Analyze

An ethnographic moment that stands out to me is when a yearly visitor to the Grand Staircaise Escalante region emphasized the importance of preserving the area under monument status. In a rare moment of recognizing the energy use/demands of even those who are preservation/wilderness proponents, he said "look, I know we have to get our energy from somewhere and maybe for now it's going to be fossil fuels, but please, not here. This place is sacred." Although everyday energy use and the use of petroleum to make such outdoor recreation products as kayaks is occasionally brought into view instead of displaced, these comments are often divorsed from thinking about how people in this area get energy, where the materials extracted from this area go, and what other forms of energy production might replace this extraction. Rather than arguing for a transition of how energy is produced, there seems to be a sense of inevitabilty of extraction but a desire for such industrial processes to be carried out somewhere else.