As the current oil boom attests. West Texas’ oil deposits come with high social and environmental costs.
oil
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Life on the Oil Frontier
What it was like living in one of America’s most patriarchal societies.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Female Fracker: A Rare Species in North Dakota
Imagine being the only woman living with 200 roughnecks — risking your personal safety every day — just to make a buck.
Posted inEditor's Pick
It Takes a Boom
In an essay adapted from The New Wild West: Black Gold, Fracking, and Life in a North Dakota Boomtown, Blaire Briody profiles female fracker Cindy Marchello, who survived hellish working conditions and rampant misogyny trying to earn a living in service of big American companies thirsty for oil.
Posted inEditor's Pick
‘The Ocean Is Boiling’: The Complete Oral History of the 1969 Santa Barbara Oil Spill
On January 28th, 1969, crude oil erupted from a rig off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, triggering a worldwide alarm that energized the nascent environmental movement.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Living and Dying in Cancer Alley
David Hanson, writing for the Bitter Southerner, helps residents of Standard Heights, Baton Rouge, tell their story of a town next to an Exxon plant — explosions, sinkholes, toxic sludge, and a everyday life that has to go on, regardless.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
Why (and How) the U.S. Overthrew Iran’s Democratic Government
In 1953 the United States was still new to Iran. Many Iranians thought of Americans as friends, supporters of the fragile democracy they had spent half a century trying to build. It was Britain, not the United States, that they demonized as the colonialist oppressor that exploited them. Since the early years of the twentieth […]
Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Immersive Reporting from the Bakken Oil Fields: A Reading List
Oil production in the Bakken region of North Dakota has topped 1 million barrels a day. The seven-year boom has flooded the area with new residents seeking their fortunes, and many journalists have also joined the labor force, sending dispatches from the new Wild West.
Posted inNonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
Interview: Maya Rao on Spending a Month Working as a Cashier in the Bakken
On “being a woman in a place where women could be in demand as much as the oil”
Posted inUncategorized
A trip to an oil boomtown transformed by thousands of young men arriving to find work: I’d heard Williston was a magical place. A small town where the recession didn’t exist, where you could make six figures driving a truck, and where oil bubbles straight up from the Earth’s Bakken layer like water from an […]