“Forests are the ‘lungs’ of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”
Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Statement on receipt of the award of the Schlich Forestry Medal, 9 January 1935.
There are approximately 100,000 disused and abandoned oil and gas wells in the environs of the 500,000 acre Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania, some from the earliest days of the US oil and gas industry. Some 14,000 wells are in still operation. As a consequence the air quality of the forest is compromised by fugitive pollutant gas discharges, prominently methane, which is carcinogenic, poisonous to humans and wildlife and climate-affecting.
Run-Offs
Water pollution occurs due to run-offs and discharges from oil drilling, from both abandoned and operational wells.
Immiscible Realities
Immiscibility occurs when substances are incapable of combining forming an homogeneous mixture. Over time the components of a mixed but immiscible fluid will separate out. These are photographs of brine and oil mixtures collected from the Allegheny National Forest.
Hydrocarbon Landscapes
These chemigrams are intended to guide our perceptual feelings towards oil and gas extraction. They are non-documentary, non-indexical images which simulate and depict underground chemigeological processes found in heavily drilled oil and gas producing regions. The chemigrams are produced on light sensitive paper, using crude oil, salt, dead biological matter and processed with developer and fixative.
