Salvage

In the north of Essaouira, Morocco, I stand on a beach covered in shattered tiles, brick, rubber and chemical foams. To my right, a blackened chimney belches dark smoke into the sky. The spray from the ocean smells like sewage, like rotting waste. Looking further up the coast, what I initially believed to be a cliff face reveals itself as the source of the washed up debris, and potentially the smell, a waste landfill glinting in the sunlight swarmed by seabirds, its edges falling away into the water. Inland, oil and chemical barrels are cut up and repurposed into spades and shovels sold at a farm market. A workshop cuts boards of Swedish pine stamped with a crown, ready to be used on construction projects. Inside the walls of the Medina, luminous cleaning fluids are decanted into used plastic drinks bottles of varying sizes to be sold on. Tourists and locals alike drink crates of two litre bottles of water, ensuring no shortage of empty containers.

In Shetland, from the top of Sandness Hill, my mother points towards the horizon on a clear day. An oil drilling platform under construction in the north sea, I open up a shipping tracker website on my phone hoping to gather further information. At night, standing in the dark until the faintest aurora borealis can be made out, what I presume to be light pollution from a nearby town is in fact the glow from a gas flare at Sullom Voe, the island's crude oil terminal. Walking Shetland's windswept rocky beaches, I create a catalogue of objects: Twist of red rope, tangle of green rope, polystyrene nugget, orange crate, sheep's skull, washing detergent bottle, coca cola bottle still with liquid inside, foam of unknown composition and origin. Driving the hour it takes to get to the supermarket (half stocked after a storm prevents the freight ferry from traveling), the car passes through scenes where there are no people for miles around. On the heathland the earth is scarred, centuries of peat cutting for fuel has left its mark, revealing dark energy-rich earth under sodden plant life.

In both of these locales of profound beauty, I consider how to live in a world so enmeshed in the extraction, manipulation and combustion of crude oil. How life finds a way in a broken world, and how to make the best of what is inherited. I take these questions with me when I leave, revisit them daily.