An Essay On Air

Photograph courtesy of the author

One year ago, the pandemic took Texas, and I moved back to the rural Panhandle town I grew up in. The population is less than 5,000 and though the town has just one stoplight, there are two different dollar stores and a specialty coffee shop in the building where the old Parson’s pharmacy used to be. Instead of getting a sliced beef sandwich at the counter, I can now buy an oat milk cappuccino for roughly the same price. I left the Great Plains when I was 18 and I am 39 when I return. I didn’t know how I would feel living again in the place where I was raised, in the belly of the Bible Belt, where Trump banners are as common as churches. But then a year went by. My stay feels indefinite and there is nothing to do here but count sunsets, add books to my collection, and think about tomorrow.

On warm days, I make the hour drive out to Palo Duro Canyon, a surprising and stunning drop off from miles of prairie, located outside of Canyon. I pick a different trail each time I go, walking along paths looking at antelope horn and prickly pear, stopping to touch quartz embedded in red rock. Comanches called these canyons and the long stretches of prairie home, until settlers hunted bison almost to extinction and forced many Comanches north into Oklahoma. After the displacement came land grabs, feedlots, dairy farms, slaughterhouses, and manufacturing plants.

One of those manufacturing plants is a corn wet milling plant, built in Castro County in the late 1960’s, where I grew up. The most energy consumption within the food industry is corn wet milling, which uses 15% of the energy. Greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the fossil fuels which are burned to produce the necessary  intense energy.  They also negatively impact local water systems, such as the Ogallala Aquifer, which runs through 48 counties of the Panhandle and is the most important source of water in the region. The aquifer is being depleted rapidly from overuse and cannot keep up with the demand by humans and the local agricultural, cattle, and meatpacking industries.

My father worked for 30 years at this particular plant, which finally shut down in 2004. Cargill, the second largest privately owned company in the US as of 2020, had bought the plant in 2001, but my father began working there in 1972, while still in high school. He helped his siblings attend college while raising a family of his own. I never knew breathable air quality during my youth because of the methane from the cattle yards and emissions from manufacturing plants. This manufacturing plant is also located in the poorest neighborhood, known as “el campo.” During my childhood, mostly migrants lived in the surrounding area. I often wonder what long-term effects this place had on their lives. It’s difficult to find information related to pollution dating back as far as the 1990s, but communities affected by extractive markets and pollution know these effects too well. A dense particle thick fog drifts in the air some evenings, obscuring otherwise clear horizons and clouding up roads. I notice dust more than I notice the word God, and in a place where there are just as many churches as bars, that’s quite a lot of dust. 

So while a virus might have transformed the way we breathe, colonization and capitalism have left us breathless. The long soundless days I have spent on the Great Plains have translated into ruminations on colonialism, on extraction, and reconfiguring my spatial relationship to the environment. Even when gasping on fecal dust, my neighbors love how their red, white, and blue rhetoric waves in the wind. And too many of them still crumple together inside bars, while our uncles die and some of us cough and not all of us fit inside a funeral. Some of us stand around in gas masks in long lines at the grocery store. 

Every day I log onto the Internet, thousands more have died from the virus till we have reached half a million. For me, grief has always been a default, a go-to emotion that prepares me for the future, for this present, for this day-to-day coping of indeterminable loss. The local, state, and national governments are just as responsible for these losses; for this is a nation that protects property, profit, power, and policy over the lives of people. Suzanne Césaire notes in her collection of essays, The Great Camouflage, that “from the time of the arrival of the conquistadors and the rise of their technical know-how (beginning with firearms), the lands from across the Atlantic have changed, not only in facial appearance but in fear.” If we peer behind the curtain of the settler colonial project that is the United States, we find a pyramid scheme of profiteers and conquistadors that have affected the landscape and climate under the pretense of laws, while families sing funeral songs through Zoom.

Beyond the feedyards and smokestacks of the High Plains, I think about the red hued skies in California and Oregon from fires torching the land. I think about how the Yurok, Karuk, Hupa, Miwok, Chumash and hundreds of other nations across California used small intentional burning to avoid large uncontrolled wildfires, and how the US government outlawed the practice in 1850 by banning Indigenous people from intentional burning. I think about the UPS truck under the blood orange skies of San Francisco. It might be the closest I will ever come to seeing Mars. Every season brings a different emergency, and many of us are living in a constant precarious existence.

In February 2021, winter storms sweep across the Gulf Coast, setting records for freezing temperatures. Parts of Texas and Mississippi lost their power and water. In Texas, this climate disaster was worsened by the state’s decisions. Texas legislatures had decided to allow one operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), to manage the market for 75% of the state. The power outages occurred because, although legislatures knew about the possibilities of a large scale failure due to the grid’s vulnerabilities, including a freeze in January 2014 that showed a glimpse of weaknesses in its system and probable collapse under duress, Texas lawmakers, the Public Utility Commission, and even the Texas Railroad Commission stuck with their deregulated market. During the worst moments of 2021’s freeze, more than 4.5 million people were without power. And not just for a few minutes. But for days in frigid temperatures, people lacked power, heat, and eventually, even water. And where were the elected officials?

In The Extractive Zone, Macarena Gómez-Barris points out that “extractive governmentality shows that an ecological imaginary can never be fully activated through the law… Ultimately, the law is embedded within a global political economic and interstate system that does not serve as a steward to the natural world but sells it to the highest commodity market.” Extractive capitalism relies on the exploitation of workers, marginalized communities, and resources, for its economy to function and increase the wealth of the 1% such as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, ERCOT executives, and more often than not, our so-called elected officials who also benefit from disaster and catastrophe. In the case of ERCOT, lawmakers continuously ignored warnings and recommendations about the potential for failure since 2000, and communities suffered the consequences from both climate disaster as well as the descendants and beneficiaries of our extractive economy. 

I watched in horror as Austin, Houston, San Antonio, and parts of the Rio Grande Valley experienced devastating outages and below-normal temperatures, while back in the Panhandle, inches of snow covered the Plains; but we still had heat and water. That’s because the majority of the Panhandle is a member of the Southwest Power Pool and not ERCOT. In the 90s, the Texas legislature decided to deregulate the electricity market in Texas. However, during that time, the speaker of the house was a fellow from the Panhandle named Pete Laney, who insisted that Hale Center (where Laney was from), and the rest of the High Plains, not join ERCOT. It was almost as if Laney knew being a part of an unchecked system cashing in money would eventually collapse. Even more troubling is that despite millions losing power and dozens of weather-related deaths, legislators like former Texas governor Rick Perry think most people would choose to be without electricity “for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” Perry, according to a Texas Tribune and Propublica investigation, received campaign contributions from TXU Corp. while he served as Texas governor. TXU Corp. is a parent company for one of Texas’ largest electric utilities, Dallas-based Luminant, whose own issues in 2014 generated a study by Texas Public Utility Commission, which recommended that energy companies address any vulnerabilities, including weather events, that would lead to failures and outages. From the blackouts that occurred in 2021, we know that once again, the government chose profits over people, people who are still living under a global pandemic while trying to navigate climate disaster and government negligence. But the bottom line in extractive capitalism is always money. In 2001, the corn wet milling plant where my dad worked shut down. Not because of environmental concerns, but because it simply wasn’t profitable. My dad doesn’t like to talk about his 12 or 14 hour shifts there, days, nights, weekends. I can still remember the smell from the plant, a false sweetness that drifted up into your nose and lingered there, thickening. It was a very different stench than the one coming off the feedyards. Both covered the entire town like an invisible globe.

On the anniversary of my year in quarantine, I drove out to the abandoned plant on a windy March morning. A few days prior, the Texas governor ended a mask mandate for the state and told all businesses they could open to full occupancy; meanwhile many people in Texas still lacked electricity or water, and others were attempting to repair damage from the winter storms. Greenhouse gas emissions, which contributes to climate change, extreme weather, as well as wildfires, mostly come from burning fossil fuels for energy. The air pollution from all that has also been linked to respiratory diseases. As I stand near the abandoned plant, near the chain linked fence keeping anyone out, I cannot help but attempt to parse out all of the connections between my past and my present, the connections between air and our access to it. Here I am, in my cowboy boots and my grandfather’s jacket, under more sky than anyone could ever imagine, back home during a global pandemic, witnessing climate disasters that are likely results of the fossil fuel industry spanning decades, witnessing people literally left in the dark during crisis by their government’s commitment to the fossil fuel industry, witnessing an escalation of destabilizing lives, witnessing a virus that spreads through the air, air that is already barely breathable because of smog, wildfires, cars, cows, and too many other reasons. In “The Malaise of Civilization,” Suzanne Césaire writes that it is “too bad for those who consider us mere dreamers. The most unsettling reality is our own. We shall act. This land, ours, can only be what we want it to be.” The government does not believe in people, but for government to exist, people must believe in government. Belief is the fulcrum of a democracy, and the US government relies on people’s belief in laws they designed. Which brings me back to belief. Mine is not in democracy or government. So despite current Texas Governor Greg Abbott declaring that we are free from masks and mandates, I know not to trust a conquistador for my freedom. 

Some of us, who can afford to, stay inside, architects of our own quarantine. We barely venture outside our doors. We pick up hobbies and habits. We disassociate. Like Orcas, we form pods. We drink whatever we find, including moonshine. We live our lives dreaming about tomorrow, barely able to remember yesterday. We become lists in newspapers. We that work every day despite a deadly plague. We that wept in the streets, from tear gas, from methane, from smoke of wildfires that ate the land. We that marched together. We that never forget those murdered or disappeared by the state, by the bourgeois’ swinishness, by the hands of so-called civilization. We that bury our dead. We that care about others. We that don’t believe in borders. We that light matches that burn property. We that demand land be returned. We that desire a liberation beyond colonization, beyond capitalism. We that believe not just in dying, but in an afterlife. We that find joy even in absence. We that one day will celebrate the ashes of empire. 

Combining elements of the architectural and the memorial, mónica teresa ortiz connects landscapes and burials not to hold onto the past, but so that through memory and haunting, poetics travel beyond our individual experience of them to discover instead, a collective one. They explore the relationships between necropolitics, geopolitics, and history. Born and raised in Texas, ortiz is the author of muted blood & autobiography of a semiromantic anarchist.

(c) 2021 mónica teresa ortiz