Man's Footprint on the Earth

Have you ever pulled up Satellite view in Google Maps and looked down on the Earth, as if you were in a plane gazing out and down through the window? If Google has given us nothing else than the ability to virtually "fly" across the Earth, looking down at wherever we wish we could be, this is the best for me. I have spent many a time, using Google maps to try to find a place to live or my next vacation trip, or just looking at a place that I wish I could go to live. I expect to be moving soon, and I was looking at some of the smaller communities around where I expect to be soon. I was looking at the area south-west of Dallas-Fort Worth, and I noticed a huge number of pale tan "spots" fairly uniformly scattered around.

Zooming in a bit, I could see them all over, but I couldn't figure out what they could be, to be so common in North-Central Texas. Wind turbines? No, lots of them in West Texas, or along the coast. Not Minuteman ICBMs, they are all in the Dakotas. I was stumped.

Each seemed to have its own small driveway in, with a wide dirt area, and close to the roads. I was still stumped.

Zooming in all the way, it finally hit me. Oil! Good old Texas oil and gas wells, and the associated storage tanks. Oil, petroleum, has become controversial. The industrial revolution would never has gone as far as it did, and our civilization would never have grown as large as it has and become as technologically complex as it is on coal alone. And the climate change and sea-level rise and the other impacts we are seeing would not have occurred if we had never discovered oil. You could say that we owe almost everything we have now because of oil. Yet it is so easy to forget our footprint on the Earth, the impacts of our technologically complex, oil-fed society. We need to be reminded of it by looking at the Earth. I can almost understand how the climate-change deniers can deny the changes that are occurring. Sitting inside your air-conditioned office or riding in your air-conditioned limousine to the next campaign stop doesn't expose you to the real world. And that is a problem, because we can't begin to take on all those big problems our country faces when we don't even see them, don't want to see them, and (maybe) are paid not to see them.