what we make from petroleum

Pascagoula, Mississippi, is the home of Chevron's chemical plants. Pascagoula sits on the Gulf Coast and on the banks of the Pascagoula River, which, like many other rivers in the country, is used in industry and is often abused by those same industries. This is nothing new; it's been going on as long as people have been making things. It just doesn't stop.

Now, I can't live without chemicals, so it's not the actual manufacturing of the substances that bothers me. It's the assumption that the natural resources that we need to make these things will be around forever in their pure and useable form. There is only one amount of water on the Earth; it's just in many forms—vapor, ice, liquid—and in many states of cleanliness. That's the problem. Once we mess it up, it's extremely expensive to clean it up. And no one wants to spend the money to do that. Nor does anyone want to spend the money to make sure that water isn't messed up in the first place. Yeah, yeah, it's better than it was in the 1950s and 1960s and the 1970s, but it's not as good as it should be.

Ok. A rant. You rarely have to read this much. You just didn't smell the air today when I was photographing these pipes. It was nauseous. Really. Yuck.