasions, she was on a rig when fatal accidents occurred. One of the accidents, in 1981, caused by corroded wellheads about which she had tried to sound the alarm, killed a welder and injured her severely. Afterward, she was helicoptered to the ER, blood spattered and unconscious. The accident shattered several bones in her right hand, which was permanently disfigured, and ended her career as a roustabout. But it eventually propelled her to embark on a new career, as an industry safety consultant determined to prevent other rig workers from going through similar ordeals.
To some extent, accidents on offshore rigs were unavoidable. But the toll in lives was not the same in all countries. Between 2004 and 2009, fatalities in the offshore industry were “more than four times higher per person-hours worked in U.S. waters than in European waters, even though many of the same companies work in both venues,” noted the national commission report submitted to President Obama after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. The report traced this disparity back to the 1980s, when a series of deadly accidents took place, including a blowout on the Piper Alpha, a platform in the North Sea, that killed 167 people. In Norway and the United Kingdom, the response was to enact stronger regulations that put the burden of preventing future disasters on industry. The United States adopted a laxer approach. One reason for this was that the oil industry vigorously opposed regulation. Another was that the U.S. Minerals Management Service, the federal agency responsible for overseeing safety and environmental standards in the Gulf, also oversaw the collection of royalties from oil and gas leasing operations. After taxes, these royalties were the second-largest source of government revenue, which helped explain why the MMS approached industry “more as a partner than a policeman,” as one agency official quoted in the national commission report put it. None of this changed as oil companies started drilling riskier wells in deeper waters. Nor did it alter much as different administrations took office. As the national commission’s report noted, “The safety risks had dramatically increased with the shift to the Gulf’s deepwaters, but Presidents, members of Congress, and agency leadership had become preoccupied for decades with the enormous revenues generated by such drilling rather than focused on ensuring its safety. With the benefit of hindsight, the only question had become not whether an accident would happen, but when.”
Espinoza-Gala served as a consultant on the national commission report, helping to write the chapter on worker safety. The Deepwater Horizon disaster did lead to some positive changes, she told me. The MMS was replaced by the newly formed Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement. New safety regulations were passed. Yet Espinoza-Gala was understandably in no mood to harp on this progress on the day we got together. We met on May 2, 2019, which happened to be the thirty-eighth anniversary of the accident that almost killed her. The day before, the Trump administration put out a revised well-control rule that gutted the safety regulations passed after the Deepwater blowout. Under the new rules, independent auditors were no longer required to inspect safety equipment on rigs. Testing requirements for blowout preventers were also weakened. Overseeing these changes was Scott Angelle, a close ally of industry whom Trump had appointed to run BSEE and who proceeded to meet repeatedly with executives from oil companies that had been cited for violating safety regulations. “Help is on the way,” Angelle promised the executives. Espinoza-Gala did not mince words about what delivering on this promise would mean for rig workers. “He has the potential to kill people that are connected to this community, and it will be on his soul the rest of his life,” she said of Angelle, who was from Lafayette. Yet she acknowledged that it might be wishful thinking to assume this would weigh on his conscience. Espinoza-Gala told me that years earlier, when Angelle was running for Congress, Espinoza-Gala told me that she started calling various candidates in the race to ask them what they were going to do about offshore safety. “Offshore safety?” one of the candidates responded. “That’s not an issue, Lillian. There’s no jobs! The only thing people care about in Louisiana is jobs.”
Just as Louisianans did not have the luxury to protect their coastline from environmental degradation, so, too, did they lack the luxury to protect rig workers from getting maimed and killed, the candidate was essentially telling her. Espinoza-Gala refused to accept this logic, both because of her own near-death experience and to honor the memory of the eleven workers who died on the Deepwater Horizon. When the blowout happened, she told me, it felt just like 9/11 to her. Ironically enough, it also led her to conclude that the emphasis on safety was misplaced—personal safety, that is. “Personal safety is, Wear your hard hat! Don’t fall down!” she explained. It was the message that companies drummed home to workers in training sessions, leading them to think that avoiding accidents was up to them, which is what she herself had believed as a roustabout. “When I worked offshore, I thought all our accidents were caused by us,” she said. It was the same message dirty workers in prisons and slaughterhouses received: if a problem existed, it was their personal fault. What mattered far more, Espinoza-Gala had come to believe, was “process safety,” a product of choices made long beforehand—cutting costs, rushing projects—that made the entire system unsafe. Process safety flowed from decisions reached by senior executives who sat at what she called “the blunt end of the spear,” as opposed to their underlings on “the sharp end of the spear,” the frontline workers who risked death and injury, doing the dirty work for them.
The drillers and roustabouts imperiled did not all work offshore. According to Michael Patrick F. Smith, who went to North Dakota to get a job as a swamper during the fracking boom, “From 2008 to 2017, roughly the same number of oil field workers were killed on the job as U.S. troops in Afghanistan.” Since the Deepwater disaster, Espinoza-Gala had been giving PowerPoint presentations about how to prevent more workers from dying, in part to debunk a common narrative that emerged after blowouts, which is that lives might have been saved if the people on the rig—the ones at the sharp end of the spear—had acted more responsibly. This narrative had important moral consequences, leading workers to blame themselves or their peers, rather than the executives pulling the strings above them, when things went awry. One afternoon when I visited her, Espinoza-Gala led me into her office, a small, wood-paneled room whose walls were decorated with various mementos. On one wall was an award recognizing her as “one of the first Gulf of Mexico female production roustabouts.” On another was a picture of eleven wooden crosses planted on a strip of sand, one for each of the workers killed on the Deepwater Horizon. Espinoza-Gala slid into a chair in front of a computer monitor and, using the two fingers on her right hand that she could still bend freely, began clicking on a mouse pad. Halfway through her PowerPoint presentation, she clicked on a slide that showed the faces of each of the workers who had died. There was Donald Clark, forty-nine, an assistant driller from Louisiana. There was Aaron Dale Burkeen, thirty-seven, a crane operator from Mississippi. Wearing hard hats and safety gloves—personal safety—didn’t help these workers, she noted. Feeling less pressure to keep costs down, or more freedom to report safety concerns to their superiors—process safety—might have. Some of the workers on the Deepwater Horizon had shared their concerns about the lack of safety with family members, Espinoza-Gala told me. One of the victims even asked his wife to make out a will for him just before the blowout. Other workers confided in Lloyd’s Register, which surveyed conditions on the Deepwater Horizon a month before the disaster, interviewing forty workers, several of whom said they “often saw” unsafe practices but were too afraid to report them. After the blowout, Congress recommended extending whistleblower protections to rig workers to alleviate this fear. But in 2017, BSEE determined that enforcing these protections was beyond its purview, another gift to industry from Scott Angelle and the Trump administration.
Before shutting down her computer, Espinoza-Gala clicked on one other slide featuring a worker, a bearded man in a navy suit and silk tie who was sitting at a congressional hearing, delivering testimony. It was Stephen Stone. Behind him was a woman with long red hair and freckled cheeks dabbing a tear from her eye. It was Sara. On the next slide, a congressman was shown holding up a photo of one of the blowout’s victims: a pelican, Louisiana’s state bird, encrusted with crude oil. A proud Louisianan and committed conservationist (“Bayou Vermilion Watershed: Keep It Clean,” read a sticker on the refrigerator in her kitchen), Espinoza-Gala was not unmoved by the image of the pelican. But, like Sara Lattis Stone, she found it difficult to understand why the pelicans aroused more sympathy from politicians than the workers. “The widows were in these hearings, where they’re holding up pictures of birds instead of their husbands!” she said. For a long time, she told me, this enraged her. Eventually, she came to terms with it, reluctantly concluding that if not for the pelicans, the Deepwater Horizon disaster would likely have gone unnoticed in Washington, the way most rig accidents did, owing to the low value placed on the lives of the roustabouts who did the dirty work.
“If eleven workers would have died, nobody would have cared,” she said. “It’s only because of the birds and the pollution.”
A few weeks after meeting Lillian Espinoza-Gala, I saw Sara Lattis Stone again. She was still living in California, but she was no longer married to Stephen. Not long after I’d visited them in San Clemente, they had moved to Portland together, seeking a fresh start in a calmer, slower-paced environment. The move took place shortly after they’d reached a settlement with Transocean that compensated them for the pain and suffering the blowout had caused. Both BP and Transocean ended up paying out billions of dollars in such settlements, leading some media outlets to portray the companies as victims of opportunistic lawyers filing a blizzard of inflated claims. Sara did not share the amount of their settlement with me. What she did tell me was that in the nearly five years it took to iron out, a period when Stephen couldn’t work and she had to stay home to take care of him, they burned through all their savings and had to rely on family (in particular, her parents) to get by. She also told me that they wanted to hold out for a trial but ended up agreeing to a settlement out of desperation as medical bills went unpaid and debts piled up. “I feel really crappy about that,” she said. For her and Stephen, the settlement was both a relief and a source of discomfort. Although the cash was welcome, they came to see it the same way Flor Martinez viewed the bonuses her husband earned as a supervisor at Sanderson Farms: as dirty money.
In Portland, their lives would return to normal, Sara had assumed. She and Stephen moved into a large craftsman-style house on a tree-lined street in a gentrifying neighborhood. Sara turned a room on the ground floor into an art studio. “Everything would be okay,” she told herself hopefully. But things were not okay. Instead of calm, the neighborhood was noisy, with police sirens that blared through the night, setting Stephen’s nerves on edge. Meanwhile, Sara began to experience a physical breakdown, migraines and ripples of pain that flared in her back and spread through her body. The pain grew so severe that, eventually, she couldn’t get out of bed. “At one point, my legs were so heavy I couldn’t walk up the stairs,” she recalled.
Until this point, Sara had reserved most of her energy for caring for Stephen—making sure he took his medications, monitoring his intake of food and alcohol, assuaging his anxiety. Now her attention shifted to her own needs. To alleviate the pain in her back, she started seeing a chiropractor. To ease the emotional distress that she sensed might be causing it, she started seeing a therapist. The experience was transformative, enabling her to begin working through what she came to see as her “secondary trauma,” a condition that she learned could afflict people who spent prolonged amounts of time in the company of individuals with PTSD and vicariously absorbed some of their symptoms. The condition was prevalent among the wives of military veterans, to whom Sara began reaching out on online chat forums. But as Sara took steps to take better care of herself, she also grew more aware of how unhealthy Stephen’s coping mechanisms were. In San Clemente, he had spent his days reading sci-fi novels and smoking marijuana. In Portland, he discovered a new diversion, long, intricate board games that sometimes took weeks to solve, an activity that occupied his mind but pulled him further and further away from reality. The zeal he used to display for hitting the road and exploring new places after returning from hitches had not resurfaced. Neither had the levity Sara remembered from the pre-blowout days, when he would walk into a room and say something that instantly got people laughing and smiling. These qualities, she was beginning to suspect, might never resurface.
As this realization sank in, Sara decided to take a trip to Houston, a five-day vacation that was both a chance to see some friends and an opportunity to find out how Stephen would fare in her absence. On her third day away, she received a phone call, informing her that he’d gotten into another car accident after drinking too much. Although no one was hurt, the accident shook her profoundly, causing her to wonder what might happen the next time she left his side. The thought of living with this fear for as long as they were married frightened Sara, who had always valued her independence. A few weeks later, she told Stephen she wanted to split up.
Sara relayed all of this to me over dinner at a restaurant in Los Angeles, around the corner from the apartment in Hollywood to which she’d moved after she and Stephen separated. She had come to L.A. to make art—more specifically, to make movies. She was now a graduate student, enrolled in UCLA’s acclaimed film school. The inspiration to apply to the program had come from one of the few new friends she’d made after the Deepwater blowout, a documentary filmmaker named Margaret Brown who had reached out to her back in 2011, after coming across her Survivors paintings. Impressed by the work, Brown asked Sara whether she and Stephen might be willing to appear in a film that she was making about the Deepwater spill. Under normal circumstances, the answer would have been no: after the blowout, neither she nor Stephen felt any desire to expose their lives to an outsider, much less an outsider pointing a camera at them. But Brown, who had grown up in Alabama, was a fellow southerner and fellow artist with whom Sara felt a connection. Her film, titled The Great Invisible, came out in 2014, deftly interweaving stories of the human beings whose lives were devastated by the spill—rig workers, oyster shuckers—with vignettes illuminating how quickly business as usual resumed once the disaster faded from the headlines. In one scene, a former chief mechanic on the Deepwater Horizon who was badly injured by the blowout talks about the less visible emotional wounds that he bears. “It makes me feel guilty ’cause I played along,” he says as his wife prepares a slew of pain and anxiety pills for him to take. “A lot of things that I was doing, I knew were wrong. I feel really guilty for working for BP.” In another scene, a group of executives attending an oil and gas trade show in Houston toast the industry’s resurgence on the deck of a luxury hotel. After lighting up cigars, one of the executives says, “Personally, I think we should tax the living hell out of gasoline.” “That’s a political statement,” another objects. The argument eventually goes the way of the smoke wafting over the table and the carbon emissions the oil industry belched out year after year, drifting into the atmosphere as the executives sip cognac and agree that what most Americans want is for gas to remain cheap and plentiful. “They love their cars and they love to drive,” one of them says with a chuckle.
A decade after the Deepwater disaster, when lockdowns and travel bans during the coronavirus pandemic caused the global demand for oil to plunge, some analysts speculated that this ravenous need for cheap energy might finally be changing. Millions of Americans suddenly stopped taking flights and driving to work. At one point, the pandemic caused the price of oil futures to fall below zero, prompting some to suggest that fossil fuels might soon lose their significance in the metabolism of the modern world. As sea levels rose, forests burned, and the effects of climate change became increasingly dire, oil would inevitably be phased out, some argued, giving way to a new era of clean, renewable energy. A few energy companies themselves seemed to be betting on this (and making plans to cash in), including BP, which, in 2020, announced that it was investing billions in renewable energy and embarking on a path to becoming a “net zero” emissions company.
To the extent that the pandemic altered behavior in a lasting way, leading more and more people in America and other countries to work from home and travel less, it was certainly possible to imagine the age of oil ending. On the other hand, plenty of analysts had wrongly predicted this in the past. At the start of the pandemic, fossil fuels still dominated global energy consumption. The plunge in oil prices wouldn’t necessarily help motivate consumers to install solar panels in their homes and telecommute. It could have the opposite effect. “If you look at SUV sales they’ve gone beyond their stronghold in the US,” an industry analyst told the Financial Times a few months after the coronavirus pandemic began. “Cheap oil is likely to exacerbate that trend.” Without support from the world’s leading economies, moreover, the shift to cleaner forms of renewable energy was likely to remain a pipe dream. During Donald Trump’s presidency, such support was sorely lacking from the United States, which, in 2017, pulled out of the Paris Agreement, the international treaty on climate change that went into effect in 2016. The move was consistent with Trump’s “America First” energy policy, which called for opening 90 percent of America’s coastal waters to offshore drilling. The agenda appeared to shift dramatically under Trump’s successor, Joseph Biden, who, on his first day in office, announced that the United States was reentering the Paris Agreement and that he was elevating the climate crisis to a national security priority. But bold steps to address the effects of climate change were still likely to meet with stiff resistance in Washington, not only from lobbyists for the fossil fuel industry but also from many elected officials. In the Republican Party, acknowledging that these effects resulted from human activity was increasingly rare.
For years after the Deepwater blowout, Sara had avidly followed such developments. By the time she enrolled in film school, she’d taken to tuning them out. What she wanted now was to focus on her own well-being and to channel her feelings into the one thing that had always come naturally to her—visual art—this time by making a film that would fill in some of what The Great Invisible left out. When Sara watched the film, she felt validated, she told me. But she was also disappointed. One reason for the disappointment was that none of the friends she’d invited to a screening in Houston—people from Katy who, like her, had grown up in oil families—showed up. Sara attributed their absence to the fact that, like the people in Frankfurt with whom Everett Hughes met after World War II, they lacked the will to know about things that might make them feel implicated. “They didn’t want to talk about it,” she said. “They still don’t want to talk about it.” One guy she knew, a friend whose father had been involved in designing the well that caused the Deepwater blowout, told her that she and Stephen “should just get over it,” she told me. Later, the friend apologized and told her he felt awful about what had happened. “He carried a lot of guilt,” she said.
The other reason watching The Great Invisible upset Sara was that although she and the wife of another rig worker appeared in the film, their role was mainly limited to talking about the ordeals their husbands had undergone. As always, it seemed to her, the spouses and family members were pushed to the margins; they remained invisible. In her Survivors paintings, Sara had made a point of foregrounding the experiences of family members by including people like Chris Jones, whose brother died on the rig, and Natalie Roshto, who lost her husband. “I think ‘survivors’ extends much further than the guys that were just on that rig,” she explained. “I wanted to make sure that people saw the layered effects that occur. Your children get affected; your family gets affected. It’s not just—there’s an explosion, your husband’s hurt, that’s it. It keeps extending out quite a bit.”
What Sara said about rig workers was true of all forms of dirty work, it dawned on me later. It didn’t just stain and tarnish the lives of individual workers. It tarnished whole families and communities, lingering in the minds and memories of the people with whom dirty workers interacted and shared their lives. The dirty work of caging human beings in crowded, violent prisons affected not only corrections officers but also their spouses and children. The dirty work of staring at screens on which human beings were blown to pieces by Hellfire missiles made it difficult for some drone operators to feel much when learning that members of their own extended families had died.
The next day, Sara invited me to watch another film, a narrative work she had made that elaborated on this theme. It opens with a U.S. Coast Guard transmission at 9:51 p.m. on April 20, 2010, indicating that an explosion had taken place on an oil rig in the Gulf. The rest of the film toggles back and forth between two women—one in California, the other, modeled on Sara, in Texas—who learn the news and try to figure out if their husbands have survived. We watch the women register the initial shock. We see them strain not to panic as images of the burning rig appear on television. Eventually, the woman in Texas starts randomly calling the burn units of hospitals in the Gulf, and later, after seeing a report on the news describing the accident as catastrophic, stumbles onto the front patio of her house, screaming and sobbing.
The screening took place on the UCLA campus, in a theater located next to a sculpture garden dotted with jacaranda blooms. Sara and her peers gathered there to present their final projects in the narrative-film class she was taking. After her film was shown, Sara sat on the edge of the stage, fielding questions from her peers. Then she went home to “numb out,” she told me. The hardest thing about watching the film wasn’t looking at the images, she said at a diner where we met for brunch the following morning. It was listening to the sounds, which brought back the terror and helplessness she’d felt on the morning of the disaster. “The screams were hard,” she said. “That was really hard.”
After finishing brunch, Sara and I took a walk, strolling along Melrose Avenue before turning onto the street where she lived, which was lined with flower gardens and lemon trees. Her apartment was halfway down the block, a one-bedroom flat with walls adorned with Peruvian rugs and a couple of paintings. Sara had not put any of her own work up, but she did have it with her. At one point, she went into the bedroom and returned with a stack of canvases wrapped in brown paper that she laid out on the living room couch. It was the Survivors paintings. We stood over the portrait of Chris Jones—lips sealed, face blue, eyes brimming with rage. “He was furious,” she said, “but so sad.” Next to the painting of Jones was the painting of Stephen, wearing a vacant, glassy-eyed stare. Sara told me it was the hardest painting in the series to draw, because its subject was both so close to her and so distant. After the blowout, “he just took off,” she said, drifting away to escape a world he’d lost faith in. Despite their separation, Sara clearly didn’t blame Stephen for this. “I just think about what it’s like to have such a tender soul and then have, like, everything bad put in front of you,” she said.
Before I left, Sara brought out one other painting, an unfinished portrait of a young boy crouching next to a stone walkway shrouded in plants. Frogs and lizards scurry through the yard where the boy has bent down to play. It, too, was a portrait of Stephen, as he’d appeared in a family photo that his mother had sent to Sara. It showed him in more innocent times, she told me, in the one place that had always managed to bring him a measure of solace—nature. “That’s where he went to,” she said.