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<\/a>where it all went down…<\/p><\/div>\n
The great blue bowl of the California sky has doubtlessly presided over some strange affairs, but perhaps none is stranger than the serial cycle of entrapment\u00a0 and petrification that started around 38,000 years ago in a collection of deceptively limpid ponds in what is now a quiet park in downtown Los Angeles. After it rains here, the play of sunlight and clouds is mirrored on their lambent surfaces, beneath which lies a menacing secret: for\u00a0what first might appear to be a refreshing pool in an arid terrain is only a thin film of water obscuring an abyss of sticky bitumen, which has been oozing steadily from petroleum-bearing rock formations deep beneath the earth.<\/p>\n
These are the notorious La Brea Tar Pits<\/a> and since the days of the Pleistocene<\/a> their peculiar configuration has served as both death trap and mausoleum for thousands of creatures\u2013great and small, thirsty and merely curious\u2013who venture into them and get stuck in their viscous pitch. Like a giant version of the \u2018cockroach motel,\u2019 once they ‘check in’ they never ‘check out’<\/em>\u00a0and indeed the thrashing and bellowing of trapped victims \u00a0attracts predators, whose natural wariness proves no match for the\u00a0 promise of an easy meal, ensuring\u00a0 they too are quickly doomed after jumping in for the kill. And so for thousands of years, \u00a0whole conglomerations, \u00a0entire food chains of animals have met their ends here: \u00a0predators and prey sinking down alongside each other, each creature na\u00efvely repeating the fatal mistakes of \u00a0its predecessor: \u00a0sabre-toothed cats and \u00a0Dire wolves<\/a>,\u00a0with fangs and claws sunk into the contorted bodies of mastodons and camels, all of them frozen in elemental struggle as if in some Classical frieze.\u00a0Not even the carrion eaters escaped the gruesome fate. Outsized vultures, giant condors and hideous, meat-eating storks, wheeling and squabbling for landing rights on the bloated corpses and\u00a0almost\u00a0corpses, snagged themselves when a carelessly extended talon or trailing pinion made contact with the merciless tar, that pulled\u00a0them in,\u00a0flapping and screeching , never to fly again. As well as being deadly, the tar has \u00a0miraculous powers of preservation. The seething, interconnected beds of bone\u00a0 that have accumulated there have kept scientists busy ever since they first started excavating back in the early 1900s. Many of the rich paleontological finds are on display at the adjacent\u00a0George C. Page Museum.<\/p>\n When I was a boy in Toronto back in the early 1960s, a small piece of the La Brea Tar Pits was on display in a dusty diorama at the city’s Royal Ontario Museum. This was a few years before the ROM adopted the loathsome trend for \u2019interactivity\u2019, which consigned much of the museum\u2019s extensive palaeontology collection to back rooms, out of public view, and what we got instead was an ersatz mishmash of\u00a0mood\u00a0lighting, \u00a0audio tape loops and fibreglass models of dinosaurs standing aura-less amid plastic palm trees.\u00a0Anyway before all that stupidity, I remember how transfixed I was \u2018just looking\u2019 at the thing itself<\/i>, without being told how to think about what was in front of me \u2013 \u00a0the tea coloured skeleton of a sabre-toothed cat, its outsized canines filigreed with tiny age cracks, poised to stab the neck of a\u00a0hapless ungulate \u00a0(a proto-camel? an extinct horse?) which had already\u00a0begun to sink. It was the futility of it I remember the most,\u00a0that both<\/i>\u00a0animals\u00a0died together in\u00a0the same inescapable way, the first doomed by thirst (or bovine idiocy), the second by carnivorous\u00a0savagery.\u00a0And I knew this scenario was to\u00a0play itself out again and again because it was elementally and inherently unavoidable<\/em>. Presiding over the sad scene was a tromp-l\u2019oeil<\/em> painted backdrop\u00a0of a clot of vultures, hanging like wind-ripped umbrellas in the branches of a skeletal tree, and in broad brush strokes, a distant herd of mammoths melting into\u00a0the horizon.<\/p>\n When I finally, this spring, got to tour the La Brea tar pits firsthand, I couldn\u2019t help but see them as a kind of \u00a0trope for contemporary times.<\/p>\n LA is a strange enough place to begin with\u2013its palm-studded freeways and rivers of twinkling windshields pouring into the heat haze of the hyper- illuminated horizon\u2013a place at once banal and startling,\u00a0the High Baroque of American drive-thru suburbia amid scintillating beaches flooded in a golden, Canaletto-esque light. \u00a0 There are people there, of a certain age, whose faces have been so surgically altered it is as if they\u2019ve been sucked through a magic wind tunnel.\u00a0The mismatch between their wrinkle-less heads and the sun-withered bodies is\u00a0chimerical, as if bands of Surrealist \u2018exquisite corpses\u2019 \u00a0had gone AWOL, pulling themselves off the canvases and walking around. \u00a0Los Angeles is the very essence of the American Anthropocene<\/a> and yet prehistory bubbles and belches everywhere just beneath the surface. The city sits astride a massive oil field, where serried ranks of mini malls and tract homes lie nestled in the napes of brown hills and rustling eucalyptus groves, the edges of which bleed into a kind of terrain vague<\/em> of ponderously nodding pump jacks tirelessly sucking petroleum out of a deposit dating back to the Miocene\u2013 a geologic epoch already long gone by the time the first mammoths sank into the tar.<\/p>\n Wandering through the pleasant grounds of Hancock Park, the past becomes the present and one soon encounters a pair of giant, chocolate-coloured ground sloths<\/a>, like outsized Easter confections, placid and dim-witted in expression, yet armed with menacing fore claws that could easily rip the face off almost any attacker. As late as 10,000 years ago, these ungainly beasts lumbered across what was a vast North American range – their remains having been found from the Yukon to Mexico. At La Brea, they were regular victims to the suffocating tar.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n yours truly and the ground sloths<\/p><\/div>\n <\/p>\n In a still bubbling tar pit encircled by construction fencing, a family replica of gigantic Columbian mammoths<\/a> replays a pathetic tableau. An adult is hopelessly stuck in the pit, its mouth agape in panic, its trunk frozen between the great curved brackets of its tusks, frantically gesturing to its mate and calf who stand helplessly on shore. \u00a0 The theme of serial entrapment and the futility of instinct gets amplified as soon as one enters the museum, which is packed with reconstructed skeletons and glass cases full of phylogenetically arranged remains,\u00a0memorializing the legions of hapless creatures who died there over thousands of years, who just couldn\u2019t stop themselves<\/em> from making the same fatal mistakes\u00a0over and over<\/em>, in a senseless and recurring cruelty against which no benevolent god or Walt Disney narrator would intervene to warn \u00a0\u00a0\u2018Stay out of those pits, yo!<\/em>\u2019 \u00a0If only Spielberg had been in charge…<\/p>\n In paleontological terms, the tar pits are what is known as an \u2018evolutionary trap.\u2019<\/a> These create a stimulus<\/em> that certain species are unable to resist and the results are often fatal. A contemporary equivalent has been the sad epidemic of dying albatrosses we\u2019ve been seeing on Pacific Islands, their body cavities packed with bits of plastic that they seem programmed to snatch up from the waves and swallow in place of their natural food. Like the victims of La Brea,\u00a0they just can’t help themselves.<\/p>\n Back at the Tar Pits, the Dire wolf<\/a> (Canis dirus)<\/i>\u00a0 seems to have been \u00a0a particularly slow learner. To date the remains of over four thousand of them have been found there with doubtless many more to come. One of the more impressive displays at the George C. Page<\/a> is a long, back-lit display, like something out of a high-end shoe store,\u00a0containing hundreds of Dire wolf skulls,\u00a0each an embodiment of one individual’s lack of impulse control. It seems that whenever a pack of them came upon an animal in distress in the tar, they would pile right on in on top of it,\u00a0dooming themselves by \u00a0their own overly developed killer instincts and susceptibility to peer pressure. The fact that the Dire wolf seems to have been exceptionally competitive, didn’t help matters. \u00a0Males in areas where there was high population density developed outsized fangs with which to fight each other. \u00a0It\u2019s hard not to imagine the pack dynamic being a rather savage affair, especially when they chanced\u00a0upon a bleating animal, trapped in tar. For the Dire wolf, there likely wasn\u2019t a lot of time for second guesses.\u00a0Though heavier and likely much meaner than their little cousin the coyote (Canis latrans)<\/em>, the Dire wolf failed to survive the Pleistocene, while the coyote still thrives in LA’s hills and canyons, feeding on what it finds in trash cans and snatching up unguarded pets. \u00a0 Though the Tar Pits weren’t the only factor in the Dire wolf\u2019s continent-wide extinction, the evidence of its behaviour at La Brea indicates\u00a0an inherent \u00a0inflexibility, which must have been a major handicap in what, at the end of the Pleistocene, was a rapidly shifting set of conditions including changes in climate and the incursion of the first Paleo-Indians<\/a> into its environment, who competed aggressively with the wolf for prey.<\/p>\n dire wolf skulls<\/p><\/div>\n Though we may think our species’ ability to show foresight gives us particular resiliency\u2013after all we started out in minuscule numbers, survived an Ice Age and proceeded to take over the world\u2013we find ourselves now under a similar delusion to that which befell those hapless beasts at La Brea. Could it be that in the black, viscous materiality of petroleum we have finally met our match? Though we may think we have mastery over our fate, we seem blind to the possibility that it might be a substance<\/i> that has control over us…<\/p>\n As an evolutionary trap\u2013 a nemesis\u2013<\/em>petroleum is the perfect agent. \u00a0It is the very\u00a0essence<\/em> of death, a distillate of corpses from untold myriads of prehistoric organisms, which\u00a0has quietly waited for us beneath the earth. If substances possess their own agency, as Jane Bennett surmises \u00a0in her (2010) Vibrant Matter<\/i><\/a>, \u00a0is it so far-fetched to suggest that petroleum is luring us in, manipulating our innate behavioural vulnerabilities to ultimately absorb us into its oozing corpus? Like the sabre-toothed cat and Dire wolf before us, petroleum has exerted its ability to hypnotize, to communicate directly with our vulnerable animality, bypassing our much vaunted capacity for reason and discernment. It\u2019s not that big a leap from the Tar Pits to the Tar Sands\u2026<\/p>\n As happened to the Pleistocene creatures who got stuck in it when they put aside their caution, petroleum\u2013ever protean\u2013 has set its exquisite trap for us \u00a0in the form of \u00a0a fata morgana,<\/i>\u00a0which gives \u00a0us the illusion of eternally abundant and convenient energy with no long-term consequences. \u00a0 We are probably already in too deep to realize what has happened; \u00a0that we are becoming<\/i> petroleum, absorbed by the wily substance to become one with its subterranean deposits.<\/p>\n The Anthropocene might be remembered as a geologically brief period during which our species was allowed an overdraft, a blip during which we extracted a quantity of the black ooze before we had to repay our loan with the highest of interest; our lives, and those of the countless other organisms we took with us after we have made the planet uninhabitable. In so doing, we are offering up billions of putrefying corpses, untold tonnage of petrochemical garbage and entire landscapes of withered vegetation to be re-incorporated into the geologic, where unstoppable tectonic regimes will reprocess\u00a0it into the mother of all oil fields.<\/p>\n So it is a mistake perhaps to wax too moralistic about our failure to rein in our natural impulsivity, to plan sensibly or imagine a future free from our addiction to this substance. Our connection to it might be too deep, too genetically encoded for us to resist through mere self critique.<\/p>\n Following the logic of the Dire wolf, our own species is competing increasingly viciously for what is (for the geologic moment anyway) a limited resource. The power elites in localities dependent primarily on petroleum production (Russia, Nigeria, Libya and others) have drawn whole societies into animality and impulsivity.<\/p>\n Even Canada, long a role model for liberal democracy, has slid into this\u00a0petro-brutality<\/i>. Under the prime ministership of oil-mad Stephen Harper, its government has declared a totalitarian war on scientists <\/a>who study climate change and associated environmental contamination. The uncomfortable facts they keep\u00a0bringing up highlight Canada\u2019s abysmal record on these matters, which, aside from being an international embarrassment, threaten to push the usually complacent Canadians into a confrontation with the ecological Real (boring!, depressing!)<\/i>, invoking questions\u00a0the Harper government is determined not to let us\u00a0ask. Important and long-standing research facilities and environmental monitoring stations have already been shuttered, their scientists sacked and the scholarly material packed away or even thrown into the garbage. Those few scientists still working have been given STASI<\/a> style minders, through which all communication with the public must be vetted. They even shadow the scientists at academic conferences to make sure they don’t say anything deemed \u2018off message\u2019 to the government\u2019s single-minded agenda.<\/p>\n Yet given that our attraction to petroleum is demonstrably biological, can we really blame the individual oil worker, warlord or myopic Canadian bureaucrat? By doing their part to hasten \u00a0mass extinction, they are in the service of the long term interest of petroleum itself. By extending its sticky tendrils through a higher dimensional space than most of us are letting ourselves imagine, petroleum assumes the characteristics of what the philosopher Timothy Morton<\/a> calls a \u2018hyperobject,\u2019<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0an entire set of relationships, interactions agencies and desires of which we are but a small and transient part.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a>