Still-Life of Environmental Paradox, Hidalgo, Mexico

Recently, I was invited to visit a small family farm in rural Hidalgo, Mexico, where the the stone-cold mornings of the countryside made me feel as if I’d been transported to another time. Dawn was announced by pig grunts, the shuffling of horses hooves, and shepherds’ horns bugling across a landscape that seemed untouched by the chaos of the outside world. 

Except that it was also dangerously close to the town of Tlahuelilpan, where, five years prior, an oil pipeline leak erupted into a deadly fireball that killed 137 of the desperate people who’d run to collect the gushing gasoline as if it were bread or pesos. 

If I hadn’t known this fact, the land itself revealed no obvious threat other than the high altitude that  left me gasping and shivering in the crisp air. I felt like I was walking through a painting as I maneuvered rocky fields that had been hand-plowed between golden hilltops illuminated against a gray autumn sky—simultaneously in awe at both the human capacity to endure such intense conditions and the still-present beauty of the raw, open landscape, where farmers still coaxed life from dirt with their bare hands and hope alone, as if nothing could halt the cycle.  

The disconnect between what I knew and what I saw left me stumbling for how to feel. I listened to the corn stalks rustle in a silence that I mistook for heaven until I noticed the absence of birds and bees. I watched horses graze amidst the agave while trying not to think about the poison sleeping in the soil until the rains came to carry it further across the land.

The initial disaster was just as paradoxical. When the pipe split, it created a cascading geyser in which children laughed and danced for hours while nearly 1,000 people gathered with any container they could find. Maybe they ignored the threat because they just couldn’t believe that static could ignite the air. Or maybe it was because they’d already been dancing in the face of death for years by then – ever since armed gangs began occupying farmland to tap the pipelines. Many of their neighbors had fled after receiving death threats, but when the President vowed to crack down on the fuel thieves, his chaotic efforts resulted in a nationwide shortage. And so, after weeks of waiting in long lines at the pumps, a geyser of free gasoline became a cause for celebration for those whose lives had already been so controlled by a resource that they themselves were denied. 

In reality, the price paid that day was not only the lives of those who died, but also the health of the thousands of people who rely upon the soil and water for survival, for generations to come. 

The leak caused widespread and irreversible environmental damage, contaminating not only the soil but also a main irrigation canal feeding the valley. The locals told me they swear they can taste gasoline in the vegetables that still grow.  

Perhaps it speaks to the power of denial, but as I walked through the countryside that day studying the horizon between Yesterday and Tomorrow, I mostly just noticed how near they were to each other. In the scale of history, we are astonishingly close to that ‘other time’ before fossil fuel dependency led us down a path of global destruction and warfare on a level never seen before. Even more paradoxical, this path is paved with the myth that an alternative system is an impossible flight of imagination – as if humans have never before changed the world before in a short period of time. 

In the raw and deadly beauty of a disaster zone, I watched flocks of sheep run across the hillsides as if it were nothing to scale the border between earth and sky. I still don’t know what to do with this dissonance, except to keep focusing on the dissonance.