"Wyoming is under assault here, Ms. Fuller said, standing on a road
buffeted by the infamous high plains wind. She believes people are
being used by the energy industry. In the past several years, dozens of
workers have died on the rigs around the West.
“Throwing warm
beating hearts at a failed energy policy is a tragedy, whether it’s the
war or the oil fields,” Ms. Fuller said. “The jobs are a good thing.
But going after it so frantically and doing so much damage is wrong.”
“I travel between these worlds. I couldn’t
leave the oil field behind when I came home to Teton County,” she said.
It has been hard, Ms. Fuller allows, to tell her friends about the
other Wyoming. “I can’t talk about my childhood, I can’t talk about the
war, and its hard to talk about what’s going on in the oil field.
That’s why I wrote the book.”
. . .“Rather than write in the
rhetoric of conflict, she’s chosen to tell a story of one young man,”
said Terry Tempest Williams, a neighbor of Ms. Fuller in Wilson, who
has long written about the West. “That’s much more powerful because it
touches our humanity.”
It is critical, Ms. Fuller said, that
people know who to blame. “Teton County has a huge carbon footprint
with heated driveways, roofs and huge houses heated all winter long
with no one in them,” she said. “I don’t see this as something the
roughnecks or the oil companies or the administration alone is doing.
It’s something we’re all doing.”
~ Jim Robbins, in the New York Times