Oil Field Worker Quotes

By the time workers have picked a field, tens of thousands of words have flown from mouth to ear. Part of the landscape’s mind—its memories, connections, rhythms—is thereby held in human consciousness. Work among the olive trees does more than yield oil; it creates and deepens the stories from which are made human and ecological communities.

She loved the smell of old truck; thick cotton and vinyl seat covers, old gasoline and oil, the smell of country, decades of farmers, workers and families taking trips back and forth to town, up backroads to swimming holes, over fields, through all the weather. She imagined what this truck would have seen if it had eyes and a memory. She was about to become one more episode in its existence.

Regardless of whether you think the industrial era has been good or bad, three profoundly fundamental shifts underlie this revolution. The first is that industrialists harnessed new sources of energy, primarily to produce things. Preindustrial people occasionally used wind or water to generate power, but they mostly relied on muscles—human and animal—to generate force. Industrial pioneers such as James Watt (who invented the modern steam engine) figured out how to transform energy from fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas into steam, electricity, and other kinds of power to run machines. The first of these machines were designed to make textiles, but within decades others were invented to make iron, mill wood, plow fields, transport things, and do just about everything else one can manufacture and sell (including beer)7. A second major component of the Industrial Revolution was a reorganization of economies and social institutions. As industrialization gathered steam, capitalism, in which individuals compete to produce goods and services for profit, became the world’s dominant economic system, spurring the development of further industrialization and social change. As workers changed their locus of activity from the farm to factories and companies, more people had to work together even as they needed to perform more specialized activities. Factories required more coordination and regulation. In

behind every human life is an immense chain of happenstance that includes the gravest concerns; murder and theft and betrayal, great love; lives spent in burning spiritual devotion and others in miserly denial; that despite the supposed conformity of country places there might be an oil field worker who kept a trunk of fossil fish or a man with a desperate stutter who dreamed of being a radio announcer, a dwarf with a rivet gun or an old maid on a rooftop with a telescope, spending her finest hours observing the harmonics of the planetary dance.

In the United States, Europe, and other developed nations, the poorer people are, the fatter they’re likely to be. It’s also true that the poorer we are, the more likely we are to work at physically demanding occupations, to earn our living with our bodies rather than our brains. It’s the poor and disadvantaged who do the grunt work of developed nations, who sweat out a living not just figuratively but literally. They may not belong to health clubs or spend their leisure time (should they have any) training for their next marathon, but they’re far more likely than those more affluent to work in the fields and in factories, as domestics and gardeners, in the mines and on construction sites. That the poorer we are the fatter we’re likely to be is one very good reason to doubt the assertion that the amount of energy we expend on a day-to-day basis has any relation to whether we get fat. If factory workers can be obese, as I discussed earlier, and oil-field laborers, it’s hard to imagine that the day-to-day expenditure of energy makes much of a difference.

What struck Al-Kasim most about his adoptive country of Norway was that most of his colleagues and other people he met were quite fearful rather than excited about the prospect of discovering oil. Norwegians knew from the outset that oil could have disastrous consequences both for the economy and society as a whole. And when oil was discovered they became even more fearful. ‘The country feared the social and economic consequences of an oil boom. The Groningen gas field had ruined the Dutch economy. Norway was aware of that; it had quite justified fears. And with the oil discovery Norwegians feared they’d be over-run by Texan oil workers who would be chewing gum, looking for girls and bringing prostitutes into the country,’ he explains.50